Food and Drink

The world’s first fast-food restaurant chain. The first to sell over a billion hamburgers, to invent the carry-out and to offer discount coupons in the newspapers. Jewel of the American Midwest. Celebrating its centenary. Better burgers than McDonald’s, according to Consumer Reports. Still run as a family business. Some 377 US locations, and growing. Obsessively loved by some, faintly ludicrous to others with its trademark enamel-glazed, faux-brick architecture and miniature square patties, White Castle is the Rodney Dangerfield of greasy spoons. It gets no respect.

‘Life,’ Carl Sandburg says, ‘is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.’ Carl, being a poet, was the sensitive type. You’d better believe that when Chuck Norris peels an onion, the only crying comes from the onion. But Chuck’s iron-jawed impassivity isn’t a trait I personally seek to emulate (though one is naturally curious about the type; did you know that when Chuck goes to a feminist rally, he leaves with a freshly ironed shirt and a sandwich?) I freely admit that both life and onions have occasionally brought me to tears. Especially onions. Julia Child thought it hard to imagine a civilization without them, but as a seven-year-old I vigorously disagreed.

About five years ago, just after my 50th birthday, I noticed that I was extremely fat. Not ‘overweight’, not ‘heavy’, not ‘big-boned’, not possessed of a ‘good sense of humor’; fat is what it was. It was down to a long-undiagnosed medical condition and the attendant medication. It was also down to enjoying food a lot. What to do about it? Like a lot of men, I like a solution. I fundamentally believe that if you have a problem, you just need to find the right expert, who will lift the hood, run a few tests, give you a schedule to follow and it’ll be right as rain. ‘Go to the Mayr,’ a friend said. ‘They’ll put you right.’ And so it was. The Mayr Clinic is a celebrated health farm on the shores of the Wörthersee, a lake in eastern Austria.

My jar of vegan flaczki has been eyeing me for the last four months. It sits in my fridge, large, round and imposing, filled with a lumpy gray mixture. Flaczki is tripe soup, a traditional Polish concoction of broth, herbs, spices, vegetables and guts. Poles adore the stuff. It is warming and hearty. An unimpressed friend once described it as ‘elastic-band stew’. My vegan flaczki contains mushrooms instead of tripe. I bought it for a lark. My Polish friends thought it funny that a modern, progressive twist was being put on a firmly traditional dish. I am a vegetarian, but every time I think about eating my vegan flaczki, I think again. Traditional Polish food is warm, rich and meaty. Roulada, for example, is a meat roll stuffed with, among other things, more meat.

I don’t remember my grandmother, Anna Olson Nelson (Nelsie to her grandchildren), ever measuring out anything for her divine Swedish bread. The recipes must have been kept under the thick, blonde braid that she piled expertly on top of her head. What I do recall, as if it were yesterday, is helping Nelsie bake fläta and limpa every other Sunday in her small kitchen. The heavenly smells of cardamom and fennel wafted throughout her apartment while she tried to improve my Swedish. My mother, Mimi, often spoke Swedish to me and my sister, Chris, when we were babies and my father was with the Office of War Information as a correspondent in China, Burma and India during World War Two. Nelsie was our ‘Swedish nanny’.

How better to lift a torch against late-winter gloom than by conjuring an evening from a time when our country was still a confident going concern, when its culture and ideas bestrode the free world? What with our plague-driven mania for virtual living, it’s hard to get anyone to come to dinner these days. And since she died in 1969, our virtual guest of honor won’t be coming either. But from an era full of entertainment giants, we pick one, the star of stars: Miss Judy Garland. If only in our minds, we invite Judy to cocktails and dinner and then, just maybe if we get lucky, to linger late into the evening around the piano and sing a few of the old songs. This is not a formal affair, just two couples on a Friday evening after work.

What will Easter 2021 be like? Nothing like 2020, if I have my way. This year, I dream, Easter will be preceded by a Holy Week as solemn as if COVID had never been. Purple-veiled statues will stand solemnly about the church overlooking the Holy Thursday foot washing, a jug of water the only cleansing agent in sight, while a large choir sings the Ubi caritas. The Mass will be jammed with people, as it is every normal year, lovely, unknown people who spontaneously show up, unregistered and untraceable, squeezing in wherever there’s space. Afterwards an altar boy swinging a golden censer will lead the procession through volutes of blue smoke to an altar of repose, swathed in white silk.

Growing up in a mixed American household of Indian, Italian and Puerto Rican descent, I never questioned the varying menu each night for dinner. Until I was a teenager, I hadn’t realized my family’s weekly meals were different from those of my friends — until they began begging me to eat at my house on weekends after I told them what was being cooked. For me, dietary normalcy meant chicken curry on Mondays, arroz con habichuelas on Wednesdays and lasagna on Fridays. My Puerto Rican and Italian American mother Loretta had married my father Roop, an Indian immigrant, in 1981. I always admired my mother for her fearlessness in crossing cultural lines during an era when interracial marriage was less common than it is today.