Kitchen Yarns Read online

  The muffins came from the Jordan Marsh Bakery, all the way in Boston. I had never been to Boston, never been to Jordan Marsh. It loomed large and sparkling in my imagination. I imagined it looked like a palace, its floors filled with dazzling mirrors and fancy women spritzing perfume at customers as they passed. We had department stores in Rhode Island, sure. But none that produced muffins the size of tennis balls.

  The only competition for Jordan Marsh was its rival store, Filene’s. My birthday, December 9, came the day before my godmother’s birthday. Auntie Ellen was a romantic heroine. Tall and blond, with her makeup always perfect and her hair always flipped just so, she had no children of her own, and this gave her an air of tragedy but also added to her mystery. Auntie Ellen never had to run off to pick up anyone, never smelled of applesauce or baby like the other aunts, who were all mothers. Unlike them, she had the time to go all the way to Boston to shop at Filene’s. She bought my birthday presents there, delivering them in their store wrapping paper and tied with a perfect red bow. One year, I opened the box to find a brown suede bracelet with a gold rectangle in the center. In that rectangle, in the fanciest script I had ever seen, my own name: Ann-Marie.

  WILLIAM FILENE, a German immigrant, founded Filene’s, which was originally called Filene’s Sons and Company and encompassed a group of many small shops. In 1881 Filene combined them to create his department store on Washington Street, where, twenty years earlier, Eben Dyer Jordan and Benjamin L. Marsh had opened Jordan Marsh and Company, the first “departmentalized” store in the country.

  Filene’s and Jordan Marsh began many of the services contemporary shoppers take for granted. Both stores were elegantly designed, with products from around the world sold in different departments. Edward Filene, William’s son, opened the bargain annex that came to be known as the famous Filene’s Basement. He also developed an automatic markdown schedule to discount merchandise that is still used today. Filene’s slogan was “Money back if not satisfied.” Next door, Jordan Marsh pioneered its own services for shoppers, including charge accounts and the policy that the customer is always right. It was also one of the first stores to feature electric lights, glass showcases, telephones, and elevators. And it had art galleries, a bakery that produced those fancy blueberry muffins, and fashion shows, a specialty that eventually reached across almost a century to me in Warwick, Rhode Island.

  THE WARWICK MALL opened about two miles from my house in 1970, when I was thirteen years old. At one end: Filene’s. At the other: Jordan Marsh. The arrival of these two department stores heralded an opportunity to buy the clothes and makeup I drooled over every month in Seventeen magazine. It meant that even for a girl like me, someone who sat and stared out the window dreaming of a vague but glamourous future, sophistication was within my grasp. The stores were exactly as I’d hoped. They dazzled and enchanted me with their displays of goods. Cosmetic counters filled the entire first floor, and the air smelled of Chanel and Shalimar. When I walked into either department store, I became someone new. They held the future, I thought. My future.

  One afternoon as I stepped into Jordan Marsh from the mall entrance, a woman called to me. She had the best posture I’d ever seen, and she sat at a makeshift desk. Her smile stretched brightly across her face.

  “Have you ever considered modeling?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said without hesitating. I had considered every occupation I thought would throw me headfirst into a glamourous life: model, cruise ship hostess, airline stewardess.

  “We’re putting together a fashion board of eight girls,” she explained. “Marsha Jordan girls,” she added.

  Before she could continue, I was filling out the application.

  “Do you know what you’re going to wear on the first day of school?” she asked me.

  Know? I had made a chart of my outfits all the way through October.

  “Hot-pink hot pants with a matching maxi vest and a pink flowered shirt,” I said.

  “Hot pants with a maxi vest?” she repeated, impressed. She made a note and told me that sixteen girls would be called for final interviews.

  By the time I got home that afternoon, Jordan Marsh had called. I was one of the sixteen finalists. In an afternoon, I had gone from a regular girl with oversized dreams to an almost Marsha Jordan girl. A week later, I was in the upper-floor conference room of the store, eating brownie sundaes with executives and answering questions about everything from what makeup I liked—Bonne Belle!—to my favorite novel—Marjorie Morningstar! Every Jordan Marsh store in New England had Marsha Jordan girls, high school girls who were models in fashion shows in the stores and at mother-daughter teas, who did tests and surveys about fashion in the malls and in their schools, whose pictures hung on spinning cubes in the junior clothing department. By the time I left that interview, I knew I had to be a Marsha Jordan girl. I had to.

