An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  It wasn’t all grim, though. My mother did make us cakes, soothing custards, and cinnamon rolls. My dad was great at fudge and pie. There were treats of all kinds from the traveling Dutchman, Corti Brothers in Sacramento, and other places far better than Safeway. Still, if we kids said we were hungry at night, hoping for another bite of dessert, my dad would say, “There’s shredded wheat in the kitchen; help yourself.” He always saw right through us, and we were never hungry enough for that.

  My mother was not a terribly good cook, but she would get high marks for her feeding efforts today when it came to the lunch box, for she used that wholesome bread for sandwiches with their vegetarian fillings and a piece of fruit for dessert. There are many of us who would love to see such options in today’s cafeterias and lunchrooms. But left to my own devices, I reveled in making less healthful food choices. For my birthday I always asked for Wonder bread and sweet and sour spare ribs, both of which I got. When my grandparents came to visit I hovered around the breakfast table in an annoying fashion in the hope that some of the store-bought pastries procured for their breakfast might also be mine. Elementary school field trips took us not to farms, as they might today, but to the Hostess cupcake factory in Sacramento, where we stared at all those squiggly white lines of icing being set down over the shiny dark domes of a thousand cupcakes. I lusted for them.

  Despite feeling deprived as a kid, I never developed a taste for soft drinks or potato chips, fast food or junk food, or cigarettes, which were also forbidden in our household. None of this ever tempts me, for which I’m grateful. It always strikes me as odd that when I’m being interviewed, there’s inevitably the moment when the interviewer says, “Okay, confess. What is your favorite junk food, your guilty pleasure?” I have to confess: Junk food is not really on my horizon. But I have other temptations that do harm in excess—mainly good cheeses, cashew nuts, and cream.

  * * *

  —

  My first kitchen forays were focused on sweets. By the time my brother Mike and I were eleven and thirteen, we were accomplished at whipping up a white cake from an old edition of Joy of Cooking, to which we added poppy seeds. We ate about half the batter and baked the remainder, yielding a one-layer cake for dessert on any given night. Our father had taught us how to make frosting out of margarine, powdered sugar, and vanilla, and we made it whether or not there was a cake to be iced. And he taught us a kind of short-cut praline we made out of margarine and brown sugar.

  After cake, frosting, and pralines, crêpes became a favorite, and my best friend and I often made them after school. Following crêpes suzette as our model, we folded them, put them in a pan with butter, then added whatever liquor her parents had, as mine had only wine. Gin was not especially good with crêpes, while sherry could be tolerated. Once we got to use Grand Marnier, which was the best, and this pretty much constituted our modest foray into booze as well as French desserts.

  At thirteen I made my first pie, one for my mother. It was a dreadful thing, the crust made with hot water from the Joy of Cooking. I have no idea why that recipe was included in that otherwise venerable book. It seems to me if you’re that intimidated by making pastry, you should probably be encouraged to make a crisp rather than mess around with a tough little crust that will only disappoint you. Making piecrust, regardless of the recipe, was a painful ordeal for me for a very long time. I hated that it stuck and tore, and working with pie dough made my temper suddenly mean and short. The first time I swore was while making piecrust, that first piecrust. Even today pie dough can be a bit dicey for me. If my husband walks into the kitchen and sees I’m rolling out dough for a pie or a galette, he quietly goes out to my office for the duration. But I’m not so bad at it now. In fact, it usually goes pretty well. I very seldom swear, and I never think twice about making a pie because of the pastry. With practice, one can learn.

  After my first pie failure, my mother, who was actually a pretty decent bread baker when she took the time it required, introduced me to the joy of working with yeast. She taught me to make cinnamon rolls that were loaded with brown sugar, walnuts, and raisins and completely free of healthful pretensions. Again, I thank her for never suggesting that anything could go wrong with yeast. Yeast is really quite easy to work with, yet so many people are scared that they’ll kill it, forgetting that in the end, it’s just a package of yeast and some flour we’re talking about, not a huge investment. Making breads and rolls is such a pleasure that it’s a shame to miss out on it just because someone once overcautioned you about using water that’s a degree or two too hot.

