Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (9 page)

8 or so large white potatoes

Butter

Buttermilk, cream, or half-and-half

Salt

Cut potatoes into chunks. Boil until tender. Drain. Add butter and cream and mash. Add salt to taste. Mash again. Add more butter. Mash again. If potatoes look grainy, add more cream and more butter. Keep mashing
.

• • •

“Your Grandpa’s recipe for mashed potatoes was simple,” Mom says. “The biggest potatoes he could find and a ton of butter. And then he basically beat them to death.”

12 medium potatoes

Butter

Milk or sour cream

Salt

Cut potatoes into small pieces and boil in water that has a pinch or two of salt in it. Drain in colander and transfer potatoes back to pot. Add some butter and begin to mash potatoes vigorously. Add a slosh of milk or a few tablespoons of sour cream and keep mashing. When your arm gets tired, add more butter and a touch more milk or sour cream, and salt to taste. Switch arms and go back to mashing until potatoes are smooth
.

• • •

“Oh, I don’t know exactly how much butter goes in,” Mom says. “A lot. When I think about it, it’s a wonder anyone survived our family dinners.”

Low-fat plain yogurt

Olive oil or unsalted butter

Sea salt

Wash potatoes carefully and peel, fretting all the while about not getting organic ones because heaven only knows what these have been sprayed with. Cut into chunks; wonder if it matters that some are small and some are large. Decide that it probably doesn’t and boil chunks in lightly salted water until tender. How long is that? Poke a misshapen chunk with a fork. Is that done? Give chunk the bite test. Wish you had remembered to blow on potato chunk before biting. Ignore pain from burn on roof of mouth, drain potatoes, and transfer back to pot
.

Have brief internal debate about olive oil being healthier than butter, but worry: Will these mashed potatoes taste
the same as Grandpa’s with that substitution? Try to remember ever seeing olive oil in Grandpa’s kitchen … Nope, just butter and Crisco. Cautiously add a small pat of butter. Begin mashing potatoes—be surprised at how much arm has to go into this. Remember the first time Grandpa let you mash the potatoes, how grown up you felt, how you had to use both hands to push the masher through, how he laughed when you had to jump up and down to get any kind of mashing power through those skinny six-year-old arms
.

Add about a quarter cup of low-fat yogurt (surely it’s okay to put one healthy ingredient in here) and keep mashing
.

Ponder grainy texture of potatoes and thin flavor. Shrug and add a few good-sized tablespoons of butter and some salt. Do not expect to live forever, but try to enjoy life while living it. Note that these are definitely getting near how you remember mashed potatoes should taste. Add more butter and a slosh of milk. Feel that Grandpa, who lived simply and very well until he was seventy-seven, would approve
.

• • •

I never thought my first serious discussion about getting married would feel like a high-stakes poker
game, but that was preferable to the Mexican standoff it could have been. It was December of 2005, and Nathan and I were on our first vacation together in Tulum, Mexico, a few hundred miles south of the border, eating chicken enchiladas at a little beachside cantina. “So,” he said with a charming smile, “when are we moving in together?”

“When I get an engagement ring,” I said.

He looked at my hand. “So it’s going to be like that,” he answered.

“Yep.”

“Fine,” he countered. “I’ll see your engagement ring for one year of living together before we get married.”

I raised my eyebrows and smiled in admiration. “Deal,” I said, and we shook on it.

• • •

For twenty-one years I’d lived mostly alone, except for brief stints of taking on roommates: a soulful musician from Miami, a lovely friend who played Mary to my Rhoda, and Larry, who would eventually leave me for Jeff. (They are still happily married, and I adore them.) In that time, I’d amassed a lot of things that defined me
and my living space—furniture, art, knickknacks, whatnots.

Now I was in the process of giving most of it away so I didn’t overtake Nathan’s apartment. I cheerfully parted with the square red dishes and noodle bowls I’d bought in Chinatown when I lived in San Francisco during the dot-com boom. I was happy to donate shelves full of books and bags of clothes to the local church thrift shop. The dining table and chairs went to the man who was kind enough to move my things from my old apartment to my new place, with my new fiancé, in New Jersey. In fact, I was so fizzy with recently engaged glee that I probably could have given away all my possessions, except for the heart-shaped ring on my finger.

And my potato masher.

Almost everything Nathan had in his kitchen—in his whole apartment, for that matter—was newer and better than what I had. His dishes were a complete set of understated modern china for four. His TV was a flat-screen. His potato masher had a matching red plastic handle and head, and it was only about a year old. Brand-new, a fresh instrument for fresh starts.

I looked at my potato masher, which had been
Grandpa’s. It was older than I was and burnished with use. When I held it, memories seemed to seep from its dark wooden handle right into my skin.

The family gatherings for Easter, Christmas, or just a Sunday when we hadn’t seen each other in a while. Leg of lamb, or pot roast, or meatloaf—whatever the main dish, there were always mashed potatoes to go with it. (There is no memory of vegetables.) Here is my mother checking the lamb, smiling as she tastes a carved-off bite, while Grandpa’s strong arms work the potatoes. The kitchen is tiny, not much counter space, so the potato pot is in the sink.

