Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen

by Matt McAllester

  Father Joseph Christie, Jesuit priest and sometime television and radio personality, is waiting for my father in a gloomy little room in the church on Farm Street. My father is twenty-four, an atheist from a Protestant family wanting to marry a Catholic. That means he has to learn the ropes of the Church. My mother's father lines up ten sessions with the priest for his future son-in-law.

  Christie is about five foot ten, stocky, good-looking, and sharp as a whip. He waits for my father in the ground-floor room. It is empty but for a table and two chairs. There is one window. My father decides that this room is set aside for lessons like those to which he has committed. It is an island of monastical asceticism in a building bubbling over with shimmering gold leaf, marble statues of the Virgin, mosaics of cobalt and crimson, all of it surrounded by the impossible wealth of Mayfair.

  My father is still a student of photography and living in London without my mother. She is in Edinburgh, where they met while at university. An arts degree was not for him, he decided quickly, and moved to London to study photography. But he's very much in love with the young woman he met at a coffeehouse one day. Her name is Ann Taylor.

  He drives to church in his light-blue Sunbeam Alpine sports car after classes end. It is early summer and London is at its best.

  “Donald, I'd like you to take these away and read them before next time,” Christie says at the end of the first session, handing my father a bundle of pamphlets. “I want you to fire some questions at me next time.”

  My father likes the priest enormously and enjoys the first forty-five-minute session. Christie is fiercely intelligent, and my father feels intellectually exercised as he zips up Park Lane after the meeting with the car's top down in the evening sunshine. He does his homework and the classes continue. The day before the fourth session with Christie, something in one of the pamphlets catches my father's eye.

  “Okay,” my father, the would-be husband, says when they meet at the church. “What about the Catholic teaching in relation to the situation when a mother's life is threatened by the birth of a child? As I understand it, the teaching says that the child is more important and that the mother would therefore die. How on earth can you justify that?”

  “You see, Donald, these days the advances in modern medicine are so great that this situation never arises,” the priest says, looking uncomfortable.

  “But that's not always been the case and it's not the case in many countries. And besides, it's the teaching I find troubling.”

  “As I said, Donald,” Christie says, “this situation never arises these days.”

  At the end of that session, Christie pronounces that my father has learned enough and there is no need for the next six lessons. He wishes my father all the best in his marriage.

  Six years later my mother gives birth to me, her second child. She chooses the Farm Street church as the site of my christening. It is December 16, 1969. Afterward, the families go to our house for tea. I am dressed in a very long white christening robe. My mother poses for pictures with me, holding me on her lap with one hand, smoking a cigarette with the other.

  23

  PERNILLA AND I SAT WATCHING CRAP TELEVISION SHOWS ON a weekday afternoon when we should both have been working. We were waiting for a phone call from the IVF clinic. I had refused to believe that this time it would be anything but successful. I only wondered whether we would have a boy, a girl, or twins. Besides cooking and jabbing Pernilla in the ass each morning with a needle the size of a pencil lead, my only job throughout the IVF was to be cheery. The night before I had not felt very cheery all of a sudden, and I dreamed about the test results all night. The phone rang.

  “Oh, no, not again,” Pernilla said, her face crumpling.

  The test results were inconclusive but not promising. Pernilla would have to do another blood test the next day. I called the nurse back. “It's fifty-fifty,” she said. I stared out the window at nothing.

  Our favorite restaurant, Moro, called to confirm our booking. I had planned a celebration. “Actually, I was just going to call you to cancel,” I said.

  There was little to be done in the way of cooking, conjuring jokes, cheering each other up, discussing how we felt, or even talking. I went to my study and closed the door and cried. I wanted to buy a first record for someone. I wanted to sit on the rocks in Ardnamurchan with my arms around someone small and tell him or her that I would dive in without a second's hesitation. I wanted to make one beautiful, delicious, special meal after another for my family. I wanted someone to be alive who was not alive. Not my mother this time, but a child. I would be the one doing the looking after. I'd be doing the parenting and I'd make sure that I'd do it well, for the rest of my life, not just until the little person was about ten years old. I would not disappear into madness and drinking.