  Not only was my mother a good baker, but so was our neighbor June Halio, who used to make challah every Friday afternoon for Shabbat. Its enticing smell would drift from her yard into ours. It was so deliciously eggy, seedy, and yeasty that I asked her if she would teach me to make challah and she did. I made it every week for about two years and eventually came to turn out some pretty handsome braids. I traded my weekly excess to a few ceramicists at UC Davis, Robert Arneson and Dave Gilhooly in particular, in exchange for some of their pieces, which is how I began to build a pottery collection. Unfortunately I gave away those wonderful, wacky pieces during my ascetic Zen Center days, but I still have a love for clay, which, when you think about it, is not unrelated to bread and to food itself. Food and clay are both gifts from the earth, and both dough and clay get kneaded. When I became an art student at UC Davis, one of my short-lived majors, parties were held after bronze castings, and I often hosted them and did the cooking. That’s when I really developed my challah-braiding techniques alongside my piroshki-making skills, as well as my attempts in ceramics. I even ventured into making homemade noodles rolled out with a rolling pin to plump up in chicken soups. They were never quite thin enough, but were more like dumplings. Wrong but good.

  * * *

  —

  Since, as a teenager, I wanted to have a larger food experience, for my fifteenth birthday I asked to go to a restaurant. My father chose a Mexican restaurant he knew in Daly City, and we all went. I was enchanted with the large paper flowers, the mariachi band, the tortillas and enchiladas, which would soon enough become common food for my friends and me. But that was the first time, and it was transporting.

  Soon other restaurant experiences followed. My high school French class ate at the Lion d’Or in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. The room was dark and smoky, the very stuff of adventure, but I can’t recall one morsel tasted. Later I ate at the Old Poodle Dog Ritz with my boyfriend and his well-traveled academic parents, who knew their way around France and a French menu. The father was impressed when I ordered sweetbreads. I didn’t tell him that I was curious about what kind of bread the French might serve as a first course; it seemed so odd. Plus, I was baking a lot then so I really did want to know. When they came, I saw that sweetbreads were not bread at all, and I found them too revolting to eat. The father gallantly asked if I might trade my dish for his sole—my sweetbreads looked so good. I still marvel at what a gentleman he was. The entire experience was fraught with mistakes and confusion, and although I wanted to be, I was not enchanted.

  Another boyfriend and I went to a hotel, again in San Francisco and again for a French meal. As we were settling into our seats, we noticed a large table of women pointing at us and looking our way. Eventually one of them came over with a platter of crêpes suzette. They were all on diets. Would we like them? Of course we would! We were nineteen and hungry.

  By this time I had formed a more or less distinct image of what I thought French food should be, thanks largely to the Foods of the World cookbook series, in particular the volume The Cooking of Provincial France. But the hotel’s menu was what we used to know of as continental; and there was not one of the gorgeous, lusty dishes that the pictures in the Time-Life book had promised. Whatever we ate—seafood with béchamel sauce pinked up with tomato paste I believe—there was nothing memorable about it, except the crêpes. To be
fair, our dessert appetizers could have affected the rest of the meal, but my disappointment was a big one. I didn’t really recover from it until I went to Chez Panisse for the first time many years later. That’s where I experienced the food I had thought of as French all along.

  * * *

  —

  When I was about sixteen I started going to San Francisco on my own via the Greyhound bus. There I spent hours hanging out at City Lights bookstore and less time trying to enjoy espresso in North Beach, or taking the bus to the Surf Theatre out on Irving Street to see foreign films. It was a thrill to discover the dense poppy-seed-filled pastries in the Russian neighborhood on Clement Street and the piroshki stuffed with moist, ground beef. After eating my first piroshki I longed to learn how to make them. With practice (and help from the Time-Life volume on Russia) I became pretty good at these tender savory pastries, which I made by the hundreds for all kinds of occasions.