  I was told they’d call by five-thirty. But five-thirty came and went and no one called. At six, I was hysterical, begging Mama Rose to pray to Saint Anthony, her patron saint. Puzzled by what exactly to pray for, she nonetheless set to work in front of his statue in our living room. My mother ordered me outside; I was making her nervous. When the phone rang at six-fifteen, I was too nervous to answer. But my father did. I heard his slow greeting and then: “Ann,” he said, “it’s someone from Jordan Marsh calling for you.” I grabbed that phone from his hand and said hello to my future.

  THE SEVEN OTHER Marsha Jordan girls and I were given uniforms, gray-and-white striped pants and jacket, a cranberry blouse with white cuffs and collar. We traveled on our own by bus to that flagship store on Washington Street for fittings and fashion shows. We ate chicken divan crepes at the Magic Pan and salads with sticky buns at the English Tea Room on Newbury Street. We hailed cabs and walked across the Boston Common, a gaggle of long-haired, long-legged sixteen-year-olds. At home, we stood on pedestals, mannequin modeling. We dated college boys who worked at the store for their summer jobs, getting first kisses in their Fiats and Mustangs in the parking lot. On one night in December, the store closed for Men’s Night, and only men were allowed to come in; they shopped for their wives and girlfriends while we walked around the store in a revolving array of clothes. Bonne Bell sent us makeup to try, and cartons of Ten-O-Six lotion to tackle our pimples.

  I wanted my days as a Marsha Jordan girl, with those summers of long kisses with boys and hours of fittings and runway shows, to go on and on. But like all things, those days eventually did end, and soon I was off to college, where I traded in that gray-and-white pin-striped uniform for one of khaki pants and an Izod shirt. I still went to Filene’s and Jordan Marsh when I wanted to buy something special—Christmas gifts for my mom, beautiful housewares as friends got married, splurges for myself. And then I traded in my preppy uniform for the Ralph Lauren–designed TWA flight attendant uniform. On layovers I rode the escalators in department stores in Paris and London, San Francisco and Manhattan. Harrods was bigger, Bendel’s more chic, Nordstrom grander. But none of them compared to my first loves, those early visions of glamour and sophistication that anchored the Warwick Mall back home.

  Filene’s and Jordan Marsh are gone now. At the mall, Macy’s and Target have taken their places. Like my childhood dreams, they have faded in my memory. But when I bake those muffins from a recipe straight from the Jordan Marsh Bakery, when I pull them from the over warm and sparkling with sugar, I can almost go back there. I close my eyes and take a bite, and a rush of images passes through me. My mother in Filene’s, testing a new shade of red lipstick. My friends and me buying 45s of Three Dog Night and Simon and Garfunkel in the Jordan Marsh record department. I am giggling with my friend Beth. I am opening a slender box and finding a brown suede bracelet with my name engraved on a gold plate: Ann-Marie. The muffins are sweet. Their taste lingers for a long moment before it is gone.

  JORDAN MARSH BLUEBERRY MUFFINS

  If you were lucky enough to visit a Jordan Marsh Bakery, you know that these muffins w
ere huge and sweet—the tops were covered in sugar. You can find recipes for them in the New York Times and other venerable newspapers and food magazines. But the one I use came straight from a Jordan Marsh baker, John Pupek, in an interview he gave to Boston’s WCVB anchor Maria Stephanos. When she asked Pupek if he liked making the legendary muffins, he replied, “It was my life.” Here is his recipe:

  Makes 12 muffins

  INGREDIENTS

  ½ cup butter

  1 cup sugar, plus 2 teaspoons for the muffins’ tops

  2 eggs

  2 cups flour (unsifted, an equal blend of bread and pastry)

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  ½ cup milk

  2½ cups blueberries

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

  On low speed, cream the butter with the sugar until it’s fluffy.

  Add the eggs one at a time and mix until blended.

