Kitchen Yarns Read online

  My mother built lunches the way some people build skyscrapers or monuments. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized they were her Taj Mahal—all of that glorious food jammed into a brown paper bag, made only for me.

  GOGO’S MEATBALL GRINDERS

  In Rhode Island, we call milkshakes cabinets, water fountains bubblers, and subs or hoagies grinders. To make Gogo’s Meatball Grinders, think big and think messy. These are not for lightweights. Of course, you can use fewer meatballs and less sauce, but please don’t tell Gogo.

  INGREDIENTS

  16 ounces or more of your favorite red sauce (page 151), warm

  13 meatballs, or one batch of Gogo’s Meatballs (page 30), warmed in red sauce

  Enough Parmesan cheese for heavy sprinkling

  Enough shredded mozzarella for melting on top (optional)

  3 or 4 hard grinder rolls, big enough to hold 4 meatballs (interpret as you like, using your favorite type)

  Split the tops of the rolls.

  Spread a good amount of sauce on both sides. Don’t be prudent here!

  Although you probably have had meatball grinders in which the meatballs are cut in half, we use them whole. So line them up in the roll. They should be saucy from sitting in the warm sauce, but you also want to add more sauce once they’re in the roll.

  Sprinkle a good amount of Parmesan cheese on top.

  Grab lots of napkins.

  Eat.

  Optional

  Top with shredded mozzarella and stick under the broiler until the mozzarella is melted and the roll is toasted. Keep an eye on it because this happens fast, usually in under a minute. Then go to steps 5 and 6.

  Fancy Food

  When I was a kid, I thought my mother was the fanciest woman around. She wore a wiglet, a small clip-on piece of synthetic auburn hair that gave her the much-desired added pouf that stylish women in 1965 placed on top of their heads. Before every holiday, she redecorated our house, turning it into a theme park of hearts and cupids, leprechauns and shamrocks, Easter bunnies and colorful eggs, red, white, and blue everything, turkeys and ghosts and snowmen. Even our bathroom got a makeover, with the shower curtain and bath mat changing from red to green to yellow to navy blue to orange and brown. My mother wore a red matte lipstick that ringed the cigarette butts she left in the heavy harvest gold ashtray by her favorite chair in the living room. Unlike the heavy, dark, plastic-covered furniture my aunts had in their houses, thanks to my mother we had Danish contemporary: a pink armchair, a low turquoise sofa, and an orange vinyl bucket chair that spun around. Fancy.

  But it wasn’t just what she wore or how she fixed up our house; it was the food she made that convinced me of her sophistication. She imitated the women she saw in glossy magazines to escape her Italian American, blue-collar roots—an impossible feat really, since we lived with her mother and grandmother and other assorted relatives, all of them with one foot back in the old country. My mother bought grapefruit spoons, small teaspoons with serrated edges for removing the wedges of pink grapefruit she served in fancy glass bowls. We were Catholic, which meant no meat on Fridays. Most Fridays, Mama Rose served up polenta with kale or Eggs in Purgatory (sunny-side-up eggs in red sauce) or pasta fagioli. But every now and then, my mother would take over the kitchen. She’d make a simple white sauce, add canned tuna and canned peas and carrots to it, and serve it on toast points—small triangles of white bread that she’d carefully cut and remove the crusts from. I hated that cream of tuna. It smelled like cat food and tasted even worse. But I admired its beauty: the toast triangles and glossy white sauce and bright bits of green and orange.

  The fanciest food my mother made were her salads—ham and chicken. Usually they appeared in finger rolls on large silver trays for bridal showers, card games, or PTA meetings. Sometimes they showed up for lunch on a Saturday afternoon, elegant and exotic, nestled close together on one of those trays. Mom put the meat through an old-fashioned meat grinder, rendering it almost smooth, without any traces of fat or gristle. To each salad she added mayonnaise, only Hellmann’s. Then the chicken salad got celery and onion, both diced so small that they were indiscernible except for the crunch and flavor they provided. To the ham salad she added diced sweet gherkins and nothing more. The result was two distinct flavors, and it was impossible for me to choose a favorite. My mother, presiding over a tray of those sandwiches in her red lipstick and wiglet, seemed fancier to me than her favorite movie star, Sophia Loren.