  Once I discovered a fortune cookie factory in a Chinatown alley and watched from the doorway as an enormous wheel with little griddles on the end of each spoke moved jerkily over tiny flames until the batter on each griddle was cooked just enough for a seated man to deftly lift the hot cookie off its grill and fold it into quarters around its paper fortune. I also discovered dim sum during this time, along with Chinese pastry shops that featured endless versions of steamed sponge cake, and the Japanese shops where pastries were made of glutinous rice stretched over sweetened bean pastes. San Francisco offered a carnival of flavors and possibilities.

  * * *

  —

  Sacramento, thirteen miles from Davis, was our other, less exotic city, but it had its own interesting personality, and it too was accessible on the bus. Part of Sacramento’s allure had to do with its place on the Sacramento River, which, until the levees were built and the flat rice-growing floodplain established, periodically caused severe flooding and big trouble.

  A Chinese neighborhood was clustered around the train station. It was not a bright bustling Chinatown like the one in San Francisco, but a more somber place with shabby old buildings and restaurants with creaky wooden floors. Frank Fat’s, a fancier Chinese restaurant that stood a block or so from the state capitol, served as a meeting spot for politicians. It was also where kids went on their prom nights, that and a Polynesian restaurant called the Tiki Hut, which served scalding bits of chicken wrapped in tinfoil; they were terribly exotic and burned your fingers as you unwrapped them.

  Sam’s Hof Brau, next door to the bus station, was also considered special, like Tommy’s Joynt in San Francisco. You took your place in a line that snaked past all the meats sitting warm under their heat lamps, containers of sauces and pickles, baskets of rolls, and barrels of beer. I went to Sam’s on my first date, and as I knew little about meat and nothing about dating, I just ordered what my date ordered, a rare roast beef sandwich. The stringy meat was bloody and impossible to chew, and I was scared that it would lodge in my throat, which made me even more nervous than I was already. It ended up in my purse, folded in a napkin. Food! From the get-go, I didn’t have an easy relationship with meat, and for a long time it was somewhat of a mystery to me. It still is.

  Old Sacramento in the late 1950s and early 1960s was funky, but not dangerous. There was no mall and no Macy’s, but there were places like Beers bookstore, a giant old barn of a building that had that musty smell of used books and dust. The state capitol was elegant and grand, and you could just walk into it to gaze up at the white and gold dome. A display window for each county on the ground floor showed what it produced. Around the time of the state fair, in September, the windows would be filled with pyramids of fruit and vegetables, showing off the incomparable treasure of food that amassed each summer in California.

  * * *

  —

  When I was a young teenager, I had a huge fascination with all things Japanese, which came from meeting my father’s Japanese graduate students, who occasionally joined us at home for dinner. They always brought plates of inari sushi and other treats, and they were by far the nicest people I had ever met. In addition to these visitors, porcelain Japanese teacups, fans, sumi-e paintings, and other Japanese foods all became extremely compelling. I fell in love with Japan in the way that a young, naïve person can—passionately and without discrimination.

  Sacramento had a Japanese community and there were a few Japanese restaurants scattered along the river. When I was fifteen or so I used to eat there by myself in little cafés with half curtains, or noren, strung up at the entrances. There were just a few tables in small dark rooms, and the customers were Japanese people speaking Japanese. The menus were also in Japanese, so I had no choice but to point to what someone else was eating, or say the only useful word I knew: “sukiyaki.” The Iris Café was where I encountered braised tofu for the first time. Nestled in a dark salty sauce among the yam noodles, a raw egg, and sliced beef, it was the most tender, subtle food I had ever eaten. With its faintly nutty flavor mingled with the lingering salty broth, the tofu possessed this remarkable silkiness. Unlike today’s tofu, which lasts for months in its packages, this was utterly fresh. Here I could look into the kitchen and see the tofu in its large buckets, the big white cubes floating freely in water, unbound by plastic. It was probably used the same day it was made, the way it was in Japan. Later when I went to Japan, I recognized the immediate, clean, unsullied flavor of the tofu there as being the same, and a few years after that, when I was cooking at the Zen Center, the tofu I ordered also came floating in five-gallon buckets of water just as this had, only it was a coarser Chinese-style bean curd.