  But on this day it had all begun to seem as impossible as bringing my mother back.

  The next days became all about the amount of hCG, or human chorionic gondadotropin, detectable in Pernilla's blood. This is a hormone created by the cells that form the placenta, which is the root of nourishment for a growing embryo. (I liked to picture the placenta as a French country dining table laden with fresh, colorful, delicious food with only one place setting—for a ravenous, growing embryo.) The level of hCG in Pernilla's blood would hopefully at least double every two days. If it didn't, the embryo would be giving up the ghost. Currently, it was on 15. A reading of 25 or more is considered a positive pregnancy.

  I forced myself up to the kitchen, wanting to find some comfort there. An unprompted memory surfaced, of my mother's thick, yeasty homemade bread. I poured some whole-meal flour, yeast, and water into a bowl and pounded the dough with my fists.

  My mother stands next to me in the kitchen in Edinburgh, showing me how to use my upper-body weight to lean into the warm sticky mixture, pushing it away from me in a kind of rocking motion across the flour she has scattered across the Formica work top. She picks it up and slaps it down on the surface and I do the same, louder and harder. The house fills with the oven-rich smell of fresh bread baking.

  My christening party

  The phone rang again. It was the doctor. The team of doctors at the clinic had looked at the blood-test results and they'd decided that the embryo, giving off an hCG reading of 15, had a chance. Pernilla and I had been calling the embryo Bongo. Bongo was there inside her, but he was weak. Pernilla had a whole ream of new instructions—inject more of this, stop that, get up at the crack of dawn and come straight to the clinic because you'll probably be on a plasma drip all day.

  “It's the Battle for Bongo,” I said, and we smiled and I went into the kitchen on my own, closed the door, and gave the risen dough an even harder pounding. Then I soaked some dried porcini mushrooms, sliced up some prosciutto and some garlic, and made a creamy, peppery pasta sauce.

  We were up just after dawn and driving to the clinic. Pernilla gave more blood. The embryo had not given up; the hCG level was now at 24.

  “Sorry, but does that mean she's pregnant?” I asked the doctor, a quiet man who spoke in a mumble.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling in a sort of regretful way, “but it's an embryo that's trying to get by.”

  The doctor said the clinic would be monitoring Pernilla and the embryo carefully over the coming days. But the bottom line was this: It might well be abnormal. Poor. Doomed. Or it could be just behind schedule and a bit weak right now.

  “If it does survive, when will we know that it's going to be okay?” I asked.

  “To be honest, in twelve weeks,” he said.

  If Bongo was abnormal, there was fuck all I could do about it, I thought, as I drove home quickly so that I could jab my newly pregnant wife, who was sitting next to me, in the ass with the elephant needle. But if he was just struggling a bit, then he could do with some good fuel.

  Pernilla went to bed and I went to the kitchen to make Friday afternoon lunch. It was the first meal I was making knowing for sure that I would be feeding an e
mbryo that had a real chance. So I took a root of horseradish out of the fridge and pared it down, grating it into a bowl and mixing it with vinegar, English mustard, salt, and sugar. “You're totally going to like this,” I said to the embryo. “Just a taste of what's to come over the years ahead.” I mixed the horseradish mixture with yogurt (it should really have been crème fraîche, but I didn't have any) and put the very small joint of beef in the oven, alongside the loaf that I had left to rise overnight. I boiled some carrots in a little water, a lot of butter, some sugar, and a pinch of salt and reduced the mixture until there was a sweet, delicious glaze all over the crispy carrots.

  “I'm getting the impression that you're cooking away your stress,” Pernilla said, when she came into the kitchen after her nap.

  What I was really doing was making the only vaguely useful contribution to the embryo's survival I could think of. From now on, now that I knew he or she was in there, I'd up my game and feed Pernilla and Bongo as my mother once fed me. I planned a trip to Britain's best food market, the incredible Borough Market, for the next day. But there was someplace else I had to stop by too.

