Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Food became something I could use to engage him and repair our relationship. When we talked on the phone about how to wrap Shanghai water dumplings or braise dong po rou pork belly, 30 minutes would fly by. Then, when the subject turned to anything else: “How’s the weather? Plans this weekend? O.K., goodbye.”

  It’s not doing “Carpool Karaoke” numbers or landing guest appearances by Michelle Obama, but the relative success of my dad’s cooking videos has been, for me, almost unbelievable. Most people would kill to have these viewer metrics. The videos are earnest and adorably cheese-ball, bearing the production tropes of ’80s VHS: There are spinning wipe effects, gratuitous zooms, saccharine background music.

  His most-watched recipe, with nearly a quarter-million views, is for Chinkiang-style pork ribs. I remember eating these when I was growing up. He would use a cleaver to chop spare ribs into two-bite cubes, wok-fry them, then sauce them with a viscous glaze of Chinese black vinegar. The result was fatty and sticky and crisp, and I would slurp the meat clean off the bone in one motion. Watching through nearly two dozen more videos, I realized every single dish had been served in my childhood home. Macau-style Portuguese coconut chicken. Pan-fried turnip cake. Sweet-and-sour pork. This time, the wave of nostalgia washed over me: I was 12 again, sitting at the kitchen table, my family’s mouths too preoccupied to squabble.

  My dad makes enough in each month’s ad revenues to take my mom out for a nice lunch. Making the clips is a lot of work. The two of them test each recipe a half-dozen times before committing it to film. Dad is behind the camera and editing the footage; it’s usually my mom’s hands demonstrating. They don’t speak in the videos. They say they’re embarrassed by their spoken English and feel more comfortable using onscreen text, in Chinese and English, for instruction. Writing and translating this adds several more hours of work.

  “Why?” I asked during one of our weekly phone conversations. “Do you want a show on the Food Network or something?”

  “You really want to know?” my dad asked in Chinese. “Your mom’s great-grandmother used to cook amazing Shanghainese food for her. She would dream about it. But when your mom was finally old enough to ask for the recipes, her great-grandmother had already developed dementia. She couldn’t even remember cooking those dishes. The only thing your mom had left was the memory of her taste. We’re afraid that if you wanted to eat your childhood dishes, and one day we’re both no longer around, you wouldn’t know how to cook it.”

  “You know,” he added, “you can be pretty uncommunicative.”

  Neither of us is likely to have the courage to sit down and hash out years of father-son strife; we’re both too stubborn, and verbalizing our emotions would leave us squirming. I even waited until the last minute to send him a draft of this story, and waited nervously for the response. Soon enough, a reply arrived:

  Hi Kevin,

  This is a good and true story. Thank you. Call me sometime.

  Dad

  * Pang, Kevin. “My Father, the YouTube Star.” From the New York Times, June 27, 2017. Copyright © 2017 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

  Cooking

  BY ELISSA ALTMAN

  From Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw

  In this memoir, as in her previous book Poor Man’s Feast (2013), Elissa Altman decodes the mixed messages of her turbulent Queens Jewish upbringing, where temple services were followed by sweet-and-sour pork at a Chinese restaurant. In her family, nothing was more emotionally loaded than food.

  During the school year, she makes potato latkes and diaphanous matzo meal pancakes the size of saucers. She makes salty matzo brei egg scrambles with caramelized onion and a shower of black pepper. There are kugels sweet and savory, roast chickens kneaded with vegetable oil and paprika, their metal kosher certification tags dangling from their ankle cartilage like charms from a bracelet. There is stuffed breast of veal sewn up with a carpet needle she bought special from a flooring store on Queens Boulevard, and in the heat, chef salads into which she slices neat triangles of cold cuts: long sheets of Swiss cheese differentiated from American only by virtue of color and hole; bologna; Hebrew National salami; Oscar Mayer boiled ham. There are television snacks of saltines and spray cheese; grilled cheese and bacon at McCrory’s on Sixty-Third Drive served to me by a strawberry blonde shiksa wearing a peach-toned, triple-weave polyester apron who Gaga introduces to me as my lady friend. There are frozen fish sticks cooked in a smoking toaster oven that always catches fire; doughy French bread pepperoni pizzas; Weaver fried chicken drumsticks; Swanson’s Hungry-Man dinners; blueberry blintzes topped with dollops of sour cream; cold leftover brisket stuffed into soft onion pockets; chopped chicken livers on Russian black bread so dense and dark that it looks like a starless midnight sky.

  What shall I make for your return? she writes to me in her letters, when I’m at sleepaway camp and, then, working at the hotel. The question feels formal, asked in the old-fashioned style of a mother writing to her son off fighting at Gettysburg or the Somme. What would you like me to have waiting for you? she says, and I believe at that moment my universe is comprised of just the two of us: Gaga, whose daughter’s attention has turned toward a new life as a single woman in late–1970s Manhattan, and me, whose world is stitched together by her grandmother—the foul-tempered, unsmiling woman who once loved another woman. After the divorce, Gaga and I spend our days together quietly at the kitchen table while my mother is out with Ben, and my father is living in Brooklyn with his mother, who after sixty years is still trying to feed him the borscht that he has hated since he was a baby. He rails and fights with her as though nothing has changed for them; nothing has.