Another time, Aunt Midge brings Grandpa a glass of scotch, only she doesn’t know it should be two fingers in a tumbler, and she’s brought him a whole wineglass full of it. The adults erupt in laughter as Midge slowly, carefully brings the filled-to-the-rim glass to her father. “Well,
this
is going to be a happy birthday!” jokes my uncle Chick. I don’t understand why the grown-ups are nearly crying with laughter now, but my cousins Tommy and Sue and I giggle along anyway.

Uncle Eddie laughs so hard he chokes on the sweet smoke from his apple pipe tobacco. This was before he
got Alzheimer’s and forgot everyone but Aunt Midge, forgot even that he smoked, before his long Irish clay pipe would gather dust in their basement. “You okay there, Pop?” asks my cousin Richard, who reminds me of Robin Hood in the old movie I watch on my grandparents’ black-and-white TV.

And there is Aunt Marie in the kitchen, a long cigarette at her lips, listening to Nana tell a story about the farm—the one about the cow who never missed an opportunity to relieve herself on the threshold of the barn door. Nana mimics the giant step Grandpa had to take over the doorway, and Marie laughs and wipes mascara-stained tears from her cheeks. A few years later, Marie would get a blinding headache one night, and then she would be gone.
Just like that
, Grandpa would say sadly, with a snap of his fingers. I learned early on to appreciate people while they were in front of me. As time went by, we mashed fewer pounds of potatoes.

And a couple of years after Nana died, there is someone new mashing potatoes in the kitchen: Doris, my grandfather’s new girlfriend. She has a loud
ho-ho-ho!
laugh and blond hair she wears pinned up like Betty Grable. She tries to teach me
how to make biscuits one day. “It’s easy,” she says, trying to coax me over as she breaks eggs into the flour. But I won’t go to her; I pout and frown, close but distant. She is not my nana, never will be. Mom is almost as bad as I am, polite but not warm. In the wake of Nana’s death, we ache so much that we inflict pain.

“She’s gotten under my skin,” Grandpa says apologetically, as though it was his duty to us to remain alone. He coughs loudly and longer than usual. His emphysema, a souvenir from being gassed in the First World War, has gotten worse, and his plan is to move back to Florida with Doris. Mom and I disapprove, and we will feel ashamed about this when Grandpa dies a little while before he and Doris are set to begin their new life together.

• • •

“I have a potato masher,” Nathan says as he helps me unpack my boxes.

“I know,” I tell him.

“Mine is newer,” he says. “Do we really need two potato mashers?”

I look at the utensil in my hand, and the sparkle from my engagement ring flashes brightly next to the dull, scratched silver of the masher’s handle.

“I’ll see your new potato masher,” I say, “and I’ll raise you an old one.”

1 stick and ½ of butter

1½ cups of flour

1 egg

1 teaspoon of vanilla

1 cup of light brown sugar

¾ teaspoon of baking soda

A pinch of salt

Sift the baking soda with the flour and the salt. Get egg and sugar and beat until light. Have butter at room temperature and add to the egg, sugar, and vanilla. Add the flour. You may also add ½ cup of coarse walnuts
.
Divide into two parts and roll in wax paper. Keep in freezer overnight
.

Slice and bake 10 to 12 minutes. 350 degrees. Makes about 4 dozen
.

• • •

During our wedding toasts, Nathan’s friend Jason took the microphone in one hand and balanced his two-year-old son in the other arm. “Nathan, this advice was shared with me on my wedding day, and now I’ll pass it along to you: Happy wife, happy life.” Then we cut the wedding cake, and Nathan smushed the piece he was holding all over my face. I licked off the frosting and we went back for seconds.

When the mâitre d’ presented me with the top of the wedding cake, Nathan wrinkled his nose. “I’m not sure I’m going to want to celebrate our first year as husband and wife with old, thawed-out cake,” he said, so we ate it later that night. The restaurant had given us the leftovers, too, so we ate wedding cake again the next night.

When people said this was the best cake they’d ever had, I knew they weren’t just being nice—those layers of airy dark chocolate and sweet vanilla resting on a
hazelnut filling and finished with pearly white fondant were incredible. And, like most brides-to-be, I’d been dieting like a crazy person for weeks. After two months of naked salad, steamed vegetables, and plain fish, I think even a cake made out of nuclear orange Circus Peanuts would’ve tasted divine.

• • •

I was never a picky eater as a kid. Mom remembers that even as a toddler I had a curious palate. “You loved martini olives,” she says.

“What were you doing feeding martini olives to a two-year-old?” I ask.

She shrugs. “It was the sixties …”

When I was five and discovered that our local Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs stand sold frog’s legs—and that they were
really
the legs of frogs—I had to try them. (Yes, they did taste like chicken, probably because they were cooked in the same oil as the chicken, and the French fries, and every other fried item they served.)

Surrounded by good food made by Mom, Grandpa, and Nana, I rarely said no to anything, but I didn’t gorge either. I was in tune with my body’s rhythms in a way that I envy and miss today: I ate when I was hungry,
slowly, tasting the food, humming a little song I’d made up, and pretending I was a giant eating broccoli trees.

My family had no rules about eating. I was never forced to clean my plate, and when I heard the ice cream truck’s tinny chimes, Mom would give me a quarter for a strawberry shortcake pop. One of the neighbor mothers would ask, “Isn’t that going to spoil her supper?” and Mom would say, “So she’ll eat a little later. It’s no big deal.”