Link of Loukoumathes
Callie is all excited because he took her to the Greek Festival over the weekend. “Oh it was so much fun, oh you should have seen the dancing, oh the food was so good. I want to learn to do all of it. Listen, listen—I learned a new word. Loukoumathes! Loukoumathes! What a long name for doughnuts! They are so yummy! Can we learn to make loukoumathes today?”
I give her a hard look. “Callie, let me remind you that we are making a red meat sauce scented with cinnamon to serve over fancy buttered rice molds,” I pause, “and loukoumathes are not doughnuts.”
I’ve been coming back at least twice a week, teaching her new dishes: moussaka, youvetsi, youvarelakia, plaki. She wants to learn everything before the mother-in-law comes. I feel sorry for her because she’ll never really be a good Greek wife. I’m not about to teach her how to be subservient.
Each week the baby gets fatter, grows a little hair, and gets to know me. He’s gotten so that he smiles when I come over. I always bring a little treat for him and tell him, “Tha se faw!” Every time he starts giggling and bouncing in his high chair, his legs swinging to and fro. I talk to him in Greek, and now she is learning to pick up what I’m saying, too. “Tha se valo stin catsarola!” Ha ha. “You’re going to put him in the cooking pot! Why do Greek people joke about eating babies so much?” she asks.
“Oh, we’re not joking,” I tell her. “We eat our babies alive.”
It is still early in the afternoon, and we have time to make both the cinnamon-scented meat sauce with rice as well as the loukoumathes, but I’m not feeling cooperative. I’m in charge of the lesson, not her. She gets up close to me and squeezes her eyes shut and clasps her hands together. “Oh please, oh please, let’s make dinner and loukoumathes!” I wasn’t going to relent, but then she says, “Manny loves them too!”
Manny. He is sitting on the floor in the kitchen clutching a red and blue plastic toy hammer and shoving it into his mouth. His cheek is pushed out on one side, and with his reddish-brown hair he looks like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. I want to bite his cheek it is so round. Round and delicious and soft like loukoumathes. I imagine my teeth sinking into the warm puffs. I crouch down near the baby and playfully bite his cheek. “Well, if Manny loves loukoumathes, then loukoumathes it is!” He gurgles.
“What do you think goes into loukoumathes?” I ask her.
“Well, I would guess flour and water, maybe an egg? And honey, nuts, and cinnamon on top.” She bends down and plays with Manny’s curly hair, the color of rusty cinnamon. “Except for Manny—we’ll coat his in cinnamon and sugar.”
“What makes them rise?” I ask.
“Baking powder?” she guesses and kisses Manny’s fat cheek.
“It’s the magic of yeast,” I correct her. “Without that ingredient, they would never come to life. It’s just like Manny. You picked the ingredients. You combined yourself and his father, but God sprinkled in the magic that made him come to life.”
She becomes quiet. “What if you don’t have yeast? Could you use something else?”
“If the ingredients aren’t right, no matter how hard you try, it’ll fall flat,” I tell her. “Loukoumathes are simple to make, and the ingredients that go into them are common. We just go to the supermarket and pick up whatever we want and never think about where the ingredients came from. We forget the farmer that threshes his wheat, and the bees that collect pollen from thousands of flowers to bring back to the hive. Most of us don’t even know that cinnamon is a bark that has to be collected with care before it is ground and put into labeled bottles with holes in the plastic top for sprinkling. We take ingredients for granted, but we should not. Ingredients can change lives.”
Callie is nodding, her blue eyes intent. She wants so badly to learn to be a good Greek wife. She is on the right track, learning how to cook Greek food, but she will never master subservience, and it is too late for her virginity.
She is standing close and puts her hand on my arm. “What if you think you have the right ingredients, but then in the middle of the recipe you realize that you are missing something? Should you give up or keep trying?” I move my arm away, but I can still feel the imprint of her fingers on my skin.
“Each ingredient represents a choice. You choose which jar of honey has the best flavor. The bee selected which blossoms to collect pollen from. The gardener decided whether to put pesticides in her garden. God decided if it should rain to grow the flowers. It is all a chain. We are linked.”
