An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

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  My father died in 2005 in an upstate New York town so poor that food was purchased at the gas station. By then he had dementia and was living with a couple who truly loved him, although they couldn’t have been more different from each other. At his funeral there were many funny stories about my father’s little quirks, and everyone had wonderful things to say about him. It was obvious that he had touched all of their lives.

  I arrived with a suitcase of some of his favorite foods from when we were kids—Irish Cheddar, Dutch licorice, an aged Gouda, a honey cake, walnuts, avocados, Meyer lemons from California, and more. I brought napkins and candles for the table to make it special, and after the small service we—there were only six of us—sat around the table and nibbled and talked. All at once, I was spent. I looked down and saw a bottle of single-malt scotch. I asked if that was Dad’s, by chance, and when his teetotaler caretakers said yes, I poured myself a glass, raised it, and said, “Thanks, Dad. For everything.”

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  My mother was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, into a family that was large, Russian, Jewish, and East Coast. Her parents were respectable and middle class and my tiny, elegant grandmother was the mistress of the rich, succulent dishes that put distance between the hard times of the past and the better life of her present. Not surprisingly there were always plenty of good things to eat in my grandmother’s kitchen—and in those of her sisters, my great-aunts. I recall the searing of briskets, the use of sour salt, the raisin squares she sent us every year, Aunt Anna’s brownies, and the Passover dishes the few times I got to make the trip to West Hartford for that meal. The food back East was plentiful, meat laden, and delicious, but my memories of it are few and that generous table wasn’t really mine, as much as I want to stake my claim there. I was only a guest, a visiting relative whose mother had temporarily left the fold of Judaism. With the extended family three thousand miles away, I didn’t grow up learning to cook alongside my grandmother or her sisters, or any other women in the family except, on rare occasions, my mother, to whom I’m grateful for telling me not to be afraid of baking with yeast. She was so right. But not everyone has cozy memories of learning to cook alongside a grandmother. I certainly didn’t.

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  My mother’s name was Winifred. She was gifted with a strong creative bent that emerged early in her life, a bent that was not encouraged. It was incomprehensible to her family that a girl might want to express herself when she was just going to get married, the goal for so many young women of her generation. Despite her elders’ expectations, she managed to go to Bennington and later to Oberlin College, study modern dance with Martha Graham, play the violin in chamber groups and orchestras, model hats in New York, meet Russian men who claimed to be princes in exile, and pose for famous artists. She published fourteen books for children and young adults and wrote many more for full-fledged adults. She drew microscopic organisms in the geology department at UC Davis, and had many shows of her paintings, the last at the age of ninety-five. She made a home for four children, a succession of animals, and a husband, and managed to live a rich, creative life. She also decided to complete her college degree and she graduated from UC Davis the same year I graduated from high school. She was a Phi Beta Kappa.

  To us kids she was quirky, often irritating and hurtful, but to others she was an amazing woman and much admired in our town. Still, the work and time it took to fulfill her many ambitions—art, music, and writing—meant that there was a lack of nurture for us kids, especially in the feeding area. Food, as she frankly owned, was somewhere on the (far) edges of her world, not at its center. She cooked every day, but cooking was something she fit in after her own work, hurriedly, with distraction and occasional irritation. Only now do I appreciate that she cooked at all. And although I too admire her and miss her terribly, it’s difficult to paint her full portrait. As her daughter, what I recall most are the hard parts, that kids to her were a bother, that she said things that were just inappropriate, like asking a man I was dating if he’d ever thought he might like to be a mountain goat. “Mom!” The thirteen-year-old’s whine comes out and explodes until the very end, regardless of my actual age.

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  My mother lived such a long life that I had begun to think she would always be here. The reality of her aging sank in only gradually. I’d open the mailbox and suddenly realize that I would never get a Valentine or birthday card from her again. When her caretaker asked if she could have one of the books I had written that was in my mother’s kitchen, I of course gave it to her. The rest, I thought for some reason, my mother might still cook from, even though that was highly unlikely. I guess I didn’t really think at all at that time. Her attitude toward death and dying had long been fairly upbeat. She’d tell us not to worry. She’d joke that she’d lived past her expiration date. And then, her life was over.

  I was so disoriented. While I had felt that my father had lived a long and good life, I was struck more by my mother’s death, far more saddened. My father left few possessions, almost nothing behind. My mother had a house with four bedrooms crammed with things that had to be gone through. Her horrible cooking didn’t really matter, but it was too late to tell her that. Other things did matter, but their power had diminished. My siblings and their spouses along with my husband, Patrick, and I gave her a great send-off in a room filled with her many admirers and friends, music that she loved, food that contained no meat, at her request. We set up a room with her paintings and invited everyone there, her friends, to take one, and they did, with joy.

