Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (3 page)

• • •

Normally, eating two bowls of pasta would put me in a carb-induced coma. Tonight, after getting a six-figure pay cut, it’s calmed me down enough so that I can begin to take stock.

My family’s history of rainy days gave me more than enough incentive to put part of each paycheck into a savings account. It also made me frugal—to a fault, in my mother’s eyes. “You need this coat,” she said when we were in a department store one afternoon.

“But Mom, it costs six hundred dollars …”

“And it looks like it cost a thousand! Buy it, or I’m buying it for you!”

Her rationale betrayed our humble background: “In
order to make money,” she said as I reluctantly handed over my credit card, “you have to look like you already have it.”

Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing that coat when I negotiated a freelance contract with my now former company. The monthly stipend won’t be enough to retire on, but between that and my unemployment benefits, I can put my bag lady nightmares aside for a while. Another relief is that I’m not doing this alone anymore—now I have a husband who says things like “Don’t worry. I’ve got my job. Have another cookie and relax.” Together, we have enough to pay our rent and bills and to buy groceries (less expensive ones, anyway; I may need persuasion to buy fine clothes, but not fine food).

All in all, I feel relatively safe, especially when Mom tells me about what Nana went through during her childhood and the Depression. By those standards, I’m nowhere near trouble.

OCTOBER 2008

WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK

Mom’s Version of Great-Great-Grandmother Matilde’s Baked Pork Chops with Sauerkraut

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cut loin of pork into 1½-inch-thick chops. Sprinkle chops with all-purpose seasoned salt, the kind in the large container found in the Ethnic Foods aisle of the supermarket
. “Much cheaper than whatever the name-brand was I used to get,” Mom says, “and God knows these days every cent counts.”
Put a little olive oil in a large roasting pan and bake seasoned chops for about 45 minutes. While the chops are baking, make the sauerkraut—one bag. Melt about a tablespoon of butter in a large pan on a low flame. Sauté the sauerkraut and add a few shakes of caraway seeds
.

“How much?” I ask.

“Oh, you know … enough,” she says. I’ve come to my parents’ house for information about Nana and her recipes, but I should’ve known better than to expect exact amounts from Mom. These instructions weren’t written down but handed down, all the way from my great-great-grandmother. Besides, my mother cooks by instinct, while I have to measure everything to the last grain. I’d say it was 1½ tablespoons, but it depends on how caraway-y you like your sauerkraut.

Add a slosh or two of white wine
(again with the non-measurements! It looked like a quarter cup)
and about ½ cup
(or so)
of applesauce
.

By this time your pork chops should have browned nicely, so take a good caramelized-looking one out of the oven and add it to the pan of sautéing sauerkraut for flavor
. “Grandpa used to make this as a pork loin,” Mom says as she stirs it all around, “and he’d cut a chop off the end to add to the sauerkraut. One day I said, ‘Does it make any sense to do that when the chop in the kraut is the one we all fight over?’ He thought about it for a second and said, ‘Good point.’ ”
Which is why you’ll now add the chop with the sauerkraut and applesauce mixture to the rest of the pork in the roasting pan. Turn the chops over and loosen all the good browned bits on the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to mix with the sauerkraut. And back it all goes in the oven
.

“For how long?” I ask.

“A while,” Mom says. “You know, your Nana, Matilda, had always wanted to write about her life. Then
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
came out.” There were so many similarities between Matilda and Francie, the child heroine who grew up in working-class Brooklyn in the early 1900s, Mom says, that Nana felt as though her biography had already been written.

I have a vague knowledge of Nana’s rough background, but it doesn’t match up with the way I
remember her. She was tall, with elegantly coiffed white hair and tasteful style. She would have looked more appropriate getting out of a taxi on Fifth Avenue than off the subway at the last stop in the Bronx. And whatever poverty of affection she might have endured as a child she made up for by lavishing me with a vast, unconditional love.

“That book was someone else’s story,” I say. “I want to hear hers. Ours.”

So, as the pork chops make comforting sizzling noises in the oven (for about another forty-five minutes), Mom and I sit in her small dining room, and she tells me the stories that Nana told her while she made dinner in their kitchen.

• • •

AUGUST 1913

THE BRONX, NEW YORK

As a child, Matilda was blissfully unaware that her father was a drunkard who wanted nothing to do with her, or why her family sometimes had nothing more than mashed potatoes and coffee for dinner. She thrived in the soil in which she was planted—she had a grandfather
who doted on her, a nurturing teacher, and a bunch of neighbor kids who lived as she did, in tenements crowded with relatives. Many years later she would write about her blue-collar Bronx, New York, home:

Her family, the Guibes, lived in a tenement filled with Irish and German immigrants, where the scent of corned beef and cabbage mingled in the hallways with the aroma of pork, sauerkraut, and simmering apples—a recipe Matilda’s grandmother, Matilde
Guibe, brought with her to America from Alsace-Lorraine, a French region that borders on Germany.

