Food and Drink

Cape Cod winters are brutal: they are long, freezing cold and windy. Cape Codders don’t know what spring is. The Pilgrims, having first touched terra firma in Chatham after months at sea, headed across Massachusetts Bay for Plymouth to more shelter. Days jump from those when Cape Codders think that Old Man Winter has played a nasty trick on them once again, to days of suddenly delicious warm sun which breaks through feathery skies, filled with what my father Bob called ‘unused air’. One of my dearest memories of spending a winter living in Chatham’s Old Village is of my father, Bob, in mid-May, appearing in his 10-foot skiff putt-putting out of the Mill Pond past our house, wearing his salt-laden floppy hat, heading for Stage Harbor to do some clamming.

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.

The decline and fall of the New York Times, like that of the Roman Empire, did not happen overnight. Believe it or not, by 1970 the rot had already set in at the Times and rank error was being peddled as fact to a trusting public. I have proof. In August of that year, the paper ran a review of a Canadian theatrical production just arrived in New York called ‘Love and Maple Syrup’ (a reference to a Gordon Lightfoot song). The show was panned — so far, so par for the course — but the review ended on a shockingly error-riddled and un-factchecked note: ‘Love, incidentally, is great, but have you actually tasted maple syrup? Ugh! Only a nation with built-in insecurities and a dire need for blood sugar could have chosen it as its national drink.

One takes the chance, in writing about al fresco dining during winter, of getting pigeonholed as that guy who always goes on about how cold it is in Chicago. But if I’m to write about food and drink at this time of year, there’s no attractive alternative, unless you want to hear about my puttering in the kitchen making spaghetti, and how exciting is that? With indoor restaurant dining forbidden due to the pandemic, the remaining choice is the outdoors — the ideal setting, in this challenging time, for the intrepid individual to demonstrate boldness without being a complete idiot about it, always a fine line. The question is, how?

Raclette is the ultimate comfort food. From the French word racler, to scrape, this simple, hearty dish is all Swiss. There isn’t a village in Switzerland, in the Alps, the Jura or the Engadine, where you can’t have raclette. There are even restaurants, called carnotzets, just for raclette, although they usually serve fondue, as well. Many Swiss homes have their own raclette-designated space, often in the basement, sometimes doubling as bomb shelter, featuring fireplace and wooden table, with cozy banquettes. It’s where the Swiss go when they want to soak up carbs for comfort. In the film Heidi, you’ll watch the orphan’s uncle serving her raclette in the rustic chalet during a cold winter’s eve.

Moving back from New York City to Central Pennsylvania has been like the Five Stages of Grief, if only the last stage were eating hot soup with a hard-boiled egg in it on a 90 ̊F day in August, which is what I’ve been doing. In other words, I’m becoming a native again. Moving back to a place as particular as my hometown of York, Pennsylvania appealed after rootless years in a coastal city. From our rich colonial history to our high concentration of snack manufacturers and the pack of wild turkeys that patrols the bike path along the old railroad, York may not be an elite metropolis, but it’s no anonymous suburban wasteland, either. We owe some of that specificity to the Pennsylvania Dutch.

It’s hard to keep up with the French. First they invent a perfectly good culinary term, hors d’oeuvre, which as everyone knows refers to the bite-sized appetizers served at cocktail hour. We Anglos, in keeping with our ancestral custom, duly pirate the word and put it to work in kitchens on three continents. But barely have we wrestled the silent h into submission and gotten the vowels in oeuvre sorted out (is that ue or eu?), when the French — who had permitted their attention to wander for a brief space — deign to take note of our efforts, lifting a single languid eyebrow: ‘What? Hors d’oeuvres? Oh, you mean amuse-bouches?’ Stop the presses, everyone; cancel the cookbooks; send the menus back to the printshop. It’s an amuse bouche now...