The Best American Essays 2016 (13 page)

I was able to maintain a bemused distance from it all until one afternoon when the doorbell rang persistently. I opened the door to see my impatient father, who thrust a large black garbage bag in my arms and said, “Clear some space in the fridge and put this in there.” It took me a moment to realize what was happening, but as my arms felt the round contours of a small body through the plastic bag I understood this was one of the lambs, our lamb. Fighting back tears, and as quickly as possible, I shoved bottles and Tupperware aside in the largest part of our fridge, folded in the animal as best I could, and leaned against the door to press it shut. To this day, I can’t remember if we got the ass or the head.

Still, after all the drama of his various projects, nobody could have guessed it would be yogurt that would nearly do us all in. Yogurt is a tricky issue: I have inherited some of my father’s madness on this point. Since leaving our house in the Toronto suburbs I have moved through five cities in the United States and Germany. In each new home I must spend an enormous amount of energy finding an acceptable yogurt, not too sweet, not bland, not adulterated by bananas or vanilla or cappuccino goji berries, or whatever other abomination is currently being used to sell yogurt to people who do not actually like yogurt. Then I try to find the largest possible container sold of that yogurt, so as never to be without. When I lived in Dallas and was addicted to a Bulgarian-style yogurt made by, appropriately, an aerospace engineer in Austin, I had to fight the urge to buy the gallon-sized jars despite living alone. So I understand my father, understand that once he had found the “Balkan style” yogurt that was closest in taste to what we knew from back home, he didn’t want to have to buy a fresh container every day.

The normal thing to do in this circumstance would be to purchase a yogurt maker, but making yogurt in miniature cups would not do it for us; it was not really the point of the exercise. Romanians do not serve food in miniature cups. Modest, individual portions are basically inimical to our culture as a whole. Again, my father carefully explained the process to me: how a cup of starter yogurt would provide enough culture for a gallon of milk, that it was important to keep it warm, but not too hot, over many hours. Instead of a little electric machine, my father used a large pot which he wrapped in towels to keep it cozy overnight after it had been heated on the stove. The resulting yogurt was watery and lacked the firm tartness I loved about our chosen brand, but my father was convinced we would save an enormous amount of money by never having to buy yogurt again. And really, it was the least objectionable of his undertakings: it didn’t involve guns or illegal distilling or the transport of dead lambs. Until, that is, I woke up one night to the smell of something burning. The entire house was dark with smoke, and our fire alarm had not sounded. It turned out that my father had forgotten to turn the stove off, and despite the electric element giving off such a small amount of heat, eventually the contents of the pot began to burn, badly. After that, yogurt was something we got at the store, though years later my father did give me a yogurt machine with six little cups that he had found on sale somewhere. I haven’t had the courage to use it yet.

When, a year or so later, he managed to burn up the kitchen properly, the ample bounty of Casa Dumitrescu came in handy. It was a simple grease fire that began when he left some onions he was frying to answer the phone, but it destroyed a good deal of our cabinetry before he managed to put it out. My mother was at home to receive the assessor from the insurance company a few weeks later, and since it was lunchtime and his presence in our house made him a kind of guest, she offered him a bowl of soup. He accepted, and, I imagine, warmed and comforted by both soup and the empathetic smiles of my understanding mother, told her his story. He was Polish and was going through a heartbreaking divorce. My mother quite naturally poured him a glass of the house wine, and they continued talking. Afternoon turned into evening, and my father came home from work. Knowing well the therapeutic properties of Țuică and assuming that the poor insurance man hadn’t had anything so good since leaving his native Poland, my father pulled out a bottle and started filling little glasses. I think the assessment lasted until about 10:00 p.m. My parents soon had an entirely new kitchen.

Every fall I make wine for the family dinner table and for the good friends who cross my threshold. These have learned to enjoy it as any European. They praise its quality and drain their glasses like true sons of Bacchus. If they do not make it themselves, it is because I dispense it so freely, frequently bringing it to their table when I dine with them.