  Gaga and I are heretics, watchers, quick to temper, brokenhearted. Our lives begin and end in the kitchen, connected to each other by love and the fraying cords of domestic madness and disappointment: I am my mother’s daughter. My mother is Gaga’s daughter. Together, we form a triangulation of anger and disappointment that dissipates only when Gaga and I are alone together. She is my safety net and my world, even with her temper that leaves our apartment door slammed, our drinking glasses broken, my sneakers—when I choose to spend Saturday nights with my father rather than with her after the divorce—once spat upon in a torrent of fury that we both choose, somehow, to forget.

  What shall I make for your return? she asks, and I live for this question as much for the food as for the love, because the food is the love. I dream of her goulash—a mosaic of sinewy kosher chuck roast that she cubes by holding large pieces of the meat in her left hand and slicing it with a cheap flexible serrated steak knife held in her right like she’s sectioning an apple. More than once she nicks herself, dropping tiny beads of scarlet blood along with the cubes into her lime green plastic mixing bowl. There is a long massage with ancient paprika and the addition of slivered onions and smashed garlic cloves, half a can of Del Monte tomato sauce, and then the dump into a squat, avocado-colored Teflon pot into which she slices unpeeled nuggets of floury potato to thicken the contents into the consistency of slow, meaty sludge.

  What shall I make for your return? she asks me in a letter, and I write back and say, Goulash, even in the heat of the late summer, and she writes back and says, All right, my darling, I’ll make it for you.

  “She never called me ‘darling,’” my mother snarls in the car on the way home from meeting the camp bus with my father. She folds down the makeup mirror and glares at me sitting in the backseat while I read Gaga’s letters, which I carry in my knapsack, aloud. I never read them out loud again.

  Gaga doesn’t come with my parents to pick me up from the camp bus. A year later, after the divorce, she won’t meet my father’s car downstairs as it pulls into The Champs-Élysées Promenade after the long drive home from Sugar Maples. Instead, I find her upstairs at our
white Chambers stove, stirring her pot in silence, droplets of sweat dripping down her lined forehead. She folds and turns and mixes and blends and after an unfathomable, shocking hug when I burst through the door—she isn’t a hugger—I sit down at the breakfast counter in our narrow galley kitchen with my mother’s mostly forgotten, half-empty boxes of Ayds diet candies in front of me, and Gaga reaches over my shoulder and puts down a small melamine bowl and a spoon and I eat in silence with her standing over my shoulder, clacking her false teeth together to keep them from slipping, and my heart bursts open.

  There is goulash on toast; goulash on spaetzli; goulash on rice; goulash on challah. There is leftover goulash—goulash that I eat alone in the early morning hours before my mother returns from an evening out with Ben, goulash at midnight, goulash at four in the morning when I wake up and can’t sleep. The pot, its contents slowly receding like the ocean, takes up the entire bottom shelf in our fridge, but I never think to decant it into a smaller container. When the silver slashes of the dinged Teflon begin to peek through, I ration the stew, pulling the shards and shreds of meat into strings, adding meager tablespoons of hard New York City tap water to the leftovers in order to lengthen the sauce, and her love. When the pot is nearly empty, its sides and bottom lacquered with the remnants of meat juice and tomato and dried white potato starch, I heat it up to melt them into a final puddle the size of the half dollars I collect, and I use a small piece of stale challah to sponge down the sides and the corners of the pot, like its content was pure gold.

  What shall I make for your return? Gaga asks in her letters. Goulash—the food her Hungarian immigrant mother made her—ties us together, grandmother to granddaughter, outlier to outlier.

  Make me your heart, I think, and she does.

  “She was born with a mean mouth,” my mother says about Gaga. “What’s that?” I ask when I’m a young teenager.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But just look at her.”

  Instead of a downturn of sad resignation, Gaga’s mouth is pulled taut as a wire, rarely smiling or moving. I have a cousin with a mouth curled into a perpetual snarl like a mountain lion. Mine is crooked and unsure, like my father’s and his father’s. But Gaga’s is a tight red line, a boundary so straight that I expect it to creak like an old floorboard when she opens it to speak or to fight with anyone who dares cross her: the grocery store delivery boy, who she accuses of shortchanging her; the sixth-grade teacher who bullies and torments me in front of a classroom of laughing schoolmates; my mother, when she stays overnight at Ben’s and skulks back into our apartment just before sunrise.