  24

  AS FAR AS I KNOW, WHEN I VISITED THE FARM STREET church, which my sister had been so strongly drawn to after my mother's death, on a Saturday morning in 2007, it was only the second time I had been there. Pernilla and I had spent a couple of hours at the glorious Borough Market, and when we drove over to the church, our old Golf was full of apples, pancetta, lardo, hard Italian cheese, a pound of freshly roasted coffee, and bags of vegetables and other cheeses and fish.

  We went in through the back entrance, at the nave end, and looked up at the most beautiful church I had ever seen in London. There was a mid-afternoon sense of quiet, the hush between services. A wedding was scheduled, but for now the church was ours.

  We found the chapel my sister had told me about—Our Lady of Lourdes.

  Lourdes, the place of miracles. Bestowed on the visiting millions by a mother who, they say, conceived a miracle child. (Months later, my aunt Jennifer told me that she and my mother had visited the miraculous grotto in Lourdes when they were children.)

  Pernilla and I sat in the chapel of a faith neither of us believed in. I prayed. And as my sister had experienced, I felt the goodness and closeness of our mother. I sat on the bench and looked at the marble statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. Behind me were plaques embedded in the ancient walls, memorializing men who had fallen in World War I. And there was one anonymously thanking Our Lady for a prayer heard and answered.

  “Is it selfish to ask for a life?” I asked the statue.

  “Mum,” I said to my mother, “you would have wanted me to have a kid, your grandchild. Do what you can, will you? Put a word in. Intercede, will you?”

  Mum,” I say to my mother, as we sit in the kitchen in Edinburgh, “I don't understand why you pray to the Virgin Mary. She was just human. Why not pray to Jesus? Or directly to God?”

  “Mary can intercede.”

  “What does intercede mean?”

  “She can put a good word in. She has a lot of influence. She's God's mummy.”

  But I have my doubts. I come back from school one day a couple years later, when I am twelve, having learned a new word.

  “Mum, do you believe in transubstantiation?”

  “Of course I do,” she says.

  “But that means you believe that you're literally, actually, genuinely drinking blood and eating flesh when you take Communion. Right?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “That's sick. You have to be kidding. It's only a symbol, right?”

  “If that's what you want to think, fine,” she says. “I'll believe what I want to believe.”

  I sense she's not entirely convinced by all of this. My father had promised to help raise any children he would have with my mother as good Catholics, but it hasn't happened. There has been no First Communion, no Confirmation, no Confession. Only a bit of Sunday school, some reading of a fun, illustrated Bible full of excellent stories about lions and long hair and a sea parting and a golden statue and an old man with a big gray beard in the clouds. And the occasional trip to church. In truth, my mother has drifted from the Church and its prohibition of the Pill and other teachings she has begun to see as antediluvian. So her attempts to persuade my sister and me that God even exists become perfunctory.

  “Mum,” I say, on what is perhaps our last visit together to a church, “what's that for?”

  I'm bored and I've spotted a purple velvet hat-shaped thing perched on a gold-colored stand at the front of the church.

  “That's where God lives,” she whispers sharply, not encouraging further discussion. And with that sentence, she kills God off for me. God lives in a velvet hat? I don't think so. I refuse to go to church again.

  * * *

  Years later I realized that inside the velvet cover was the sacrament, the body and the blood of Christ.

  Since the day of the velvet hat, I had lived “as if.” As if there were a God or some kind of overarching goodness keeping things together. Not that I believed in it. It had not kept my family together. But I suspect that living “as if” is a common trick many atheists play when the awfulness of human behavior seems unbearable or natural disasters like tsunamis or mental illness strike without warning. Or when you are really in trouble and have no one to appeal to. Every now and then, however—and this moment in the early afternoon in the church on Farm Street was one of those times—I strayed into the slightly more theological, wishful territory of “if.” Or “perhaps.” Or “just in case.” I put my absolute disbelief to one side for a minute. And I cared nothing about the essential dishonesty of my thoughts.