The elder Matilde was a handsome woman who stood six feet tall, ran the family tavern, and once chased her husband, Peter, down the street and stabbed him in the backside with a meat fork during an argument. But giving birth to thirteen children weakened her heart, and having to bury five of them while they were still babies nearly broke it. When giving birth to the last one, Madeline, nearly killed Matilde, the eldest daughter, Carrie, was taken out of school in the fourth grade to stay home and care for her mother. She became nurse, cook, babysitter, and housekeeper and spent the rest of her childhood watching her siblings go to school, play with friends, meet suitors, and marry.

As the years went by, several men asked Peter Guibe for his daughter’s hand, but he never consented, either because it was more convenient to keep Carrie at home, or because he respected his daughter’s wish not to be married off to someone she didn’t love.

Matilda would eventually write about her childhood and family, and in one of the stories, she described her mother, Carrie:

• • •

The Guibes were staunch Lutherans, and they were shocked when Carrie, twenty-eight years old and unwed, became pregnant. The man responsible for her condition was William Riordan, the black sheep of a respected family in Jersey City. For some reason, Carrie and William weren’t forced to marry at that point; perhaps Peter disapproved of the cad so much that he preferred his favorite daughter have her illegitimate child quietly and be done with him. And so, on a fiercely hot day in August of 1913, Carrie had Matilda, named for her grandmother. Peter’s instincts about Riordan had been correct. When Carrie’s brothers escorted the new father to the hospital to see his daughter, Riordan looked at the baby and said, “Well, I doubt that that’s my kid.”

The bitterness festering in Peter about how his granddaughter had come to be—for a churchgoing
man, he had some pretty ungodly thoughts about Riordan—disappeared in the face of Matilda’s existence: He adored her. She became her grandpa’s pet and tiny kindred spirit. By the time she was five she’d earned him bragging rights by learning to read his copies of the
New York Times
, and she knew how to play pinochle just by watching the family on their weekly card nights. (She never did master a poker face, though, so her aunt Katie would drag her away from the game to embroider doilies for the kitchen shelves.)

Matilda and her grandpa had a routine: Every day when he was due home from work, she’d go to meet him at the train station with his beer pail in hand. For a while the family owned a tavern, but Grandpa, who worked as a stonemason, didn’t drink there (which might have had something to do with whatever had led Matilde to chase him with that meat fork). Peter would go into the tavern and get his pail filled, and then he’d let Matilda carry it home so she could swing it over her head, around and around, without losing a drop.

Sometimes Matilda would walk home from school with her second-grade teacher, Miss Bumstead, who wore a grey squirrel coat that Matilda would rub against her cheek before bringing it to her from the
cloakroom. Miss Bumstead lived with her father, a doctor, just around the corner from the Guibes, but in a different world. Alexander Avenue was where the “lace curtain” Irish lived—doctors, lawyers, and politicians, each family in a five-story brownstone that they owned. Housemaids scrubbed the stoops and sidewalks in front of the buildings every morning, and the brass railings and windows shone.

One afternoon, Miss Bumstead invited Matilda in. The house smelled of clean starched curtains and ginger cookies cooling on top of the coal range. Matilda’s feet sank into deep carpets as she walked through suites of rooms and past shelves filled with books. Miss Bumstead’s room overlooked a small garden in the back, and even the maid, who served them milk and cookies on a tray, had a beautiful little apartment.

Matilda went back to her tenement on Willis Avenue and up the five flights of cabbage-smelling stairways. Now she’d seen how other people lived. Far from being discouraged by her humble background and surroundings, she was inspired: She decided she would go to college, become a teacher like the lovely Miss Bumstead, and make something of herself.

• • •

In my family
, Nana wrote,
schooling was merely something that had to be done until each child was able to go to work
. For Matilda, that was when she turned fourteen.

Grandpa had passed away that year, Grandma was long gone, and all her aunts and uncles had gotten married and moved out. Rather than live with Carrie and Riordan, who’d been forced to wed when Carrie became pregnant again, Matilda moved in with her aunt Madeline and Madeline’s husband Hilding. When the legal requirements for school had been met, Matilda was sent to Bird’s Business School to learn how to be a secretary. College was never a possibility.

One of her cousins had a connection at the McCrory Stores Corporation, and an application was filled out for Matilda, who was not quite sixteen, listing her age as eighteen. In July of 1929 she started her job as a secretary to one of the vice presidents at a salary of nine dollars a week.

In the building near the office Matilda worked in was another company that looked identical to hers—rows of men in offices, and women, their secretaries, making brief appearances to take dictation. She could see in the window a couple of floors up from her own, and the man
at the desk would grin at her and wave.
He’s flirting with me!
she thought. Matilda looked down quickly the first few times, smiling to herself. But the man was handsome, and it was nice to have a distraction from work. So after a while she’d smile and wave back.

One day in October she looked up to see him standing on the ledge outside his office. He waved to her as he always did, and then he jumped, falling several stories to the alley below.

During the Depression, Matilda was the only member of the family who was able to keep a job. Though her wages were considered good for the time, they were stretched to the limit after rent, train fare to and from the city to get to work, and food for the family. More often than not, Matilda had to get by on a corn muffin—half for breakfast and half for lunch, with coffee to keep her going—and a can of soup for dinner. She began to feel faint, her heart skipping beats before her vision went grey around the edges.