It’s telling that the potato gratin was such a high point in the trip; although we were set in an exotic locale, what with the Second Empire architecture, delicious ham sandwiches, and foxy, sharp-featured Sorbonne co-eds, the only things I was capable of enjoying were those that echoed my narrow, neurotic routines at home. My father and I watched movies in Atlantic City; in Paris we watched the same movies in the version originale, in art-house cinemas off the Rue des Écoles. I rejoiced in the pork sandwiches of South Philadelphia; the lamb sandwiches cut from slowly rotating spiked wads in the twisting alleys of San Severin were just a better version of that, with pungent salty-gamey meat slowly seared and self-basted over hours and then laid on a fresh crisp baguette and piled with fresh, crispy French fries. For my father, who never ran out of proofs that the French were better than us as a people, this was one more: ‘Only they would know that you wanted French fries on top of your sandwich!’ I would leave the hotel sometimes while he was napping, open-mouthed, on the bed, and make my way down the hill to the maze of magic shawarma, where I would follow the ‘lambarinth’, as I thought of it, past dozens of indistinguishable wad-men, until I came to my guy, a small, intense-looking man with a waxed moustache. (It was two francs for the sandwich, with either fries or salad on top, as if anyone would be dumb enough to choose salad.)
Louie Moissonier’s pan of potatoes and the lambarinth were the high points of that trip, spectacles I vividly described to my friends when I got back, at almost nauseating length. But there were parts of the trip I never told anyone about, and tried not to remember myself. There was the night that we walked home and saw two glum-looking men sitting at a table outside a cafe, looking abjectly bored and depressed. They didn’t speak at all. When we passed them, I said to my dad, ‘Those guys are like, “Oh well, only another two hours to kill.”’ ‘Only another thirty years to kill is more like it,’ came his glum reply, and something seized up inside me. There was also the time he got all bombed and started crying. It was, I will say now in retrospect, very hard to have been put in such close quarters with a being as filled with despair as my father was in those years. I can hardly blame him—it sucks to come home one night from work and find that your wife has committed suicide—but I wish he could have been a little more in the spirit of the trip, bran aside. I think of him often, and the strangely stilted, but loving, relationship we had, and how we spoke the secret language of food as a proxy for everything else. He’s gone now, along with my lamb wads, and so much more, but the paintings are still around. And every time I look at them I feel the urge to ‘ring the gong’.
BETH KRACKLAUER is the food editor of the Off Duty section at The Wall Street Journal. Before that, she was an editor at the magazines Gourmet and Saveur. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CHICKEN LIVERS
Beth Kracklauer
We all enter our families in the middle of the action, and each of us is left to piece together our own story-in-progress as best we can. I would argue that for a youngest child, particularly one like me, born long after my siblings and even longer after my cousins—“not an accident, just a surprise!” has always been my mom’s cheerful spin on the situation—this drama is, if not especially acute, then at least especially self-conscious. The dream where you find yourself on stage without a script? The gathering dread that your cue is approaching, and you’re going to botch it? The only thing for it is to listen harder, watch more closely, will the action around you to coalesce into something intelligible. You read into things. Anyway, I do.
For instance, the fact that my father puts together a beautiful plate of food. I was well into adulthood before I noticed; I recall the exact moment, in fact. It was in Kentucky, about an hour’s drive southwest of Louisville, at the annual barbecue held by Dad’s mother’s relatives, the McCrackens and the Lancasters. That stretch of rolling farmland nestled up against the Ohio River is uncannily picturesque in places; our cousin Larry’s farm is one of them. It sits on a hill and around a bend in the road in such a way that, on the approach, a perfect storybook spread unfolds: white farmhouse with peaked roof, a line of shade trees, fields planted in leafy green rows, more unobstructed sky than you ever see in a city.
