Essays After Eighty (12 page)

Some things were better. Apples from the root cellar lasted through frost almost until the next crop. Berries became jellies and jams, as cider became vinegar. (A cruet on the dining room table protected us from scurvy.) Three meals a day, at least one pie with an undercooked crust sat on the table. Breakfast was two eggs fried sunny-side up—perfectly fine—and a slice of elderly mince. Henry, the grocer and postmaster down to West Andover, half a mile away, lacked refrigeration, which is why Spam and sardines lined pantry shelves. We had an icebox, which my grandfather daily refreshed with a glassy block from the icehouse. Sometimes I walked down to Henry's to trade a dozen fresh eggs for a roll of toilet paper and a package of salt, or for a can of Spam or sardines. In colder winters of the past, I was told that my ancestors hung a slaughtered hog in the toolshed, removing and melting the lard, cutting pork from the carcass all winter.

We didn't go to restaurants, if there were any, because a horse and buggy limited our range. Sometimes a neighborly Model A drove us to Franklin for shopping. At a counter in Newberry's we could buy a plate of beans and franks for twenty-five cents. For lunch at home I made a raw onion sandwich between slices of Wonder Bread. My grandmother found this new product the miracle of the century. For decades she had made bread—Monday washing, Tuesday ironing, Wednesday baking—and a week later the last loaf resisted the knife and the dentures. Wonder Bread, ten cents a loaf, came to Henry's
already sliced
. Even softer than new-baked bread, it was just as soft a week later, or two weeks. More innovations were yet to appear—Velveeta, Hostess Twinkies, Miracle Whip—but nothing altered the universe so much as Wonder Bread.

 

When I went home to Connecticut for the school year, our menu was more sophisticated. Breakfast was Corn Flakes, varied by Wheaties, Cheerios, and Rice Krispies. Milk arrived every morning from the horse cart of my family's Brock-Hall Dairy, delivered to back doors by milkmen who later became route salesmen. I walked home from Spring Glen Grammar School at noon for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. At night there was something like a lamb chop with canned vegetables and a potato. (When Clarence Birdseye froze peas, his invention required freezers in supermarkets as enormous as tennis courts.) A favorite dish in Hamden was American chop suey, which my mother continued to fabricate when she was ninety. Melt a quarter pound of butter in a frying pan. Chop an onion and sizzle it. Add half a pound of crumbled hamburger. Add a whole can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and serve. Butter, onions, and hamburger stirred together with depraved pseudo-Italian spaghetti had nothing to do with chop suey. (Chop suey had nothing to do with China.) It was American haute cuisine.

On September twentieth every year I got to choose my menu—meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream. Some kind of dessert followed every meal, often tapioca pudding (“fish eyes and glue”) or Jell-O chilled into molds with tasty canned fruit. It sounds like a lot of work for my mother, but cooking was almost all she did. In suburban Connecticut, middle-class women were required to stay at home and do nothing but cook and iron. Housecleaning was for immigrants. My mother played bridge, belonged to women's clubs, and shopped. She washed and ironed fourteen white shirts a week; dress clothes were required for father and son.

Sunday nights we ate sandwiches at a small rolling table next to the radio while we listened to Jack Benny at six p.m. The program was half an hour long, followed by Phil Harris and then Fred Allen. (Sometimes an hour later I heard Bing Crosby on a forbidden portable radio under my bedroom blanket.) The sandwiches were processed cheese spread on Wonder Bread with the crusts cut off and each sandwich split in half. The cheese came in little Kraft glasses—pineapple and cream cheese, pimento and orange cheese spread. When they were empty, the little glasses, smaller at the bottom and wider at the top, could hold our canned orange juice. In New Hampshire my grandmother used cheese glasses from Hamden for her bedtime tipple of warm Moxie.

In Connecticut on special occasions we went out to eat at a restaurant on Long Island Sound called the Sea Shell. My dinner began with shrimp cocktail—three shrimp in ketchup and horseradish—then tenderloin steak with potato and a vegetable. For dessert I picked from displays in a cart—chocolate cake, sugared strawberries—and the three courses cost ninety-nine cents. (Grampa recites prices in order to shock the young. “Gas cost a dollar for five gallons, with a set of dishes if you filled the tank.”) Mostly we ate at home—the Betty Crocker diet, which, like New Hampshire's 1975 Italian restaurant, did not include garlic.