  Sift the dry ingredients; add to the eggs-and-butter mixture, alternating with the milk.

  Mash ½ cup of the berries and stir into the mixture by hand.

  Add the rest of the berries whole and stir by hand.

  Grease a muffin tin well with butter; grease the top surface of the pans as well. (No offense to Mr. Pupek, but I use muffin liners instead, preferably with funny designs on them.)

  Pile the mixture high in each muffin cup, and sprinkle the sugar over their tops.

  Bake for 30 minutes.

  My Father’s Pantry

  My father fed me. Shake ’n Bake pork chops, Rice-A-Roni. Always together and always gummy, with a side of canned peas swimming in margarine. Meatloaf mixed with dried onion soup served with so much ketchup I don’t remember how it tasted. He wrapped chicken, canned potatoes, cream of mushroom soup, and a hefty dose of poultry seasoning in tinfoil, cooked it on the grill, and called it Chicken Bountiful. I stayed thirsty for a week after eating it. When he made me a grilled cheese sandwich, he pressed it so flat I could have used it as a Frisbee. He burned it on one side; the other side was hardly cooked at all. He served that grilled cheese with Campbell’s tomato soup made with milk instead of water and spiked with lots of celery salt. He put sugar in scrambled eggs, salt on watermelon, and orange American cheese on apple pie. I did the same. Not because it tasted good, but because I liked the oddity of it. “Pass the salt,” I’d say when I grabbed a slice of watermelon. My father would nod. “That’s right. Watermelon has no flavor without salt.” When he made mac and cheese, he used that same orange American cheese, a basic white sauce, elbow macaroni, his beloved celery salt, and dried mustard. He called it Baked Macaroni. It was his specialty. Celery salt was his favorite spice, his secret ingredient.

  All to say, my father was not a good cook.

  But he thought he was. He would say, “You like that fancy coffee, huh? Me, I like Colombian.” Then he would show me a brand-new can of Maxwell House. This was not intended as a joke.

  He believed that eating chestnuts and mangoes could be fatal.

  The fuzz on a peach could send him running in circles, screaming.

  After he baked a ham with ginger ale, canned pineapple, and maraschino cherries, he put the ham bone in a big pot of water with dried navy beans and simmered it all day. This dish actually tasted good. I used to sop the broth up with Italian bread while my father hovered around me, beaming.

  My father’s packaged cakes fell, his piecrusts burned, his roasts were too dry, his pancakes too wet.

  But he fed me and fed me and fed me. And I opened my mouth and ate.

  IMAGINE A six-foot-three midwesterner dressed in a U.S. Navy uniform landing in an Italian American family in a mill town in the middle of Rhode Island. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, with the long, lazy vowels of southern Indiana, my father had been raised on lard: the chicken was fried in it, the piecrust was made from it, the frosting was whipped with it.

  My mother did not know how to cook then. She didn’t need to. Her mother did it for the entire family. Not just our family of four, but any of her ten children and their families who happened by looking for meatballs or pigs in a blanket or a plate of lasagna. When we finally moved away from Mama Rose and Rhode Island, my mother tried her hand at domesticity. This was 1960. She wanted to shed her Italian heritage and reinvent herself as an American Wife and Mother. That meant hamburgers and hot dogs, lemon meringue pie, Toll House cookies.

  She smoked her cigarettes out of a black cigarette holder, vacuumed in a dress with a full skirt and heels, lined up Drambuie and Dubonnet along a shelf. When my father came home from his job at the Pentagon, she mixed him a martini while he watched The Huntley-Brinkley Report from our contemporary Danish turquoise sofa.

  This arrangement lasted for three years. Then my father got stationed in Cuba, and my mother packed us up and moved us back to Mama Rose’s house, where she took off her apron and went to work in one of the local mills. Mama Rose fed us for the next dozen years, until I was nineteen—right up until the day she made thirty-six meatballs and a gallon of red sauce, sat down in a chair, and died.

  MY FATHER BEGAN to cook for me when he returned from Cuba, and my mother was happily working. Every Wednesday night, my older brother, Skip, went to his junior high social. He dabbed on my father’s Old Spice and slicked his hair back with Vitalis, put on a tie, and got in our family’s green Chevrolet Caprice. My mother went along to chaperone.