She nods, but she looks confused.
“Another way to look at it: when I found you at the super-market, you were picking limp spinach, feta from Wisconsin, and light olive oil. All of those choices affect the flavor and quality of the finished spanakopita. You see? And when you have choices available to you, make sure to take advantage of that—make the best choices. The freshest ingredients, the purest flavors, will make the happiest stomach.”
She looks away toward the window over the sink. It overlooks a canyon of green trees thickly huddled together. She says, “You’re right. We have all the choices in the world.” Manny bangs his hammer on the floor. “I try to make the right choices, but sometimes it seems hard to know what the right thing to do is.”
The truth is that I do feel sorry for her, but I’m not going to tell her that. Here she is a free, adventurous American woman, and she chose to marry a Greek man—and all he wants is for her to be just like his traditional Greek mother.
“It could be worse,” I try to console her. “All you did was pick some limp spinach. You could always throw it away and start all over again.” Manny bangs the floor again. She nods.
“Just think, what if you were born a poor olive farmer, or worse yet, a poor olive farmer’s daughter like my relatives in Greece?”
Callie grabs my hand and asks, “What do you mean? Tell me about them. I hardly know anything about you . . . or your ingredients.” She smiles.
So while I show her how to dissolve the yeast into the warm water and then gently add the flour and salt, I tell her. I tell her until the batter has doubled in size and formed bubbles all over the surface.
I tell her about my Papou and Yiayia and their eight children. My mother was the youngest of the eight. They were poor farmers who lived on the land they farmed in the Peloponnesus region of Greece. Their small clay brick house was surrounded by their olive groves, line after line of gray-green queens, whose fertility and generosity controlled whether there would be enough to feed the family for the whole year. As the olives reached their feathery branches into the sky, their gnarly trunks gripped firmly in the dry ground, as if caught in an eternal choice between staying rooted in the familiar Earth or flying upward and away toward the unknown universe.
Their lives were hard, not just because of the legacy of four hundred years of Turkish occupation, or the German invasion, or even civil war, but because there was never enough to eat. Eight children, sixteen hands and sixteen feet. An army squad of their own to feed. My grandparents raised them with the firm grip of religion and the belt, hard work and sacrifice. The boys worked in the fields, digging, planting, watering, guarding against inclement weather. Running out into the precious rows of corn and grapes at midnight yelling insults at the booming thunder and unraveling crackling sheets of hard cloth to protect the ripening fruit from the impending rain. Each plant they protected, each tomato or cluster of grapes represented the difference between being hungry or starving. Each cob of corn saved would produce dry, shiny kernels that would feed their chickens that would lay eggs for their sustenance and would later float, legs up, in a steamy pot when there was cause for celebration.
The girls cooked and cleaned and tended to the livestock: beautiful brindle chickens with full breasts and wary eyes, and sneaky roosters that pounced with their bright red cockscomb quivering and strong beaks that held the chickens down. The girls knew all the secret places the chickens hid their eggs and stole them with quiet apologies. Sweet goats with trust
ing eyes ate whatever was given them, trash, old shoes, or a field of wild green weeds, and yielded sweet, warm milk that the women transformed into hard wheels of salty white cheese and hid in briny dark barrels. The eggs and cheese kept them alive.
“That’s so amazing . . . they really lived off the land.” Callie pulls me to the couch and sits down next to me while we wait for the loukoumathes batter to expand. She grabs my hand and laces her fingers with mine. I sit silently staring at our intertwined fingers which remind me of the gnarly roots of an olive tree. My face flushes, but I let my hand stay there a few moments too long. Why did I do that? When she asks me to continue the story, the spell is broken, and my hand comes back to me like a winged bird and rests over my pounding heart.
