The Sweet and Fleshy Product of a Tree or Other Plant
My sixth-grade teacher’s grandmother held a grudge against bananas. When she immigrated from Poland, someone at Ellis Island handed her one, but didn’t show her how to eat it. She choked the whole thing down, peel and all. What kind of fruit makes the best filling for a pie graph? Globally, only 55 percent of...
The Club from Nowhere
The oil sizzles, a spray of bubbles rippling across the pan, then the flour-coated chicken dropped in, first a thigh, then a leg, a breast, a wing, another leg, the hiss and sputter of crisping, edges ruffling, browning, the juices drawn in as a hand deftly turns and shifts the pieces in a hot pan...
Butchering
I. “Butcher” has nearly disappeared from public use. Customers prefer “meat cutter” because they associate “butcher” with “slaughter” and therefore “cruelty.” My father was not a certified butcher. He learned the trade working with his brother in grocery stores when they were young. My father’s job consisted of cutting steaks and grinding hamburger meat and...
Holy
My mother worries about my soul. She tells me so at her kitchen table, 6 a.m. We’re making nut-roll, even though it’s not a holiday, nothing to celebrate. My mother believes bread rises only in the morning. I’m not good with mornings. Last night I stayed up late, reading, worrying. “Ruining your eyes,” my mother...
Hospitality
is when she walks into your restaurant, a tired young woman in fading clothes, because it is the only one that is still open past midnight on Atlantic Avenue and orders the cheapest thing on the menu and then she starts scrambling to put together three dollars for a falafel sandwich from the dimes and...
Fast Food
The snow-white husky under the pew in the foyer is watching the humans at the butcher block table in the middle of the kitchen. The father in the suede suit coat has been back from his job twenty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds, and is eating eleven peanuts cracked open from their shells, three smears of...
Valentine
It’s the middle of winter, but tonight I am in summer’s warm arms, Boston lettuce torn in half before me for a salad. You’re at the stove, stirring Indonesian sweet potato peanut soup. I’m at the sink, staring down into pale green whorls. “The heart’s the best part,” my mother says, a thousand Junes ago....
Feeding Time
The table was set with all seven dishes stacked at the head of the table where my father sat. Everyday stoneware for weekdays, china on Sundays. Hot pads, to protect the plastic tablecloth that protected the vinyl table covers that protected the wood surface, likewise were only in front of his place. When the serving...
An Unusual Thing
When the roommate called, telling me he’d found an unusual thing, I was in Pittsburgh, buying pumpkins with my boyfriend. He described, to me, the bitter melon: a vegetable, green and wrinkly, like a rotted-through cucumber—its marrow filled with bright red seeds. The roommate speaks six languages and enjoys spending Saturday afternoons with a cup...
First Apartment—Brooklyn, 2002
Loaves rise, engorged as dangerous moons, all through the night. I ring the bakery’s back-door bell, buy Pumpernickel for a dollar. No matter the after-bar hour; the late-night bakers always take our neighborly buck. The dark street’s swollen with the smell of bread—intimate, in-folded—like the small humidity behind an ear, between the toes. I carry...
Comfort Food
I woo Jeanne’s appetite with her favorite Southern foods. Grits, banana pudding, Miracle Whip, and bologna loaf on white bread. French dressing over cottage cheese. Sausage gravy over biscuits: pallid sauce so thick with grease that the leftovers will congeal, gray and lumpy. Tomorrow I will reheat them to mash over her toast. When she...
As I Unscrew: A Letter
Dear Karen, As I unscrew the cap to the bottle of Gordon’s gin, the boar’s head on the label looks appalled, its eye a wide dilated circle of disbelief (that yes, I am pouring yet another drink, that no, I am not measuring my pour, that yes, I do think a 1:2 tastes watered down,...
Driving William Stafford
The only thing we talked about was bread. How to keep the crust from splitting in the oven’s heat. How to keep the rise from falling. What the kneading did for the hands. It was 3:00 a.m., as dark as early morning gets, and 26º below. I looked it up. At least once per mile,...
You Like It Don’t You, You Like It Hard and Cold
and sweet with surprises inside well let me introduce you to the state line dairy where the cherries in the sherbet are harvested from virgins and the girls filling the cones all have boyfriends in vietnam and the thing in the jar on the counter is a pickled pig’s foot let me introduce you to...
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