Eating Read Free Page B

pantry just off the kitchen which my grandmother called her “shed,” its walls lined with her preserves in gleaming jars: crab apples, peaches, cucumbers, pie fillings, hot peppers, eggplant, green tomatoes. Since I don’t recall ever being served any of these preserves, I assume the handsome jars were meant for display. My grandmother had an eye for décor. The floor was covered with old patchwork quilts where Pete slept in the summer, and where, under a single dim bulb hanging from a wire, I read the novels of R. L. Stevenson and E. Nesbit, and, with difficulty,
The Pickwick Papers
and
A Tale of Two Cities
in an edition given to subscribers to the local newspaper. I still associate these novels of Dickens with my grandmother’s shed and Pete the bulldog growling softly in his dreams beside me.
    My grandmother was born to a prosperous family of Odessa grain merchants who later fell on hard times. She was not meant to be a cook, or a gardener, either. Instead of arranging her plants in rows, she grew them wherever it suited her and them: rhubarb beside the barn, dill by the front door, cabbages beside the hydrangea, rutabaga in the orchard. Her family in the Crimea had been able to keep servants, educate their children, and move in style, first to Argentina and then to the United States, where her father, a grim, bearded presence in an oval frame in the front parlor, speculated in ostrich feathers and lost everything in the Panic of ’07. His wife hung beside him in the parlor, scowling, almond-eyed, and padded like an old samurai.
    My grandmother was a brave and cheerful soul and did her best to maintain a certain tone, particularly at mealtime. But some of her special dishes I recall to this day with dismay, especially her chicken pot pie made from a worn-out laying hen. The crust, shiny on top, was gummy underneath, the broth was thin, and the chicken itself overcooked, dry, stringy, and tasteless. Yet our family romance declared her chicken pie a favorite, and my cousins and I dutifully cheered when my dear, beaming grandmother brought the pie in from the kitchen. She had an infectious gift for conviviality. So when the family gathered around her big, round golden-oak dining-room table there was joy despite the pie. She wanted us to be happy, and we were eager to accommodate her belief that the pie made us so.
    Over the years, with the help of
Fannie Farmer
and
The Settlement Cook Book,
her repertory improved. I remember in summertime bowls of coleslaw, beet soup, platters of fried or roasted chicken, peach, apple, and blueberry pies; in winter, double brisket and braised parsnips, breast of veal stuffed with Swiss chard, lamb shank and shoulder braised slowly for hours, caramelized, falling off the bone, and ginger cookies. My grandparents were ethnically Jewish but unobservant freethinkers who spoke a Yankee-inflected Yiddish with a few French Canadian exclamations among themselves, and a Yiddish-inflected Yankee to us. “I reckon,” my grandfather, who wore fireman’s suspenders and canvas trousers, would say when he meant “yes.” On Jewish holidays, my grandmother cooked for the synagogue, having convinced her neighbors, as she had convinced herself, that she was a superior cook. On those occasions, her chickens had to be killed and dressed according to Jewish ritual. It was my job to stuff three or four of her plump fowl into burlap bags and carry them live down Prospect Hill to the ritual butcher, who, in dim light under a low ceiling in a windowless cellar, slit their throats, left them to bleed into a funnel, and handed them over to be plucked by a hunched figure all but invisible in a dark corner, as in a Rembrandt etching. Some years later, I helped my older cousin Leon, who was enrolled in Columbia College, where I would later study, carry a set of Macaulay’s
History of England,
which he had found in a secondhand bookshop, up the hill.The books were heavier than the chickens. Climbing up Prospect