 

Going to Hamden High School I discovered garlic. Spring Glen Grammar School was suburban middle class and pale. At Hamden High I first heard “Paisan!” shouted from one friend to another. In the decades between the wars, immigrants by the thousands arrived from Calabria and Sicily. Our basketball team was composed of set-shooters who averaged five foot two. As I joined the society of Hamden High, I rejected Spring Glen's culture because it sniffed at people with accents. I hung out with friends who were second-generation Italians, and they altered my diet. In pizza joints I began my romance with garlic. It's hard to believe, but at that time pizza was exotic. In most American cities there were no places that served pizza, much less chains of Pizza Huts, Domino's, Papa Gino's, Pizza Chefs, and Little Caesars. Except in southern-Italian neighborhoods, pizza was unknown coast to coast. Even in northern Italy people didn't know pizza. In 1951 I asked for pizza in a Florentine restaurant. The waiter was puzzled. He disappeared into the kitchen, and when he came back he told me I could have it tomorrow. Did the chef find it in a cookbook? The next day he brought me the worst pizza I have ever eaten—pasty, doughy, tasteless except for garlic. I am told that Florence has pizza parlors now.

In Hamden we ate Italian whenever the boys and I spent a night on the town. (Some pizza places didn't ask a fifteen-year-old to show a license when he ordered a Pabst.) I remember Nate Mann's. The eponymous owner once fought two or three rounds with Joe Louis. Joe had a habit of crushing rope-a-dopes. When my classmates and I spoke of pizza, we didn't call it pizza. The south of Italy had its own pronunciation. We ate “ah-
beats
,” “apizza” with
b
for
p
and the last vowel omitted. I never called it pizza until I went to college.

 

Already I had gulped down the undistinguished food of boarding school. Each boy sat at a table of seven, and each waited on the others one day a week. At college we ate cafeteria style, so at least we had a choice, and at midnight after the beer halls closed, fuzzled, we ate at Hayes-Bickford's. Once a professor took me to the Harvard Faculty Club for lunch, where the special was horse steak, at two dollars as fulfilling as American chop suey. I've written elsewhere about my next experience in food, which was life-altering. A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century London's best restaurants were as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s. An English fast-food specialty was baked beans spread on a slice of toast. “Beans on toast! Beans on toast!” we chanted as we drank warm bitter at the King's Arms. From Oxford I flew to Paris for the six-week break between terms. Food! It took an hour to fly between capitals on a propeller plane, and the airlines served lunch. I first flew to Paris on BOAC. When I flew back, I ate a garlicky snack on Air France and never considered another airline.

 

After Oxford, and marriage to Kirby, we spent a year at Stanford, on a fellowship of two thousand dollars a year. I remember reading ads for supermarket specials and driving all over Palo Alto to buy one item at each store, half a dollar's worth of gas to save eight cents on a package of bologna. When I heard that I had won a three-year fellowship elsewhere—to write all day—my wife and I celebrated by eating supper in Menlo Park, at a place known for its seventy-five-cent garlicky cheeseburgers.

To begin teaching at the University of Michigan I did summer school, two sections of American lit at eleven and two. I had put on weight, maybe because I ate Arby's roast beef sandwiches between meals. I dieted by taking to my office a jar for my lunch—sauerkraut, a dill pickle, and a boiled hot dog. I lost twenty pounds and gained it right back, returning to three peanut butter sandwiches midday followed by Arby's. Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. Otherwise we specialized in casseroles. One time Robert and Carol Bly were visiting, and Bob got mad at me for being a professor and living in a
house
. He and Carol lived in western Minnesota without electricity or water, with oil lamps and an outhouse. He pouted, and poured his beer on my supper. Calmly I picked up my plate, scraped it clean in the kitchen, and served myself more Spanish rice from the pot on the stove. When I sat back down I threw my beer in his face.