I tell her how the blood in their veins was the olive oil. Each September the family gathered beneath the branches of their olive trees, warily and gratefully eyeing the fruit that would both break their backs in labor and give them the bright green elixir that would bring them profit at the local olive press. It would cook their food, baptize their babies, and keep the wicks lit at their family altars and headstones. The olive trees fed them in life and in death. In the early morning it was easier to approach the task with good spirits and resolve, imagining the price the oil would fetch at market. As they spread the large cloths beneath the trees to catch the falling fruit, they sang folk songs celebrating their perseverance through this hard life. The women took one last look at their callused hands, all shades of brown after a long summer tending to their crops and animals in the burning sun. Soon they would be black with the juice of kalamata, and stinging, bursting cracks of hard skin. As the men shook the branches of the trees with long canes, shaking loose a shower of black fruit, the women murmured their prayers and made the sign of the cross before they knelt down in the dirt and started picking.
Everyone helped when it was time to harvest the olives. Neighbors and relatives all gathered to help harvest a crop, and rotated between their respective groves. Children were taught to pick the good fruit and leave the ones that had shriveled on the trees. The oldest women stayed back and cooked huge pots of food to feed the laborers—hot, creamy trahana or fried eggs with hunks of bread and cheese. Decrepit old men supervised from the side, working their wooden worry beads with one hand and pointing angrily with the other, yelling at whoever was within earshot that they were doing it all wrong. At the end of the day weary workers fell to the ground in relief and the harvest was protected as it lay in big burlap sacks under sheets of cloth. After many days, the grove would be stripped clean and the entire crop collected. The men would drive their big trucks with olives piled up high in the back to the nearest olive press, and when they returned the celebration would begin.
“How much did you get? How many barrels did you press? Where is our oil?” The majority of the oil would be sold, but each family kept a large barrel for their own use, blessing the oil and cursing the Communist soldiers who had blasted through their homes and stuck their dirty gun barrels into the life-giving green liquid, looking for hidden weapons or money, or knocked over their stash of golden grain and stomped through it with their heavy black boots. Once the price was discussed and the reality of their cash resources for the next year had sunk in, the women set to work making loukoumathes, the traditional way to celebrate the conclusion of the olive harvest. Remembering the soldiers plundering their oil and grain for the year made them anticipate and savor the fried balls of fluffy dough all the more. The sweetness of food can take away our pain, even if just for the moment.
I rise from the couch to check the loukoumathes batter. It has bubbled and risen like a cratered moon. I call Callie into the kitchen to show her how my mother learned to make loukoumathes from her mother, and now I am going to show her. I bring her into the chain, and we follow the same steps as the women before us.
My grandmother, my yiayia, would quickly stir up a batch of the yeasty batter and set it aside to rise while her daughters admired the cloudy chartreuse color of the freshly pressed olive oil. One sister chopped walnuts while another swirled the amber honey loose of crystals for the syrup. The rich, fruity aroma of the oil thickened the air as it heated in a deep pan on the petrol stove. My yiayia would wash her hands thoroughly just as the oil reached the perfect temperature, and plunge her fist into the cool batter. She pumped her fist like a beating heart, and with a spoon in the other hand captured a dollop of dough to drop into the hot oil. The puffy balls of dough bobbed on the roiling green surface of the oil, turning from pale white to golden and crisp.
While the loukoumathes cooked, the whole family gathered around the table in anticipation, jostling to be closer to the big ceramic bowl that would hold the delicious morsels. Yiayia would scoop the hot dumplings out of the oil and pour them into the bowl. She would drizzle generous amounts of honey syrup over the golden balls, and then sprinkle them with chopped walnuts and plenty of aromatic cinnamon. When the honey and cinnamon merged with the heat of the loukoumathes, an intoxicating scent filled the air that allowed everyone to forget the labor of the last weeks and that they were poor farmers. For the smell of honey and cinnamon wafting through the air of a warm, glowing kitchen can make even ordinary laborers feel as if they are rich, as if they are privy to the food of the gods.
I tell her, “Each time you pick up a bottle of olive oil in the grocery store, remember the history. Remember the labor. Remember the people whose lives are hard so that yours is easy. Remember their cracked skin and their backs burned by the sun as they bent over to pick their crops. Remember that we are linked to them. Remember and be grateful.”