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  While my parents’ approaches to food were irreconcilable, together they did something good, something that was adventurous: They hosted dinners in which they explored “foreign” cuisines. There was the cheese fondue party, the beef bourguignon party, the spanakopita menu, curry dinners with their little bowls of raisins, chutney, and roasted peanuts. The Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks did not influence this era of experimentation, for they would not be published for another few years. Rather this exploration was launched by a book called The European Cookbook for American Homes by “The Browns, Cora, Rose and Bob.” Published some twenty years before my parents were using it, it’s a good and useful book. Whoever this family was, and there’s no clue on the dust jacket, as there would be today, they were keen observers of the different places they lived. Every time I look through this book, I come away with a few good ideas. (Since having my mother’s copy on my bookshelf, I’ve learned more about the Browns and their other books through Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco.)

  My parents’ repertoire grew when the Foods of the World series finally did come out in 1968. This was, perhaps, one of the first times that “ethnic” foods, so often hidden by immigrant families, came out of hiding and made their appearance in the larger culture. Writers who were well qualified to discourse on the foods of Japan, Provence, Sweden, or wherever their assignment took them wrote these volumes. And they were full of pictures. A lot of my parents’ friends, all of whom had spent sabbatical years living abroad in one country or another, had these books and gave parties from them. As children, we looked on and later sampled any leftovers. I was drawn to The Cooking of Provincial France more than any other volume.

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  Moving from upstate New York to California must have been quite a food adventure for my parents. The beneficent Mediterranean climate that made formerly exotic foods available literally in our own backyard, and the international community at UC Davis, plus the closeness of San Francisco, contributed streams of culinary possibilities that they couldn’t have imagined in the cold Northeast.

  Once a month, my dad would fill up our larger, new maroon and orange Willys Jeep with “five dollars’ worth of regular” and we’d go to San Francis
co for the day. There were fixed places along our route—the Crystal Palace Market, Golden Gate Park, a museum or two, a bakery, and the City of Paris department store, which had a French pastry shop in the basement. If we were lucky, we might go home the long way, which meant stopping in Sausalito, where we bought butterscotch ice cream cones, a tremendously exciting taste long before the days of Baskin-Robbins and its myriad flavors. We sat on a barge licking our ice cream as seagulls shrieked and the barge rose and fell with the waves made by passing ships. For kids, this was terrific.

  The Crystal Palace Market on Mission Street in San Francisco, one of the great public markets of that era, was the most exciting place we went. A glass ceiling floated high above its spacious interior, which was filled with rows of small, family-run market stalls. It was a keenly aromatic place full of bustle and conversation. I loved it from the first time we went there. There’s no doubt that my love of markets started at the Crystal Palace.

  At the entrance there was a long, polished wooden bar where Anchor Steam beer was sold. It was my father’s prerogative to pass a solitary half hour with a stein of beer and a handful of pistachio nuts while the rest of us wandered around the huge hall. Gunnysacks of grains, beans, and nuts were stacked in front of some booths; turkeys and other fowl hung off the racks of others. Looking at photographs of the market, one can see that these were not the big-breasted white turkeys of today, but smaller, more oblong-shaped birds, perhaps one of the heritage breeds that are now making a comeback.

  The vendors bent down and stuffed our little hands with red-dyed pistachio nuts, dates, or pieces of candied fruit. But even more than receiving the sweets, what Mike and I liked to do was go to the meat counter and stare at sheep’s heads, calves’ tongues, brains, pigs’ feet, and other animal parts. We wondered if people really ate these things, and we wallowed in the thrill of disgust that such a thought provoked. Actually, our own father was a customer here and we ate those things. Some of them, anyway. He bought pigs’ feet and turned them into gelatinous sweet-and-sour “pickles,” and we often ate boiled tongue, a cut one hardly sees anymore. He also bought kidneys and liver. Certainly the Crystal Palace Market catered to a variety of ethnic tastes, but perhaps these were simply more the traditional tastes of that time, for people still ate offal and didn’t balk at the cuts of meat that are seen as unusual today, although they are slowly making a comeback. Still, we never saw the head or neck of an animal simmering in a pot in our house. In fact, I didn’t see one until I was in my fifties and a Welsh friend transplanted to Colorado cooked a lamb’s neck for us one visit. He traded with the local Navajos for sheep, and there was always a joint in the oven or a neck in the pot or something we didn’t recognize. My husband, Patrick, was somewhat uneasy about this food and he’d always ask, “What kind of squirrel are we having tonight?”

  My parents bought a lot of their food at the Crystal Palace Market—bags of bulgur, beans, lentils, rice, nuts, candied fruits for holiday breads, dried figs for snacking, sesame seeds, and olive oil. My father always managed to secure a nice piece of cheese for himself.