We stepped out of the car and into the soup that is July in Kentucky. Languid in the humidity and the resinous haze of hickory smoke, ladies were draped over lawn chairs, drawling out their vowels only slightly, the way they do down there just below the Mason-Dixon. Kids, with that eerie energy that always makes a hot day seem hotter, hurled water balloons at each other and took turns cranking the churn on the ice-cream bucket. The men had just removed the pig, trussed up in chicken wire, from the smoker, a blackened behemoth engineered from a metal garbage dumpster by Larry, his uncle Bob, and some of the other guys. The smoker is fitted with rubber tires and a trailer hitch so they can haul it between their houses. This was the first year they’d had to purchase a pig to put in it. None of the families was raising them anymore; most of them had given up farming altogether.
A rotating team had tended the smoker through the night, and we’d brought along a couple of cases of beer to thank them. It was the best we could do, given that we’d spent the day before driving down from Pittsburgh, where I grew up and my parents still live. As we were hustled over to the long tables groaning under all the vegetable side dishes and salads and fresh fruit and fruit pies our relatives’ gardens could supply, our own contribution felt pretty sorry. It always did. I remember being quietly amazed, years ago, when cousin Denise told me she’d not only made the smoky, slow-cooked beans, but also the ketchup that went into them. (Didn’t ketchup come from Heinz?)
‘You’re just a house flower, aren’t you?’ said cousin Mary Ann to a visibly wilted me as we sat down with our plates of food. The truth is, I am a sort of alien life form in that context. My hometown is a no-nonsense, Northern, rust-belt city where people put their french fries right on their sandwiches because, well, why not? My parents transplanted themselves far from any extended family before they started their own. To gain entry to this tribe once a year on our visits to Kentucky always felt exciting, and also a little like crashing a party at a late hour, by which point so much has already happened it seems impossible to catch up and fall into the easy rapport everyone else has already established. (That dream again: Where’s my script? What’s my cue?)
For my dad, it’s different. He has a lived history in this place; he spent summers with the elder members of this clan, back when they were all kids. It’s funny to see quirks I tend to think of as uniquely Fred Kracklauer reflected back to me in a whole crowd of people. Wisecracking. Given to arguing, and to relishing it. And very intense about food. I’ve already mentioned the custom-built smoker that looms like an altar over each of these gatherings. The spread these people put out—its vastness and variety—is overwhelming. The unreserved pleasure they take in eating it is palpable.
I think I can be forgiven, then, for getting a little emotional, a little existential, even, when I looked over at my dad’s plate. I was actually moved to capture it on film, and can therefore report that the elegant composition consisted of, beginning at the top and going clockwise, cucumber and onion salad, red potato salad dotted with mustard seeds, coleslaw, a pile of rosy pulled pork with just a dab of sticky sauce, barbecued beans, a salad of juicy tomatoes flecked with herbs, and another of fresh raspberries, blueberries and peaches. Giddy abundance, but selected and arranged with such care. That judicious dab of sauce. It takes a complicated history of loss and longing and seeking out the place where you feel safe to put together a plate like that.
My dad made his first trip to Kentucky at the age of two-and-a-half. Up to then, the only world he knew was the Teutonic Midwest—Milwaukee, Wisconsin—where his Southern, Irish-Catholic mother had settled among her husband’s German-immigrant family. It was the spring of 1936, and my grandmother, shattered by the death of an infant son she’d only just delivered,
had to be hospitalized. For whatever reason, no relatives were able to take in little Fred and his five-year-old sister, Joann. Now, Joann was a well-behaved girl whom various neighbors were only too happy to watch over for a while. But Fred had already developed a reputation. Wisecracking. Given to arguing. Etc.
And so my grandmother’s sister Elsie, then a footloose young student nurse, boarded a train in Louisville along with her friend Belle and headed north to collect her nephew. The two young ladies made a big impression. Belle, Dad recalls, always carried a penknife. She had a trick he never tired of, where she’d ‘swallow’ the knife (and let it drop down the front of her dress). I can remember Aunt Elsie in later years, shaking with laughter as she told the one about how young Fred pulled himself up on his seat and entertained the whole train carriage with a saucy song his father had taught him, ‘Two Old Maids in a Folding Bed’. At last, an appreciative audience!