  Since tofu arrived in the mainstream culture and received its unfortunate designation as a health food, it has become durable and long lasting, practical, and endlessly versatile, baked and smoked, flavored with Thai or Italian seasonings, fashioned into hot dogs, sausage, turkey, and more. “Exquisite” would be among the last words I’d use to describe this food that has strayed so far from its origins. But the bean curd I was encountering in these little cafés that were soon to be razed and replaced with touristy shops had the distinct and delicate mark of impeccable freshness, which is one of the qualities that makes tofu tofu.

  Today it’s hard to find tofu like that, but recently in Sacramento, I had a good tofu experience when visiting Suzanne Ashworth, an organic farmer, author, and seed saver who farms along the Sacramento River. We had gone to the wholesale produce terminal to make a delivery, and as soon as we unloaded her organic tomatoes and tiny bell-shaped peppers, a smiling Japanese woman ran up to Suzanne and thrust into her hands a plastic bag that held two blocks of tofu swimming in water. We took them back to the farmhouse, where Suzanne made a stir-fry with the tofu and some greens from her garden. It was exquisite.

  5. My Mother’s Recipe Boxes

  After my mother died, I found two boxes filled with recipes. I was surprised that she had squirreled away so many—any recipes for that matter—given her general apathy in the kitchen. Her collection was a mishmash of handwritten notes and other recipes torn from magazines, mainly Sunset and Gourmet and occasionally Good Housekeeping, which was kind of ironic since, by her own admission, my mother was hardly a good housekeeper. These folded bits of printed paper and yellowed cards, most of them typewritten recipes, introduced my mother to me in a new way, and they helped me to see her as a person I had not known or even imagined. I had to wonder, Why these recipes? Did she ever make them?

  * * *

  —

  Her handwritten categories weren’t necessarily related to the recipe contents. Filed under “Meat,” for example, were recipes for pomegranate jelly, orange jellies, orange breads, cakes, pickles, guava preserves, and even a guava chiffon pie—none of them meat and none of them foods we ever ate. The many recipes based on oranges were labor-intensive undertakings that involved taking apart, then reassembling the now highly sugared fruits, something my mother would not have had the patien
ce to do. Maybe she wished, at least a little, that she were that kind of a person, a woman who spent hours in the kitchen instead of at her typewriter writing or at her easel painting. I suspect the real reason there were so many orange recipes was that my parents had moved from the cold, snowy East to California in the early 1950s, and the orange trees there must have seemed miraculous. As a small child in upstate New York, I treasured the orange snuggled in the toe of my Christmas stocking. It was miraculous with that mist of oil that sprayed into the air as the skin was pulled back from the wet, juicy flesh. Once we lived in California, my siblings and I choked down sour orange compotes on Christmas mornings for years because the oranges were from our own trees, even though they wouldn’t be truly ripe and sweet for at least another month. It was as if my mother could never get over the miracle of California.

  Where were the meat recipes, I wondered. Elsewhere. My mother was not a fan of meat and was, in fact, a fin-and-feathers vegetarian. Perhaps the meat recipes were dutifully collected for our father, who did enjoy meat, like the recipe for roasted lamb neck. That my mother, a person sensitive to the lives of other beings, my mother, once a young farm wife back East who couldn’t bear the thought of a difficult goat being slaughtered, would even have such a recipe was surprising to me. I’m sure we never ate such a thing. The meat dishes that we did eat were mostly in her “Armenian” file, which also contained dolmas, shashlik, kebabs, and a miscellany of curries. There was a recipe for köefte from the 1950s, long before Paula Wolfert introduced us to more than fifty kinds. It was more like a fried meatball, but there it was, coming into our consciousness. On one card there were instructions for preparing pickled tongue with raisins. Again, I doubt my mother made the tongue, but we did eat tongue (and kidneys and liver and pigs’ feet); my father was the one who bought these meats and cooked them, but never with raisins.