  When I was in fourth grade, my mother volunteered as a PTA parent for my school. She had always been a relentless champion for my older brother and his activities—a Cub Scout den mother and junior high dance chaperone on Friday nights. But this was her first time volunteering at my school, and as the night for the big fall PTA meeting drew near, my pride and excitement grew. In class we decorated the room with cornucopias we’d traced and cut out, then glued fruit we’d colored onto them so it appeared the fruit was spilling out. That Sunday, Mom took out the meat grinder and produced mounds of ham and chicken for her salads. Instead of the usual finger rolls, she went to a bakery and bought bread that had been dyed neon blue, pink, and green. She rolled the bread out thin and cut it into the shapes of daisies and circles and diamonds, dropped heaping tablespoons of chicken and ham salad onto each one and topped it with a matching shape. The result was a dizzyingly beautiful array of brightly colored tea sandwiches, so stunning that I begged her to leave some behind. Instead, she’d counted how many people were attending the meeting and multiplied that by the amount of sandwiches they would each eat and made the exact right number.

  My father was recruited to carry the trays to the car and from there into the school, where he would wait for the meeting to end and then take the empty trays and my mother back home. Off they went, Mom dressed in camel and fake fur, Dad in his glen-plaid suit and wingtips. I stood at the door, glowing with pride over my beautiful mother and her fancy sandwiches. The PTA meeting would begin at six, but my parents drove away in their green Chevy just before five, so that they would arrive with plenty of time to set up. Despite the time, it was already dark out, and as I watched the taillights disappear around the corner I imagined my teacher’s face when she saw those sandwiches. I was an unpopular kid. My classmates whispered insults to me under their breath or called me names on the playground, leaving me unchosen for games of kickball. I spent hours alone, playing jacks on the asphalt. I imagined that all this would be somehow erased when their parents reported that my mother had created the most sophisticated food they’d ever eaten.

  With the meeting and then the cleanup afterward, my parents weren’t expected home until eight or nine. Thursdays offered some of my favorite TV shows—Shindig and The Munsters and Batman—and I was already sitting in front of the television when the lights flickered and then went out. Everything went out—stove, lights, television. Mama Rose screamed and moaned and wept. “It’s the Russians!” she wailed. “They’re coming for us!” From a distance of over fifty years, this seems both reasonable and probable for 1965. While she lit candles and said prayers in Italian, I hid under the kitchen table—ducking and covering like they taught us to do at school.

  Then: the sound of car doors slamming.

  I peeked out from beneath my hiding spot and saw Mama Rose, eerie in the candlelight, hurrying to the front door. Terrified, I followed, holding tight to her apron. The streetlights were out, too. In fact, our entire neighborhood was absolutely dark, except for the small interior light of my parents’ Chevy, which illuminated them: my mother pale and anxious, my father sliding the full tray of sandwiches from the back seat.

  “The whole town lost electricity,” my father said when he saw us standing outside the door.

  “What about the PTA meeting?” I cried.

  My mother got out of the car, and when she slammed her door shut, only the glowing tip of her cigarette lit the darkness.

  “Canceled,” she said. “And me stuck with all these fucking sandwiches.”


  THE FIRST TIME I made a grown-up lunch, I was twenty-four years old and living alone in a little apartment by the sea. A college friend was passing through town, and I invited her over. As soon as she accepted, I went into a panic. What did someone make a guest for lunch? When I went out for lunch, I tended toward club sandwiches and French dip, neither of which seemed like the thing to serve an old friend. I stared into my refrigerator at the previous night’s leftover chicken, breast meat still clinging to its bones. In that moment, I realized that all those chicken salad and ham salad sandwiches my mother had made weren’t because she was so fancy; for a Depression-era daughter of immigrants, they came from frugality. Nothing gets wasted or thrown away. Add some mayo or celery or sweet gherkins to leftover ham and chicken and you have a whole new dish, unrecognizable from the roast chicken and mashed potato dinner or the ham studded with cloves and pineapple rings.