Fred stayed through the summer with another of his mother’s sisters, Mae, and her husband, Ed, on their farm near the edge of Fort Knox. Once his mother had recovered and he’d returned to Wisconsin, he often headed back to that farm again come summer. Aunt Mae was known for having little patience for children. She and Uncle Ed had none of their own, and she wasn’t keen on Fred socializing too much with his cousins. Well, she must have been saving up all her patience for him, because, as my dad remembers it, he was lavished with attention and affection. As a little boy, he’d ride on Uncle Ed’s lap for hours as he drove the hay rake pulled by Kate the mule. Later, when Fred was eight or nine years old and interested in smoking cigarettes like his cousins were, Aunt Mae packed a corncob pipe with dry leaves, and the two of them sat and smoked together.
‘Oh, Aunt Mae made such nice food,’ Dad always says. Pole beans are what he usually mentions first. They were cooked in their pods and finished with hunks of bacon that Aunt Mae cured herself, along with country ham my dad claims was less salty and more delectably porky than any other he’s tried. Fried chicken. Roast chicken, too, with a dressing full of homemade sausage. Big, fluffy biscuits smothered in white chicken gravy—or just a smear of Aunt Mae’s sweet butter. Uncle Ed liked to pour Caro syrup over his plate, though Aunt Mae denounced it as low-class: ‘You don’t do that to good food!’
What good food is was precisely what young Fred was absorbing at Aunt Mae’s table. That, and a sense of how, when something is made with care, you appreciate it with equal care; how food can be a way for people who aren’t otherwise especially demonstrative to express themselves.
It’s not a lesson he would have learned at his mother’s table—or not in the same way. My grandmother had little use for cooking. Born on a farm not far from where Aunt Mae and Uncle Ed’s place was, she’d escaped to Louisville and nursing school and kicked up her heels just as soon as her parents blinked. (I remember her saying once, deadly serious, ‘It didn’t matter who I went out with. I was not staying home on a Saturday night!’) Her given name was Mary Willie—on her wedding day she became, improbably, Mary Willie McCracken Kracklauer—but everybody called her Billie. She called everybody sug, as in sugar, as in, ‘Listen, sug, could you get me another Manhattan?’
By the time I was born, Grandpa Kracklauer had long since died, and Grandma was back in Louisville. Each summer, like a salmon finding its way upstream to its spawning place, my father packed us in the station wagon for the trip to Kentucky. On the way down the Dixie Highway, he’d call out various landmarks—our favorite being the auto-wrecking yard near Fort Knox that was featured in the movie Goldfinger (the scene where Oddjob kills the guy in his car and then has both car and body crushed in a compactor). At Grandma’s apartment, we’d sit at the kitchen table while she smoked Parliament cigarette after Parliament cigarette and held court with whichever relatives had stopped in because Fred and his family were in town.
With her husky voice and commanding presence, Grandma was, to me, like a Louisvillian Lauren Bacall. Enveloped in her particular atmosphere, suffused with tobacco and the jasmine lilt of Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, you knew you were where the action was. An unrepentant hedonist—my father is definitely her son in this regard, and I his daughter—she loved eating and drinking, and most of all doing those things out in the world, in restaurants, of which Louisville has always had many good ones. But the salient meals of our annual trip happened outside the city.
We’d go out and visit Aunt Mae and Uncle Ed and their three-legged dog, Tippy—that is, until Tippy met his end, heroically, seizing and killing a rabid fox that charged Aunt Mae while she was hanging laundry in the yard. (This story loomed large in our family mythology; back in Pittsburgh, our schnauzer was never called upon to rise to such an occasion.) There was a grape arbor outside the kitchen door, and a blackberry bramble along the fence. I remember Aunt Mae putting on her bonnet, gently leading me by the hand out to the bramble, and showing me how to pluck the squishy, dark fruit from the prickly branches. She baked her berries into juicy cobblers, and her cherries and peaches into pies with lattice tops. Like our father before us, my brother, sister and I happily ate it all up.