  As soon as they disappeared from our street, my father and I took out my Easy-Bake oven. Into miniature cupcake tins and cake pans we poured mixes that only required adding water. I would peer into the oven as the light bulb inside it glowed. Finally, a ding announced that our cake or brownies were done, my father took the pan out, poured us each a glass of milk, and the two of us sat together and ate. It was awful, of course. Powdery and chemical-tasting, everything either too dry or too moist. But every Wednesday night for three years, my father and I baked.

  By the time I reached eighth grade, Skip had left for college. When my mother went to play poker with her girlfriends on Friday nights, my father took me to a place called Freddie’s for pizza. While we ate, he told me about growing up in a small town in Indiana during the Depression, how they were so poor that all he got for Christmas was oranges. Once, unable to pay for oranges, his mother made him a doll out of rags. He told me about running away from home and getting a tattoo when he was fourteen and running away again and joining the navy when he was seventeen. In China he ate hundred-year-old eggs, and in Morocco he ate dog stuffed with rice. “It all tasted good to me,” he’d say, draining his Michelob. “Maybe that’s why I like to cook so much.”

  He did like to. He just couldn’t get it quite right.

  He retired early and took over Mama Rose’s job as family cook. Every morning, he sat at the kitchen table with a yellow pad and pencil, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook open in front of him. From it, he designed menus. Often, he spent the entire rest of the day cooking. But his pork roast came out too pink, his mashed potatoes too runny. My mother might complain or give him cooking tips, but she was glad to have someone else doing it, and didn’t want him to quit.

  As for me, when he handed me a plate of overcooked pasta, grinning with pride, what could I do except take it and eat? “Mmmmm,” I’d say. “How did you make this?”

  “Well, I took a bag of frozen mixed vegetables . . .” he’d begin.

  WHEN I MOVED to New York City, I entered a world of beef vindaloo, sashimi, pork buns, and risotto. On visits home, I’d still compliment my father on his mushy meatballs or lopsided red velvet cake. But I couldn’t help describing the truly good food I now ate regularly. I would take him to my favorite restaurants when he visited me. He’d marvel at the spit-roasted lamb and the Szechuan beef. “Maybe I should get a Chinese cookbook,” he’d say as he examined his strangely flavored chicken. “I could probably make this at home. No problem.”

  Slowly, surprisingly, I began to long for my father’s cooking. Alone in my tiny apartment on Bleecker Str
eet, I would find myself thinking about my father’s overcooked roasts or his sweet scrambled eggs. He always whistled while he cooked. With the city sounds coming through my window, my stomach full of tandoori chicken and samosas, I missed that sound, those tastes from my childhood. Over time, I came to realize that it wasn’t really his cooking that I yearned for but my father himself. He always set the table just so, his food placed on fancy Italian platters decorated with roosters or fruit. He fussed and tweaked, stood back to survey the meal, then fussed some more, until finally he would sit across from me and we would begin to eat and talk. His food was only the prop for his stories, the entrance to our father-daughter talks. Once, when I got my heart broken, I jumped on the Amtrak train to Providence. My father waited for me at home, a big pan of baked mac and cheese in the oven, the American cheese clinging to the macaroni. When I was sick with pneumonia and alone in my tiny apartment, my father drove the nearly two hundred miles to Manhattan and cooked for me: his thick beef Stroganoff, his dry pork chops. I coughed and burned with fever and my father kept feeding me until I got better.

  Eventually, I moved back to Rhode Island, got married, had children. When I was pregnant with my first baby, the midwife thought I wasn’t gaining enough weight. By the time I got home from her office, my father was at my doorstep with dozens of cartons of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. After my amniocentesis, during my second pregnancy, I had to stay in bed for the day, and he showed up with a roast chicken. “I stick an apple up its butt,” he said proudly as I peered inside. “That’s why it’s so moist.” It wasn’t, of course. Everything he put in the oven, he overcooked. But I devoured that chicken, and the canned peas and scalloped potatoes made from a box and the bottled gravy he served with it. My father sat on the bed with me while I ate, grinning and nodding. “That’s my girl,” he said.