Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (4 page)

At times she looked longingly at the stove, not as much for want of food but to rest her head in the oven and turn on the gas.

• • •

OCTOBER 2008

WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK

“But she got through it,” Mom says as she checks the pork chops, sees that they’re done, and starts dishing them out of the roasting pan. “I don’t know how, because the Depression almost did her in. She supported Aunt Madeline, Uncle Hil, and their baby, Evelyn, while she was just a kid and suffering from malnutrition. But she got through it. Somehow, she had the backbone to keep going and get through.”

Mom puts out our plates, just two tonight since my stepdad is away on business and we’re having a girls’ night in. At another time I might have found this story about my grandmother depressing. It makes me ache for her; how frightened she must have been, given the amount of pressure she was under. But Nana did indeed get through a time of great despair and difficulty. Day after day, she did what she had to do, without complaint. (That’s a fact: Whenever people asked her how she was, Nana would say, “Fabulous! Never better,” no matter what was really going on in her life—and sometimes, there was a lot going on. Her reasoning was that complaining just kept a person miserable
and did nothing to improve the situation they were upset about.)

What Mom said is true: Nana had backbone. My mother and I would not be here tonight, cooking a recipe handed down from my grandmother’s grandmother, if not for that. This isn’t a sad story, I realize—it’s a strong story. I don’t know if it’s in me, this backbone, but a story like this could help me to build one.

The pork chops are salty and bronze, crackling on the outside and filled with juicy life on the inside, and the applesauce sweetens the tart bite of the sauerkraut. It’s sturdy food that gets you through.

Suzan’s Attempted Split Pea Soup

One 16-oz. bag of dried split peas

3 vegetable stock cubes

1 teaspoon of oregano

1 bay leaf

1 medium-sized onion, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

1 sweet potato, chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

Put split peas in a slow cooker with six cups of water and vegetable stock cubes. Turn cooker on low and go write an essay you hope will be accepted at one of the magazines
you’re trying to work for. Stir occasionally to mix stock cubes when you get stuck on a sentence
.

Three hours later, come back to the soup and add oregano, bay leaf, chopped onion, and chopped carrot. Wonder why the soup looks so thin and watery and add chopped sweet potato
.

“Sweet potato?” Mom asks when she calls to see how I’m doing. “That’s interesting.” She’s not saying it sarcastically, just wondering.

Go back to your article for an hour. Feel good about having written most of it. Remind yourself that work has been slow and money tight before, and you’ve always done fine. Stir soup occasionally, marveling at how it really is getting thicker—now it looks like the kind of soup that could get you through a long, lean winter. Serve with homemade corn bread
.

Slit two hot dogs down the middle and fry in a dry pan over medium heat until both sides are browned as you like them. Cut into small pieces and add to the split pea soup you made last week that you were so proud of
.

“It cost under five dollars to make three quarts of soup!” I’d told Nathan excitedly.

But after days of eating this pea porridge, even with the corn bread I baked to go with it, I wonder whether a person can go insane due to repeated ingestion of the same meal. Besides, I opened the hot dog package four days ago and I’m going to lose the remaining three, and wasting food these days is nearly as sinful as it was in Nana and Grandpa’s time. Another magazine folded last week, more and more people are getting laid off from my former company, even freelancers, and I have absolutely no idea—none!—where the next job is coming from. So I hope that the hot dog pieces are close enough to ham and make the pea soup taste even a little bit different.

Heat soup for a few minutes on a low flame and serve with the last chunk of homemade corn bread. (Note: Toasting corn bread can mask staleness.) Marvel at how strangely, surprisingly comforting the hot dog pieces are in the soup, like something a little kid would get for lunch. Feel that somehow, all will be okay
.

Check e-mail. Feel triumphant that you’ve gotten a response from your editor saying yes, she would like to see that essay, thank you very much
.

• • •

NOVEMBER 2008

HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

“I sold a story today!” I tell Nathan when he comes home from work. In a celebratory mood, I’m making a big dinner: roasted chicken with leeks, sweet potatoes, and apples over wide egg noodles.

“That’s great!” he says. “When will you get paid?”

“In a couple of months,” I say. “It won’t be much, but it’s better than nothing.” The magazine, which I’ve been working with for ten years, told me that due to cutbacks, they could afford to pay me only half the usual rate and would understand if I had to turn them down. I accepted the fee after doing some creative accounting: multiplied by scarcity of work and added to the lack of steady income, it suddenly sounded like a lot of money.