The culmination of every trip was a meal at the Doe Run Inn, in nearby Brandenburg. The restaurant was in an old stone mill built in the early nineteenth century by Squire Boone (brother of Daniel). It had a wide, breezy screened porch overlooking a small waterfall that kicked up a mist, making this possibly the coolest place in all of Kentucky on a hot afternoon. We’d sit at a long table on that porch with a rotating cast of aunts and uncles and cousins, and eat food jam-packed with a taste I guess I’d now call umami, but back then could only experience, not articulate. Ruddy, intensely salty shards of cured, aged country ham, for example: the savory flavor was so concentrated, and so addictive, I had to gulp down lemonade in order to keep eating it. Fried chicken livers with a breading as ethereal as tempura and a velvety interior that tasted like iron and earth. As a small kid, I preferred the fried chicken—crunchy and peppery outside, moist and silky within. Even the creamy salad dressing, dolloped on wedges of sweet iceberg lettuce, was powerfully flavorful, clotted with curds of pungent blue cheese. And then, for dessert, a slice of tart, gooey lemon chess pie.
There were dishes, I’ll admit, that were too much for my palate. The chicken livers at first (though I grew to love them later). And the ham balls: dense little depth-charges of minced country ham, fried until they were brown and caramelized on the outside, submerged in a sauce made from rendered ham fat and sweet, vegetal sorghum syrup. The ham balls overpowered me—flavors I loved, delivered at an intensity so fierce I couldn’t handle it. But give me a pillowy baking-powder biscuit doused in gravy made with that same fat and syrup, and I was the happiest girl in the world. It was all about the ratio of lip-smacking, savory goodness to buttery, serotonin-spiking starch. These full-on flavors were making me sit up and notice what I liked and craved, and in what degrees. It shaped the way I came to assess all food, whether in Louisville, Pittsburgh, Guadalajara or Seoul.
As everyone ate, they talked about what they were eating—what the cooks must have done to make it so good, how it compared to the way Aunt Mae did it, or Aunt Anna, or the cooks who were in the Doe Run kitchen twenty years ago. The gravity they brought to the ritual held them together. This was what an intact family looked like. ‘Don’t you like the chicken livers?’ someone would inevitably ask me. So I kept on eating them until I did.
Ten or fifteen summers ago, my family paid a visit to the Doe Run Inn and learned that it had changed hands. The menu now featured such dishes as salmon grilled on a cedar plank and chicken Caesar salad. We were horrified.
It wasn’t long before cousin Jeanne took matters into her own hands. Jeanne works for the local telephone company and had often held work events at the Doe Run Inn. She tracked down the previous owners and got them to hand over their recipes. Then she marched over to the restaurant and said, ‘Here. This is how it’s done.’ Jeanne’s not the sort of lady you say no to.
And so the old favorites were
restored—the chicken livers, the biscuits, the chess pie—but it was never quite the same. The topography around there isn’t as we remember it, either. The landmarks have changed. Along the road leading up to Aunt Mae and Uncle Ed’s, what was once farmland is now overlaid with a grid of semi-suburban development. Dad has a hard time finding his way.
Last summer, we arrived to find a sign tacked to the front of the Doe Run Inn: ‘Closed until further notice.’ When we asked what had happened, cousin Pat shook his head. ‘You know, the last time I was there, the fried chicken was greasy. Greasy chicken at the Doe Run Inn. That was it. I knew I could never go back.’
Still, the annual barbecue carries on, migrating, along with the hulking smoker hiked up on rubber tires, between the cousins’ houses. Dad takes his place among the dwindling group of his contemporaries. We make our way down the long tables of food, we pile our plates with juicy pulled pork, we defy the humidity with cold beers and hand-churned ice cream made with fresh-picked peaches. This, at least, is exactly as we remember it.
Regarded by many as the world authority on Indian food, MADHUR JAFFREY is an award-winning actress and bestselling cookery author. She has appeared in over 20 films and written numerous cookery books, including the seminal An Invitation to Indian Cookery, published in 1973.
CUISINE BY DESIGN
Madhur Jaffrey
The balmy, consoling air has been entirely shut out by my hired car’s fierce air conditioning. We are driving up Sri Lanka’s west coast on a road that slithers along sluggishly, hugging the shore. Palms lean forgivingly towards waters blasted recently by a cruel tsunami. Bananas and papayas continue to produce, beguiled by the smiling sun. Uniformed children, their dark hair gleaming with massages of coconut oil, walk to school, books and sometimes cricket bats in hand.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 14