The kitchen remodel was a high point, but as the years passed The Wine became more and more of a burden on our family. Even when money was tight there was never a question of sitting out a year of wine production. The economic rationale for it was, after all, unbeatable, or, rather, none of us had the emotional energy to challenge my father on something so clearly central to his life. I grew embarrassed at the gallon-sized jug that was always at the foot of our table, envied my friends whose parents bought wine in decent, normal-sized bottles. My father probably knew more about the different varieties of wine than any of them, but
we
, his family, didn’t. For us there was no Bordeaux or Côtes du Rhône or Merlot, there was only the special blend of Casa Dumitrescu, always changing in composition, always tasting the same. Part of my father’s goal in making wine was to revive our Romanian heritage in Canada, a place that never really felt like home to him. Unfortunately, what he kept alive for us was the familiar feeling of life under communism, where you could only ever have one brand of any product and daren’t complain about it lest the big man who ran things get sour.

This is not to say that there were not still occasional moments of pride, even as my father and I went from being tight accomplices in my early teens to arguing almost constantly as I approached twenty. My small residential college at the University of Toronto lived off stuffy Anglophile pretension and a measure of worldly sophistication, and I discovered to my surprise that I could impress the provost or an influential alumnus with an exotic bottle of homemade Țuică. As more time passed, I also cared less what other people thought. Somewhere at the core of my father’s obsession was a set of values that still feel true to me: that wine is just a beverage that goes with food, neither demon nor fetish; that local stores should not determine the limits of your culinary pleasure; that there is a warm joy in giving people food you made yourself, even if it is simple. Especially if it is simple. That gardening and cooking and fermenting and decanting can give you, if not a home, then at least a feeling that you belong to yourself even if you’re not sure who exactly you are anymore.

As trendy as immigrant foodways and home canning and novels by ethnic women with “spice” in the title are nowadays, the dream of authenticity in food is old romance. When I discovered Angelo Pellegrini’s
The Unprejudiced Palate
, originally published in 1948, it seemed I had found my father’s script and bible. No wonder my father loved the Italians so! Pellegrini, who left hunger-ravaged Italy and settled in the bountiful Northwest, waxes poetic on the spiritual value of tending a small vegetable garden, the joys of serving guests out of your own cellar, and the sheer deliciousness of fresh ingredients, put together simply but with a measure of peasant cunning. His book is a paean to immigrant wisdom, pungent and coarse though it might seem from the outside. Even in the 1940s, he notes, I read with some guilt, how the second generation grumbles about the unappealing, unhygienic food practices of their Old World parents. And yet Pellegrini is also uncannily like me, a child immigrant who grew into the language of his new home, becoming a professor of English literature. Although his mother did a great deal of the cooking, his father is Pellegrini’s model and authority, the one who taught him how to think about food and, naturally, how to make wine. Like Pellegrini, I could write a chapter on “The Things My Fathers Used to Do,” but while the émigré Italian paid attention and followed in their footsteps, I strayed.

I left for graduate school in the wake of one of our family’s uglier moments. That summer my father’s get-rich scheme was to buy fixer-upper houses, renovate them, and resell them at a profit, none of these activities fitting into what one might call his skill set. My mother was unwilling to risk their life savings on this business venture, and he presented her with an ultimatum: compliance or divorce. In the middle of this, he and I had our worst fight, so furious that when the power went out all over the eastern seaboard I was sure that my anger had blown out the lights. We had patched things up into cold civility by the time my parents drove with me down to New England. At that point he had also dropped the idea of buying property and with it, quietly, the threat of divorce. But my mother had not forgotten, and she had her own thoughts about a marriage that could be traded in for a run-down house. She made her mind up when, having said their good-byes to me and set out on the highway, the first thing my father asked was, “So when are we going to start making The Wine?”

