Today’s lesson will be grandma’s soup.
My grandmother taught me how to improvise. “Don’t buy it if you have something you can use already in the fridge”. So we’d rummage and poke and out would come a carrot or celery or a bit of an onion, some spinach, two fennel bulbs and perhaps a handful of rice. The makings of a vegetable soup or grandma’s surprise--we’d never know what new (but old) ingredient she would put in. (I joked with her as she tested my palate to see what was in the stock).
Fennel bulb inevitably became Nonica’s tour de force. She included this rooty monster in soups most of the time and in my food snob vocab it transforms bland savory into subtle, smooth soft.
I cannot eat soup without thinking about my Nonica. She’s ninety-five and blind, but she still cooks and peels carrots and zucchini faster than me. (Having graduated with a culinary degree I’m ashamed to say that).
Putting food before the family and making sure there was always enough to eat were the main pre-occupations of my father and his family. Perhaps it was the war, making soup out of flour and egg (if lucky) because there was nothing else—deeply affected them. But perhaps also the American diet and lifestyle was encroaching upon them. They assimilated completely, and swallowed the Stars Spangled Banner whole, but they did not invite the Congress to join them in their soup. My grandmother and my father’s identity remained deeply rooted in their food: it’s the only place where one can sit down together and still have a tiny remembrance of native Slovenia. The nostalgic glance of home or a loss of innocence we all miss as we grow old comes back through wafts of steam in clear porcelain bowls.
I never liked eating soup when I was younger. I did not and could not understand why we had to be forced to eat soup on a hot day or soup first always (!) before every meal. We, the first generation, new mouths and new Americans, resisted and fought the dogma we thought they kept pouring down our necks.
If your culture has to hide it will go somewhere. Mine got lost and strangled itself inside the food.
Eating as a child can seem like torture. It’s a painful act when forced. “Eat it; it’s good for you”. Who on God’s green earth hasn’t heard that? And who—as a child—wants to listen?
I’ve had the honor and the challenge for four weeks to teach sixteen children how to cook and eat. Every week for 2 one and half hour sessions, eight children trundle in and ask ‘what are we going to cook?’Their wonder and amazement at cooking astonishes me. I thought—so young! How can these little ones want to learn already? Not having children of my own, I did not realize or remember from my brother and sisters how fun it was and is to watch Mommy or grandma cooking and baking at the stove.
We quickly forget what’s good for us.
I have tried to teach people—big and small—how to eat without knowing how to have fun. (or as fun is a big part of my life, somehow it got lost).
We live and eat in a world full of anxiety, job scarcity and insecurity. Food doubts, economic worries, two wars and counting, folks without health insurance others without a house—these times are not pleasurable and they certainly are not very palatable to me.
With all the fear surrounding what we eat and what it is we can take in—my body has begun a shut down mode. My stomach closed a month ago and it’s been stuck there ever since.
Fun has left the building. There’s nothing but fear left in the mainstream American diet of newsreels, diet programs and oven-tv media.
I am not opposed to cooking shows. I think they’re a great idea—but scary stuff is happening to our food sources and we broadcast how to eat it over the big media. I don’t want Emeril to bam my food into oblivia or Rachel Ray to squawk away at me for 30 minutes to show how fast I too can cook a chicken.
How harried are we these days that there is only 30 minutes to prepare and eat our meals?
I yearn for slower times, a slower life. Like my grandma’s century—when worries were concrete and put directly in the soil—will it snow too much? Will there be butter? Do we have eggs to eat? Not will my 401k plan fall through or do I have enough money to pay for daycare or can I afford to go to the dentist too?
This diet of war, racial intolerance, scare tactics and abuse have spoiled my appetite.
When someone asks me now “what are we cooking”; I will say FUN.
That’s my antidote to our current state of worry tyranny. We need a new food democracy. And it has to be fun.
