When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s
house. On the way in, Friday night, she would lift me from
the ground in one of her fi re-smothering hugs. And on the way
out, Sunday afternoon, I was again taken into the air. It wasn’t until
years later that I realized she was weighing me.
My grandmother survived the War barefoot, scavenging other
people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins,
and the bits that clung to bones and pits. And so she never cared if I
colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes.
And hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden Calves of
breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich to swaddle in
napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was my grandmother who
taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving,
and that every part of the apple is edible.
Money wasn’t the point. (Many of those coupons I clipped were
for foods she would never buy.)
Health wasn’t the point. (She would beg me to drink Coke.)
My grandmother never set a place for herself at family dinners.
Even when there was nothing more to be done — no soup bowls to
be topped off, no pots to be stirred or ovens checked — she stayed
in the kitchen, like a vigilant guard (or prisoner) in a tower. As far
as I could tell, the sustenance she got from the food she made didn’t
require her to eat it.
In the forests of Europe, she ate to stay alive until the next
opportunity to eat to stay alive. In America, fifty years later, we ate
what pleased us. Our cupboards were filled with food bought on
whims, overpriced foodie food, food we didn’t need. And when the
expiration date passed, we threw it away without smelling it. Eating
was carefree. My grandmother made that life possible for us. But
she was, herself, unable to shake the desperation.
Growing up, my brothers and I thought our grandmother was the
greatest chef who ever lived. We would literally recite those words
when the food came to the table, and again after the fi rst bite, and
once more at the end of the meal: “You are the greatest chef who
ever lived.” And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the
Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived would probably have more than one
recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most Great Recipes involved
more than two ingredients.
And why didn’t we question her when she told us that dark food
is inherently healthier than light food, or that most of the nutrients
are found in the peel or crust? (The sandwiches of those weekend
stays were made with the saved ends of pumpernickel loaves.) She
taught us that animals that are bigger than you are very good for
you, animals that are smaller than you are good for you, fi sh (which
aren’t animals) are fi ne for you, then tuna (which aren’t fi sh), then
vegetables, fruits, cakes, cookies, and sodas. No foods are bad for
you. Fats are healthy — all fats, always, in any quantity. Sugars are
very healthy. The fatter a child is, the healthier it is — especially
if it’s a boy. Lunch is not one meal, but three, to be eaten at 11:00,
12:30, and 3:00. You are always starving.
In fact, her chicken and carrots probably was the most delicious
thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared,
or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we
believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking
more fervently than we believed in God. Her culinary prowess
was one of our family’s primal stories, like the cunning of the
grandfather I never met, or the single fi ght of my parents’ marriage.
We clung to those stories and depended on them to defi ne us. We
were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to get out
of binds, and loved the food of our matriarch.
Once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there
was no story to tell about it. More stories could be told about my grandmother
than about anyone else I’ve ever met — her otherwordly childhood,
the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her
immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation
— and though I will one day try to tell them to my children, we
almost never told them to one another. Nor did we call her by any of
the obvious and earned titles. We called her the Greatest Chef.
Perhaps her other stories were too diffi cult to tell. Or perhaps she
chose her story for herself, wanting to be identifi ed by her providing
rather than her surviving. Or perhaps her surviving is contained
within her providing: the story of her relationship to food holds all of
the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food .
It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion,
history, and, of course, love. As if the fruits she always offered us
were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.