Altman - Poor mans feast: a Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking

A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking

ELISSA ALTMAN

Copyright 2013 by ELISSA ALTMAN .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2439-1

Designed by VANESSA DINA

Typesetting by HOWIE SEVERSON

Photographs by JOSEPH DE LEO

This is a work of memoir, which, as Mary Karr has noted, is an act of memory, rather than history. The events and experiences rendered here are all true as the author has remembered them to the best of her ability. Some names, circumstances, and timelines have been changed and/or compressed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved.

Rice, from Blue Iris by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, Boston.

Copyright 2004 by Mary Oliver.

Reprinted by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.

Pepperidge Farm is a registered trademark of Pepperidge Farm, Incorporated. Hellmans is a registered trademark of Unilever.

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TO MY BEAUTIFUL PARENTS, RITA ELLIS HAMMER, WHO TAUGHT ME ABOUT SAFETY, AND THE LATE CY ALTMAN, WHO TAUGHT ME ABOUT FOOD. AND TO MY DEAR SUSAN, WHO TEACHES ME EVERY DAY ABOUT LOVE.

There is poetry in food, kindness in the act of preparing it, and peace in sharing it.

There are gray areas: years ago, Id heard about a restaurant where hundreds of samurai swords hang, point down, from the ceiling, directly over the heads of the diners while they eat.

This is not kind; this is sociopathic.

But in the act of preparing the most mundane grilled cheesechoosing the cheese, buttering the bread, warming the pan, pressing down the sandwich with the flat of your grandmothers spatula so the cheese melts and the bread tightens and crackles and smooths like solid silklies an inherent and basic subconscious attention to detail that exists almost nowhere else in our lives, except in the small daily rituals that we all have. You squeeze your toothpaste onto your toothbrush in exactly the same manner every single morning and every single night. When you step out of the shower, you towel dry your hair before putting your makeup on. You shave one side of your face before the other, and thats the way youve done it since you were in college. Mundane though they may be, these are the rituals that make us who we are. But they dont necessarily make us kind. The act of preparing food for ourselves, and for others, does. And the act of conviviality, of sharing it with othersMarion Cunningham called it modern tribal fire is what makes us human, whether it is tarted up and tortured into vertical excess, or nothing more than butter spread on a piece of bread.

I did not grow up in a home that valued conviviality; my mother and grandmother cooked our mealsplain but hearty, filling, sometimes delicious and sometimes immolated, they were not experimental or contrived until the mid-70s, when my mother went on a fondue binge like the rest of middle-class America. Generally, we ate in silence drowned out by the presence of a small Zenith black-and-white television that sat, like a dinner guest, at the end of our table. While eating, we would watch Name That Tune! , my mother calling out between bites of limp, canned asparagus, I can name it in three notes! while my father sipped his Scotch and I picked at the flecks of onion in my meat loaf. After I was done, I climbed down from my chair and went into my bedroom, where I turned on my own television set and watched as reality and make-believe converged. There were fake families sitting around their own fake tables, eating fake dinners: there was the Brady Bunch, with its gay father and wing-nut maid and libidinous eldest son. There was the Partridge Family, with its catatonic little sister who played the tambourine like a methadone addict, and a lead singer who looked more like a lady than his sister. There were the simpering, unsmiling Waltons, with their fake farmhouse that always looked filthy, and a commie grandfather living upstairs in the attic.

See him, my grandmother, Gaga, once said to me, tapping her long Cherries in the Snow-shellacked fingernail on the round glass television screen after barging into my room with the last potato latke. The man was a commie, blacklisted by McCarthy. And then she slammed the door behind her.

They were all convivial, casserole-passing people, even though they didnt actually exist ; for me, the line between television family dinners and reality was blurred like a picture taken from a shaky camera, and when I saw in the news that Ellen Corby had had a stroke, all I could think of was whos going to make biscuits for John-Boy now that Grandma cant move her arms?

One night, after a silent dinner of what was marketed as chicken rollchicken pieces that were deboned and then mechanically compressed into a loaf shape for easy slicingI left the table where my parents were watching Lets Make a Deal! , went into my room, and turned on a local television station. A Southern Prayer-a-Thon had interrupted regular broadcasting, so instead of seeing The Brady Bunch , there was a greasy, black-haired, slick-suited man marching across a stage, sobbing like a baby, and telling me that if only Id call and offer money, that Jesus would give me whatever I wanted. I scribbled down the number with a chewed-on number-two pencil, crept across the hallway into my parents room, picked up the phone, and called.

A male voice answered with, Hello! Have you taken Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?

I cupped my hand around the mouthpiece and whispered, No, I havent. Im a Jew.

I could hear him light up like a pinball machine, all the way from Mississippi.

Well, do you want to? he asked, hopefully.

Not really, I said.

Then what can I do for you? he asked, suddenly all business.

You said that if I offered some money, then Jesus would give me what I want.

Thats right, he replied. Do you have money to send us?

I do. About $6.

And what do you want Jesus to help you with?

I want a big family and a big table where everyone sits down together, like the Waltons, I thought for a minute, but without the commie grandfather. And I want everyone to be happy.

The man cleared his throat and promised to send me an envelope for the cash.

You have a good night and God bless, he said before he hung up.

I lusted after conviviality, and was drawn like a moth to the modern tribal fire; I yearned for the poetry that food writes. But I was also lured to the kitchen, to the standing there and the cooking and the serving and the feeding, because, I was certain, it would bring magic and happiness. Everything begins and ends for me in front of my stove, and if D-Day were to strike me down where I stood, where I stood would likely be right there , in my kitchen.

Ultimately, I found the poetry, and even the fire. But until I shared my kitchen with Susan, I hadnt found the peace.