  I rummaged through my box of recipes clipped from magazines and newspapers and found one from Glamour magazine for curried chicken salad. This was in 1982, long enough ago that I couldn’t find that same recipe when I searched the Internet recently. It’s vanished, along with the shoulder pads and feathered bangs we all wore back then. I remember grapes, walnuts, raisins, and curry, of course. When my friend arrived, I presented her with a scoop of curried chicken salad sitting on top of lettuce (iceberg, no doubt, since that was lettuce to me back then). This friend, also named Ann, had grown up in New York City going to museums and concerts. She was at that time the most sophisticated person of my age that I knew.

  She looked at that lunch, the shredded lettuce and golden chicken salad, and she said, “Hood! This is so fancy! Look at you!”

  Something swelled up inside me: a new, deeper understanding of my mother. I saw her at our kitchen table (topped with a thematic tablecloth: happy snowmen or grinning jack-o’-lanterns) with that old-fashioned meat grinder, making the fanciest food I’d ever been served.

  FANCY-LADY SANDWICHES

  In an essay from Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, Lee Smith writes about her mother’s battered recipe box, which her mother “antiqued” by decoupaging kitchen-themed decals onto it—a skillet, a rolling pin, a milk bottle. In it are recipes for funerals and for southern specialties like pimento cheese; sixteen recipes for oysters; clams “every whichaway”; fancy recipes for Lady Baltimore Cake and Soiree Punch. But the description I like best of all is of her mama’s noon bridge club, which met every Thursday until its members moved to Florida or began to die off. Smith describes her mother’s polka-dot dress, the cut flowers and pink cloths on the table. Lunch for the bridge club was a molded Jell-O salad, Chicken Crunch, and Lime Angel Cloud. (Please please please read this book, and everything else by Lee Smith, if you haven’t already.) My mother did not have a bridge club. She had a Friday night penny poker club, all of the women toting coffee cans overflowing with pennies.

  When it was my mother’s turn to host her poker club, I sat on the stairs and watched the ladies arrive. My mother laid out her finger sandwiches on a silver tray, and they looked so fancy that no one would ever guess they were made from leftovers. There are only two of the original thirteen ladies left, and due to physical limitations and old age, they don’t meet up anymore. But Gogo still talks with bittersweet nostalgia about Auntie Dora’s torpedo fill sandwiches (kind of a Sloppy Joe with more spice), Jackie’s stuffed artichokes, Carmela’s crescent rolls stuffed with water chestnut and beef. Me? I like the fancy-lady sandwiches.

  GOGO’S CHICKEN SALAD

  Gogo’s chicken and ham salads rely on common sense. The amount of meat to mayo and add-ins varies. As Gogo would say: “Go slow and figure it out.”

  INGREDIENTS

  Leftover chicken, white meat only, ground fine (Gogo used an old-fashioned meat grinder that attached to the edge of the kitchen table and was cranked, but you can use a food processor)

  ½ onion (more if you have a lot of leftover chicken), diced fine

  A couple stalks of celery, diced fine

  Salt and pepper

  Enough mayo to moisten and bind

  Finger rolls

  Grind everything separately. First the chicken, then remove it and put it in a bowl; then the onion, and add it to the chicken; then the celery, and add it to the chicken and onion.

  Add salt and pepper to taste.

  Spoon in mayo by the heaping tablespoon, mixing after each addition until you reach the consistency you like.

  Make finger sandwiches.

  Serve on a fancy tray.

  GOGO’S HAM SALAD

  INGREDIENTS

  Leftover ham, finely ground in a food processor

  4 to 6 sweet gherkins (depending on how much ham you have and how big the pickles are)

  Salt and pepper

  Enough mayo to moisten and bind Finger rolls

  Grind the ham and the sweet gherkins separately.

  Combine together in a bowl.

  Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

  Spoon in mayo by the heaping tablespoon, mixing after each addition until you reach the consistency you like.

  Make finger sandwiches.

  Serve on a silver tray.