Callie and I sink our hands into the batter just like my yiayia, squeezing the batter through our fists and dropping it into the burning oil where it sizzles and sings as it transforms into something delectable to be eaten with eager tongues.
Our hands move together to prepare the loukoumathes, and they are finally ready, bringing a bit of the past into our present. As we bite into the golden puffs, our teeth break through the crispy, sticky, honey-drenched crust, and a puff of yeasty steam releases into our mouths. They are too hot to eat and too good to wait for. We exhale through our mouths like panting dogs as we continue to savor the chewy dough and crunchy walnuts. Callie blows on a little piece sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and gives it to Manny, who has by now abandoned his hammer for a wooden spoon. He sucks the treat from his mother’s fingers, and makes a happy high-pitched sound and bangs his spoon until she gives him more. We eat until we are too full to stand up anymore.
We set aside a small bowl of loukoumathes for Gus, and go sit down on the cream-colored couch in the living room. Callie lays Manny down on his favorite fluffy flokati rug and he plays with the fringes. As soon as we sit down, she gets back up to get the loukoumathes that she had saved for Gus and brings them out to the couch with her. “We can always make more for Gus another time, right?”
I watch her pop another in her mouth. Well, at least she can eat like a Greek.
“Sure, why not,” I say. “We can do whatever we want. We live in America.”
She looks down and softly says, “I wish we could do whatever we wanted.”
I find myself blushing as I remember Callie’s fingers intertwined with mine, and I wonder what feelings are hidden in her downcast eyes.
When we are done with the loukoumathes, she picks up Manny and curls up on the couch with her feet tucked under a cushion and Manny nestled in her lap, nursing. The sun is setting over the canyon, and the room has become dusky. I can see the curve of her bare breast and Manny nuzzled against her softness. I long for that closeness and peace. Callie sits staring at me, and I try to avert my eyes from her nakedness. Manny has fallen asleep and is breathing softly in her arms. You can barely see his outline in the dark room.
“You know, Manny was a surprise. I didn’t really ‘pick the ingredients’ like you said, but once I was pregnant I knew I wanted him to have a father. I mean, otherwise I could have just gone to the
sperm bank. I thought about doing that. I could have gotten pregnant without a man. But it worked out this way. People get together under difficult circumstances all the time, and it turns out all right. Right?”
She could have gotten pregnant without a man? Without waiting for me to reply, she continued.
“When I got pregnant, he was so excited about having a son. It seemed like the best choice for us. There were so many things I didn’t know. There are still so many things I don’t know. So many things to learn.”
“And here we are,” I say. “Do you wish you had gone to the sperm bank instead?”
“You know, I feel confused a lot of the time. I don’t know what’s right anymore. All I know is that when I’m with you . . . I can finally feel like myself. It feels good.” She smiles at me and then turns her face away from mine.
Sitting there in the dark, I don’t want to train her to be a good Greek wife anymore. I imagine Manny lying close to her breast, safe in her arms. I can hear her breathing, can feel the warmth of her exhaled breath. The room smells of cinnamon, honey, and regret.
LOUKOUMATHES
“It’s the magic of yeast—without that ingredient, they would never come to life.”
1 package dry yeast
1 1/4 cup warm water
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon sugar
Dash of salt
Cooking oil
Honey
Chopped walnuts
Cinnamon
Dissolve yeast in the warm water, and wait for it to foam with life. Combine the flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl. Add the yeast and stir it with a spoon until you see it is well incorporated. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and then a clean towel and place it in a warm place. Let rise until it doubles in size and forms bubbles, approximately two hours.
Heat a few inches of oil in a deep frying pan until just before the smoking point, about 375 degrees. If you are right-handed, submerge your left hand into the batter and scoop up a handful of batter. Squeeze the batter so that it emerges from the circle formed by your index finger and thumb. Imagine your heart beating. Using a teaspoon, scrape a ball of batter from the left hand and drop it gently into the hot oil.
The Feasting Virgin Page 5