 

After the divorce I don't remember what I ate except for fifths of Heaven Hill, a bourbon that cost two dollars and fifty cents. My salary was nine hundred dollars a month and child support was eleven hundred, which persuaded me to write a textbook. Five years later Jane and I married. When we left Ann Arbor to move into this old house I warned her that we would have trouble finding anything to eat in New Hampshire. I talked about no fruits or vegetables out of season, no garlic, no veal cutlets, no cheese. I forgot that now we drove cars, not horses and buggies. Our market town was New London, fifteen minutes away, where our supermarket was Cricenti's. In Paris twenty-odd years earlier, I had loved
céleri rémoulade
, a starter of celery root in strips steeped in mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper. I had never found celery root in Michigan. In the vegetable aisles of a New Hampshire grocery I found it, and also Stilton cheese, garlic, Camembert, and Bath Olivers from England. Doubtless there were Spam and sardines somewhere, but I never came across them.

For the first years here we fought over who got to cook. Jane loved to study cookbooks and I to improvise. My dishes started with garlic and a cup of olive oil, or I made meatloaf with ingenious ingredients. Once I cooked it for my daughter with three boiled quail's eggs in the middle. Another specialty of mine was beef stew with wine and onions and potatoes and garlic and basil and the rest of the spice shelf. Then my doctor told me that I had diabetes. “You mean I am pre-diabetic,” I explained. “
You are diabetic
,” he told me. My disease discouraged everything that made me fat. I withdrew from the stove and Jane read diabetic cookbooks.

 

She loved cooking, even for a diminished eater. She specialized in unpredictable combinations brought bubbling hot to the table—steamed vegetables, mushroom sauce on cutlets. Now I cooked only for gigantic family assemblages. First I bought a huge aluminum pot. I found an old-style butcher in Tilton who corned his own beef. He dipped his metal hook into a salt barrel to lift out an honest gray joint, corned beef with no red dye. “I'd say about five pounds,” he guessed as the beef dripped on the scale. Home, I would put my salt beef in the giant pot, add cabbage cut into wedges, onions, carrots, parsnips, and corn niblets, but never quail's eggs. I boiled it four hours as it disassembled into a mass that tasted of salt beef, veggies, handfuls of basil and bay leaves, and naturally garlic. At the table I carved the corned beef and added foothills of vegetables
variés
.

The aftermath of boiled dinner was better than boiled dinner. I fastened the meat grinder to the kitchen's butcher block and ground up traces of corned beef from the kettle, together with bits of cabbage and carrot and onion and anything else. The anomalous final ingredient was ground-up beets, either fresh from the garden or from Ball jars. I mashed the heap into a bowl, stirred it, and served it for breakfast or lunch or dinner or all three. This local delicacy—I haven't tasted it outside New Hampshire—is red flannel hash. I added a pinch more garlic.

Jane and I ate lunch while walking around in a daydream of bookish silence, then took a twenty-minute nap and worked all afternoon. At night Jane cooked our supper while I watched from my blue chair in the living room. She sipped a glass of white wine and I drank a beer until her voice called out, “It's ready. Come light the candles.” It was the only meal at which we were formal.

 

The United States Information Agency stepped in and enlarged our eating experience. They sent us in 1987 for seven weeks to China and Japan to talk about American poetry. It was the longest time we spent away from our kitchen and our writing. We ate what we had never eaten, in the vastness of China ending each day with a banquet of fifty dishes, concluded by a goose. Chinese banquets nationwide began at five o'clock and ended at seven, when our hosts stood up and fled. Japan was variety—fancy city food, northern Japanese cuisine, and Korean food at a restaurant that described itself as
CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN
, like New Hampshire's
NO GARLIC
. (The Japanese had notions about foreigners' hygiene.) In Hiroshima we ate at an establishment that called itself an Italian restaurant. It did not resemble Nate Mann's.

Later, the State Department transformed us and our culinary life. Twice they flew us to India, sending us all over the country on airplanes instead of our twenty-four-hour Chinese train rides. In such a huge country—seventeen languages and hundreds of dialects, with English the common tongue—the tastes and ingredients of food were vastly different across the country, from curry to yogurt, most of it Hindu and vegetarian. Cattle abounded in the streets but not on dinner plates. Jane's love for everything Hindu created our new diet. The few years left in her life, our New Hampshire kitchen became vegetarian Hindu, overflowing with spices. Once a month Jane shopped at an Indian grocery near Central Square in Cambridge. Typically she cooked one or two dishes a day, and each night assembled a new combination of food with six arms. I took to the change with enthusiasm, but whenever we went out to dinner I ate steak with garlic mashed potatoes.