  GLAMOUROUS CURRIED CHICKEN SALAD

  That curried chicken salad recipe I clipped from a long-ago Glamour magazine and made for lunch for my friend Ann disappeared decades ago. But I still love making and eating curried chicken salad. It is one of my son Sam’s favorite things, especially when I top it with salted cashews.

  Serves 6 very hungry people or 8 who are moderately hungry

  INGREDIENTS

  1½ pounds cooked chicken breasts (I often buy the rotisserie ones from the grocery store)

  ½ cup mayo

  A couple of stalks of celery, diced

  5 teaspoons (or more, to taste) of good curry powder

  A handful of golden raisins

  Optional

  The above makes a delicious curried chicken salad, even more so if you prepare it the day before you eat it, so the flavors mingle together. But below are optional ingredients that you can add if you have them on hand. I am not a big fan of raw onions, so I leave them out. However, I’ve been known to throw in some scallions if I have a few lying around. The chutney adds a nice depth to the salad, but I usually add it only if I plan ahead and remember to buy it.

  1 diced apple

  ¼ cup Major Grey’s chutney, or your favorite type

  ½ diced red onion or 2 to 3 chopped scallions

  ½ cup cashews, salted, chopped or whole or ½ cup dry-roasted peanuts

  Chop the chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces

  Add the rest of the ingredients, including the apple, chutney, onion, or scallions if you are using, and mix up well.

  Serve in pita bread, on a bed of lettuce, or in finger rolls.

  CHICKEN SALAD VERONIQUE

  I fell in love with tarragon in the 1980s when a Silver Palate recipe called for it. Of course, back then I used the dried stuff, but eventually I found fresh tarragon, and it is truly my favorite herb. For something with such a fancy French name, Chicken Salad Veronique is actually very simple to make: it’s a basic chicken salad with grapes and tarragon. Once I had it with pecans in it, and another time with slivered almonds. You are, of course, free to add either, but I’m a purist. As Pierre Franey wrote about the Burgundy dish Chicken Veronique in the New York Times in 1978, “Among the foods best suited to a hasty meal are those that are skinless and boneless and tender besides.” Franey’s classic recipe uses a cream sauce with shallots, white wine, and grapes; “Veronique” denotes a chicken (or fish) dish made with grapes.

  Serves 4 for lunch or a midnight snack

  INGREDIENTS

  1½ cups cooked and chopped boneless, skinless chicken breasts

  ½ cup mayo

  1½ tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon

  1 or 2 stalks celery, diced

  1 cup white or red seedless grapes, halved

  ½ cup slivered almonds or chopped pecan
s if you’re not a purist like me

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Mix all the ingredients together.

  Serve on a bed of lettuce, on your favorite bread for a sandwich, or in finger rolls.

  Confessions of a Marsha Jordan Girl

  When blueberries are in season and I am feeling nostalgic for my younger days, I dig out a purple-stained recipe from my recipe box and begin to bake blueberry muffins. Although the ingredients—butter, flour, sugar, vanilla, eggs, baking powder, milk, and salt—do not seem magical, combined in a certain way with enough blueberries to turn the batter a pale purple and topped with a heavy sprinkling of sugar, these muffins transport me back in time.

  As they bake, if I close my eyes, I can go back to when I was Ann-Marie, not Ann. I can picture a happy half dozen muffins snuggled into a white bakery box, the lid open and me trying to choose the blueberriest one of them all. It is a long-ago Sunday afternoon and our house is filled with relatives, some who show up every Sunday and some who drift in and out over the years. My Italian grandmother, Mama Rose, is hoisting a pan of lasagna from the oven, trimming fennel to serve with a dish of oil for dipping, stirring a pot of red sauce—gravy, we called it—and making coffee seemingly all at the same time, moving around our tiny kitchen—the pantry—as if she’s in a well-choreographed ballet. That coffee was made right on the stove, with eggshells added to the grounds to cut the bitterness. In the kitchen—the room other people would have called the dining room—the relatives ate Auntie Etta’s small, round cookies fried and covered in honey, then topped with colored sprinkles; delicate butter cookies shaped like wreaths and seashells; and her daffodil cake, an angel food cake with egg yolks stirred in at the right time to create the shape of daffodils in bloom.