Years later, a family friend confessed to my mother how much he had dreaded coming over for dinner. You see, when someone makes their own wine, you can’t simply drink it when it’s served to you. You have to comment on it. You have to discuss its qualities, how well it turned out this year, how successful this particular blend of grapes was. Basically, you have to act like you’re at a wine tasting and it’s the pinnacle of sophistication to detect the fine nuances distinguishing Casa Dumitrescu 1998 from Casa Dumitrescu 1997. A failure of hospitality of this magnitude is the stuff Greek tragedies are made of, but its core is innocent, a natural imbalance of interest and passion. Here is what no one admits in their gleeful reports on the year of planting their own vegetables, baking their own bread, and brewing coca-cola with self-harvested cane sugar and homegrown cocaine: some undertakings require absolute, unyielding dedication, and not every member of the family or community can match it. Oh, it’s one thing to go berry picking with the kids on a farm and make a pot of jam at the end of the day. But if you are pickling tomatoes because you miss a taste from your childhood, you have to try to get it right, which means you have to do a lot of pickling. It also means the people around you will have to eat a lot of sour tomatoes while you work out the recipe.

Wine is even more demanding, requiring copious equipment, knowledge, and most of all time. It has to be tended, observed, cared for. You have to judge the fermentation, know when to rack it to another bottle, siphoning it away from its sediment. It is intimate too, in the various demands it makes on the body of its maker: my father labored to lift bottles and bruise grapes, and he always racked wine the old-fashioned, unsanitary way, by sucking on one end of a hose and placing it in the fresh bottle, allowing the pressure to drive the wine into its new receptacle. The liquid that a proud vintner puts on the table is the fruit of months of planning, mixing, crushing, washing, testing, tasting, pouring, and smelling, but all the guest knows is that he is drinking mediocre wine. The wine was my father’s second child, one whose faults he couldn’t see.

The deep irony of the years that followed the divorce was that my father’s liquors improved. His wine was now more than palatable, and his Țuică was the real thing, a pleasure to start a meal with. We had all put in time, but he stuck it through. It took a long while for us to be able to talk to each other after our fight and my parents’ subsequent split, and even then our encounters were awkward, veins of hurt pulsing under the surface. But it helped that all we ever did, on those tense holiday visits, was eat and drink together. On the worst days, food and alcohol were social lubricants, keeping mouths from talking too much, giving the illusion of celebration and togetherness around a table. On the better days, it was easy to enjoy a good plum brandy, to appreciate it honestly, to see him enjoy the compliment. He would send me off with several bottles to take home with me, some pure Țuică, some experiments he had colored with tea, flavored with fruit, or aged in a bourbon wood barrel. I didn’t know what to do with that much hard liquor, but inevitably something would come up—an exam passed, a dissertation submitted, another move to yet another new city—and the Țuică I found in my stores provided the punctuation.

We do not speak anymore, my father and I. The decision was his. When I went to pack my things for my most recent move, now so far from Toronto that I’m almost back where I started, I found one more plastic bottle of Țuică. It was full, and it would clearly be the last I would ever have from his hands. I decided not to put it in the container with all my other belongings, wrapping it instead in a plastic bag and hiding it in my luggage; it was perfectly legal, but it felt illicit. This is also an authentic Romanian gesture, one I performed instinctively. One of my parents’ friends escaped from Romania in the 1980s by hiding on a train, leaving his family behind but tightly grasping, under his jacket, two bottles of exquisite wine from the vineyard where he had worked. He opened one bottle with great pomp on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and told his guests he was saving the second for his elder daughter’s wedding, which he did not live to see. I did not wait so long. The bottle of Țuică was a little crushed by the time it reached my new home, looking as if it might crack the moment I tried to unscrew the cap. But it held, and to celebrate the start of our new life, I poured a generous amount into espresso cups for me and my husband. I expected the fresh, clean punch-in-the-face of all-natural, homemade plum brandy, but that is not what I tasted in the cup. This bottle, it turned out, was one of my father’s experiments, an infusion with orange peels that had taken on a powerful bitter note over the years. It was undrinkable.