• • •

Nana was in love with words. In school she read the dictionary, a page a day, and she bought new, updated dictionaries the way some people buy novels. In the box with the recipe file I find envelopes and folders
full of papers—some related to her work as a secretary for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the Coliseum, a convention center in New York. But most of it is her personal writing. She didn’t keep a diary but wrote about her life in a series of essays and articles she hoped to send to magazines, and her Everywoman subject matter was ahead of its time. In the 1950s she wrote about returning to work after being a stay-at-home mom; finding a lump in her breast and how to prepare for the four-day hospital stay that the biopsy required back then; and dealing with a teenager who could be a handful. There’s also a guide to secretarial survival entitled “You Have to Be a Bitch to Get Ahead!” That one must have been destined for
Cosmopolitan
.

She wrote a volume of poetry called
Lyrics for Losers
and a children’s story, which I think is the only piece she actually submitted for publication. It received a terse reply: “We are unable to find a place for it in our publishing program.” She didn’t let that discourage her. She kept writing, chronicling the events of her life in would-be book chapters and entertaining herself and my mother, who was a child at the time, with her
Nutty Nursery Rhymes
:

I know now, from what Mom told me, how much Nana had wanted to stay in school and go on to college. But I’d never known until finding all these articles, poems, and chapters for books that would never be published how much Nana loved to write. She would probably have eaten pea soup every day for the rest of her life if she could have been a writer, even a laid-off one. I’ve always loved what I do, but now I approach even a small assignment with a large amount of gratitude.

• • •

As far as food is concerned, I write about it a lot better than I can cook it. In fact, my editors at the magazine said that one of my best articles was the one about ruining Nathan’s birthday dinner. I was glad something good came out of those grey, overcooked tuna steaks and that firm, underdone cauliflower.

When I lived alone, it never mattered much that I couldn’t cook. I had dinners out with friends, or I ate single-girl food—steamed vegetables and brown rice from the Chinese restaurant around the corner. (I went there so frequently that one night the manager said, “Where were you yesterday? We got worried.”) Now that I’m married and the one who does the cooking—especially since I’m home all the time—I want to cook well. Or, given my lack of natural talent, better.

I like to say that I never really learned how to cook because I was like Nana; we both started working from a young age and, as a result, knew our way around an office much better than a kitchen. This is a flimsy excuse, though, because Mom became a secretary at the same age that I did, and she’s always been a natural cook. Give her spices she’s never worked with before, and the scallops will sing.

“You have your Nana’s hands,” Mom has told me for as long as I can remember. Even though Nana died a long time ago, it’s odd that I don’t remember her hands because they were always in my small sphere—holding me, pouring out a bowl of Frosted Flakes into my own special bowl, clutching one of my miniature versions of
hers while we watched
Chiller Theater
on Saturday nights.

Then my mother will hold one of her hands next to mine and say, “See, I have Grandpa’s hands—big, strong, man hands.” I remember his more vividly, maybe since Grandpa outlived Nana by seven years. I remember them gutting the bluefish he’d just caught for our dinner; I remember how precisely those huge hands poured his nightly shot of whiskey; I remember him clapping one of them, palms smooth from years of farm and construction work, over my burning ear after I pulled a birthday cake too close and my hair caught fire.

And Mom will sigh, “You and Nana have the same long, slim fingers, the same beautiful nails—hands that should play a piano.” Neither of us ever did; instead our fingers played typewriter keys. She’d had no choice in the matter, but when I graduated from high school with purple hair, average grades, and zero plans, I simply lacked direction. “I don’t know what I want to do,” I mumbled.

“Then you’re going to secretarial school,” Mom said.

“What? Why?”

“So you can learn what you
don’t
want to do.”

I had the benefit of being trained on an electric typewriter. Nana had to learn on a manual machine, yet she was always the fastest and most accurate typist in any of the offices she worked in (those long piano fingers).

Which is likely why, as Mom and I read Nana’s recipes—most of them typed single-spaced on her manual typewriter in the days before Wite-Out and correction tape—we notice that there is maybe one mistake on a page here or there. Among the typed pages, yellowing at the edges but otherwise in perfect condition, are a few worn-looking handwritten recipes.

“How come she typed most of these?” I ask.

Mom takes one of the pages and brings it close, lowering her glasses to get a better look. Then she smiles and nods as the memories come back. “These,” she says, “are the ones from the Ladies of The Grange.”