  The Crystal Palace wasn’t expensive nor was it a fashionable place to go. It was where the common people shopped, often for the foods of their ethnic pasts. Replacing the grand old public markets that have been lost over time in our country has come slowly and at a great cost, as people have had to be awakened from their supermarket stupor to the value and vitality of what public markets have to offer. San Francisco once again has something of a public market at the Ferry Plaza, where a weekly farmers’ market and various shops and restaurants coexist. The Ferry Plaza Market is a popular, bustling place—and it is extremely expensive. You can pay several dollars for a peach, and happily, if you can afford it, because it will be worth it. It will be not just a good peach, but a memorable one, and that is rare enough in the world of stone fruits today. But all the stunningly beautiful, well-grown, and smartly crafted foods found here are certainly unaffordable to many. The Crystal Palace market was funkier, but it was accessible to all.

  After the Crystal Palace was demolished to make room for a hotel, we started going to a Greek deli on Market Street for many of the same foods and a new product, filo dough. Filo dough had entered American middle-class consciousness about that time, along with recipes for spanakopita from the Greek volume of Foods of the World. For years we always had a package of filo dough in the freezer that my parents used for their “Greek” parties.

  Another regular San Francisco stop was at a bakery where my parents bought broken cookies. How they knew about this golden opportunity, I don’t know, but they always picked up a bag for each of us kids. We mined through them, first fishing out the largest pieces, then working our way down to the bits of chocolate and raisins, and eventually the crumbs. Recently, reading through a book of essays written by my brother Mike, I was surprised to find that he too had memories of—and strong feelings about—these broken cookies. Sensitive to their cheapness, he viewed them as a flawed gift and felt that it would have meant more if the cookies were whole. I didn’t think my parents were trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I thought that the broken cookies were a little treat—and a bargain at that—a whole bag for each of us. But those crumbs did inspire me to improve the quality of their lifestyle, at least with regards to food, an endeavor I persisted in for many years.

  One day, with the money I had saved from mowing the neighbor’s lawn, I bought a pebbly pink box of whole cookies for my parents’ anniversary. After successfully hiding it for a few weeks, but opening it at least once a day to stare at the columns of different cookies, I couldn’t resist making a little slit in the cellophane and pulling one out. I ate it slowly, savoring its “store-bought” flavor, that cheap, sugary taste that was so alluring. But now, with one stack shorter than the rest, I had to go to the opposite corner of the box and eat from a similar stack to balance things out. Eventually, of course, I had to even out the entire first row before finally giving the box to my parents. Not one of the cookies was broken, but a fifth of them were gone. My parents never said a word about the missing layer. And nothing changed. We still got broken cookies when we went to San Francisco.

  The usual routine was to go to Golden Gate Park, have a little picnic, then finish it off with pastries. After reading the paper, my father would do gymnastics on the iron horse while we rode that fantastic old carousel of wooden lions, tigers, and ostriches. Invariably we’d feed the ducks. We often went to the de Young Museum or the aquarium, and on nice days we’d go for a row in Stow Lake or sip tea in the Japanese tea garden. But when it was hot in Davis, San Francisco was often foggy and cold. An old photograph captures the mood that generally pervaded these visits: We’re all sitting at a picnic table wrapped in our jackets, shivering and looking as if we can’t wait to get in the car and go home.

  Once, when it was raining and going to the park was out of the question, my father decided that we would have our picnic in the car. We were parked on Geary Street, right in front of Gump’s, a stylish home furnishings store just off Union Square. We unwrapped and ate our sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, then opened the box from the City of Paris. The pastries were passed around the car so that we could try all of them. Powdered sugar and flakes of mille-feuille shattered over our clothes. While we ate lunch, drivers would pull up and stare in the window to see if we were leaving, only to discover that we were eating. My mother sat rigid in her seat, mortified. I thought she wanted it to look as if she had gotten into this car by mistake and couldn’t get out. She acted as if she didn’t know who we were and she would not eat her lunch in a car like a bunch of hicks. Frankly, I didn’t blame her.

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  Because my parents would never buy them, I stole both Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies on a regular basis from the State Market until I was finally caught. Mr. Lee chased me out of the store, yelling at me for stealing while I insisted that the Twinkies had
been in my lunch bag all along, a blatant lie that I hated telling. I jumped on my old fat-tire bike and pedaled off as fast as I could in fear and in shame, my heart beating a path out of my chest. I never stole again, and if the State Market were still there, I’d go and try to make amends.

  That we didn’t eat like everyone else, that my mother didn’t buy Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes, has, however, in the long run, been beneficial. We had soft drinks once or twice a year, on occasions: root beer or ginger ale when my mother sold a new children’s book or had a show of her batiks and paintings. Chips, Fritos, Oreos, processed meats, and candy didn’t have a place in our house, not because they were junk but because they were expensive. Our relationship with white bread disappeared the moment there was an alternative, when my mother agreed to paint the portrait of a neighbor’s many children in exchange for heavy but wholesome breads. Some of my friends had mothers who were also of the Adelle Davis persuasion and who made sure we had a glass of “Tiger’s Milk” after school. The friends I wanted to have would have been drinking Coke and watching TV—another item we didn’t have. The “health foods” listed in Roget’s International Thesaurus are exactly what we had in our cupboards: molasses, wheat germ, whole-wheat flour, cornmeal, and bulgur.