  The wedding was about to begin. The church was filling up with Korean Catholics. Pernilla and I left Farm Street through the back door, and on the way out I noticed on the announcement board outside what the church's proper name was: The Church of the Immaculate Conception.

  The feeding blizzard was intense.

  While Pernilla lay in bed, resting in the hope that the embryo inside would continue to grow, I walked to the bottom of the garden, snipped three small zucchini from the vegetable patch, and went to the kitchen to make lunch—a frittata with free-range eggs, some fresh Parmesan, and lots of pepper.

  For dinner that night I cooked the two line-caught sea bass we had bought at the market. I scored them twice, as Elizabeth David instructed, and grilled them. And in the days that followed, I kept on with my cooking and feeding program. From Elizabeth David's Italian Food book—a miracle of research at the time of publication—I learned a good, simple way to sauté eggplant, dicing them, salting them for an hour, pouring off the muddy liquid, frying them slowly, and adding garlic toward the end. From the same, a salsa verde, which I had never made before. The River Café ladies, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray—two of the most passionate disciples of Elizabeth David's credo of simplicity and seasonality—suggested I add lots of olive oil and Parmesan to my mashed potatoes.

  I shelled peas, made an intense stock with a prosciutto hock, and turned it into the River Café's pea and prosciutto soup, which we ate with slices of yeasty, homemade bread. (Elizabeth David's astonishing, five-hundred-page English Bread and Yeast Cookery was becoming my bread Bible.)

  There were some mistakes in my flurry of chopping and shopping and roasting. Thai green curry was meant to break the Mediterranean rhythm. It was a disgusting, humiliating failure. As was a very bad-smelling cold soup of radishes and mint.

  But there was also a chorizo paella, oozing warmth and togetherness. Salads from the garden's endless supply of arugula and lettuces—and the occasional carrot, radish, spinach leaf, and impossibly perfect tomato.

  On an August evening that felt like November, we ate old-fashioned carbonara and Pernilla complained of getting fat.

  “But I want you to get fat. You should be getting fat,” I said. “That's the point.”

  The next hCG level was 67. It had nearly tripled in two days. T
his was very good.

  At Borough Market I had bought a duck, the fattiest of birds and not one I had ever cooked. I roasted it, making an intense gravy out of giblet stock, chopped cherries, and lemon zest. I bought ricotta for my first gnocchi. On a hot evening we took plastic bags and bowls to a nearby railway station and stood on the platform picking blackberries while the commuters smiled. I made blackberry ice, blackberry and rhubarb crumble, and I bought prosecco and made blackberry Bellinis for myself while I cooked.

  The hCG level: 199. Again, it had nearly tripled in two further days. I asked the nurse if this meant the embryo was catching up to normal levels. It wasn't that simple, she said. It had started slowly, so only time and scans would tell.

  It was a day between blood tests, and London's skies were the color of the city's slate roofs. I stood at the sink, scrubbing clean the last of my vegetable patch's potatoes. The embryo's growth, while still worrying, was something about which I had unfettered hope. And yet I was gloomy, without good cause, and the feeling was familiar.

  I am eleven years old and it is Boxing Day in Edinburgh. I have just brushed my teeth in our upstairs bathroom, all red and black in a color scheme done by the previous owners.

  “Mum, I feel fed up,” I say to my mother, who has come in.

  “What's wrong?” she says, knowing full well that this is just the comedown from the previous day's frenzy of gifts and feasting and expectation.

  “I don't know,” I say. I lean into her; she puts her arms around me and I can smell her Chanel No. 5 and her cigarettes. Her long black hair gets in my face, tickling me. “I can't think of anything in particular. I just feel fed up.”

  I begin to cry. For no reason.

  “It's okay to be fed up sometimes,” she says.

  I stood looking out at the garden and dropped each potato—embarrassingly small, every one of them—into a colander. I turned round and picked up French Provincial Cooking to look at ways to do carrots and found “Beurre Maître d'Hôtel,” which began: We all know how to make parsley butter. But do we always do it really well or know its many uses?