  Gaga came into the world in 1901 on the precipice of a new century, almost a year to the day after Queen Victoria’s death: she inherits her mother’s love of music and her father’s ferocious disposition. A massive, barrel-chested six-foot-four Budapest-born Hungarian hussar turned kosher butcher who wrings the scrawny necks of kosher chickens in the feather-covered back room of his Williamsburg store, he sets six-year-old Gaga on a ladder over an immense cauldron of boiling water and instructs her to submerge the dead birds by their feet, to loosen their feathers. I imagine her holding the creatures, the hot water splattering up onto the dress that her mother, Esther, has sewn for her; she accidentally drops one whole chicken into the water—it slips out of her sweaty baby hands—and her father chases her around the store, taking off a blood-splattered boot and throwing it at his oldest child until she runs out the door and down Broadway, tears of frustration caught in her throat. Every afternoon, she tries to fix her mistake, and to please him, to make things right; she spends her days after school singing to herself while sitting outside the store on an upturned wooden crate, plucking feathers from piles of birds, ankle-deep in viscera and plumage, directly across the street from what will become, a century later, Marlow & Daughters, the greatest pork emporium in New York.

  Gaga is the oldest of six—five girls and a boy, Herman, who will die during the 1918 flu epidemic—and their mother, Esther, a tiny smallpox-scarred homemaker with a sweet soprano voice who turned her brownstone into a boardinghouse after her husband died at forty-two. The only way she can keep the family together and keep the roof over her children’s heads is to house and feed perfect strangers for five dollars a week. Day and night, while World War I rages on the other side of the Atlantic, Esther stands in her kitchen cooking for her family and the German and Austrian and Irish and Italian and Polish boarders who sleep and bathe and eat side by side with her Jewish children, coddling and loving them, and teaching them the languages of their homelands just so that they can hear them spoken by innocent voices: by the time Gaga marries Grandpa Philip in 1934, she is fluent in German and speaks Italian as if she herself came directly off the boat from Palermo.

  There is a dusty, dog-eared photograph of Esther that I am shown over and over again, and this is how I imagine her whenever I imagine her: her thinning, graying hair pulled back in a loose bun, smudged round Emma Goldman glasses perched on the end of her nose, black bump-toe shoes, and an apron covering a thin cotton dress laden with petunias. Every day, before the boarders come home, she takes an afternoon break and ushers Gaga and her sisters into the parlor and teaches them how to sing And the Band Played On in harmony around the massive upright Kranich & Bach piano that stands in the middle of the room.

  “She was always working,” Gaga told me when I was older, “always working. Always in the kitchen; always feeding people, whoever came by.” When one overnight visitor, an opera singer who was performing that night in Manhattan, gave an impromptu recital in the parlor for the other boarders, the man’s manager, Gatti-Cazza, found Esther sitting on a stool in the kitchen, taking a break from her day’s work, a damp dishcloth in her hands, her head resting against the doorjamb and listening to the overnight guest sing Puccini.

  “Take your apron off, Mrs. Gross, and please come into the parlor—” Gatti-Cazza said, holding his hand out. She took it and followed him into the long, cavernous room, and quietly sat out of view while Enrico Caruso sang Vecchia Zimarra. Gaga said that her mother hummed it sweetly to herself for the rest of her life, even when the asthma was killing her, when she could barely breathe and they had to bring an oxygen tank into the apartment she shared with my mother, Gaga, and Grandpa Philip, thirty years later.

  “A religion; it was like her religion,” Gaga would say while she cooked for me, telling me this story of her mother, Esther, who died in 1948, and who made it her life’s work to feed and provide nourishment and sustenance to perfect strangers, even as the only worlds they knew, thousands of miles away, were imploding.

  “Maybe because,” Gaga says. She speaks through lips as tight as a cord, putting a bowl of goulash down in front of me one day after school. Chronically soaked with perspiration, even in the dead of winter, Gaga wipes her eyes with a greasy, flowered terrycloth dish towel and goes back into the kitchen.

  “But why?” I ask her. “Why would she want to feed people she didn’t even know?”

  I have been taught over the years, by Aunt Sylvia, by my mother, that cooking for other people is labor, that it’s nothing to be proud of or ever to aspire to; the act of providing sustenance is something to be embarrassed by, the downstairs to our upstairs. The need—the desire—for sustenance and nurturing is even worse: it’s shameful.

  After my family has fallen apart, after my father has left and moved back to Brooklyn and my mother is out every night, the only thing I want or need is Gaga, just the two of us, alone together, sometimes listening to music, sometimes not. She tells me the story of her mother, Esther, and the boardinghouse, and the time that Caruso came to stay and sang Puccini, and she feeds my heart and soul, plate after plate, bowl after bowl. When she is in it, the kitchen is my safe room, the place where I am most secure, protected, sustained.

  “Do you know that you were named for her?” she repeats, and I say, “Yes, I do.”

  “What shall I make for you, Elissala?” Gaga says to me every day, and she stands
in the kitchen, and she cooks for me.

  Years later, after I leave for college in Boston, after my mother marries Ben and moves into Manhattan, Gaga will step out of the building she moved my mother to in 1960, leaving Grandpa Philip to sleep alone in his furniture store in Williamsburg with nothing but Sister Redempta and his homing pigeons for company; Gaga will stand in the middle of The Champs-Élysées Promenade and look up at our apartment in The Marseilles, occupied, after eighteen years, by strangers.

  “No one left to cook for,” she says, when she calls me in my dormitory room in Boston. “No one left to eat with. When are you coming home?”

  Six months later, at five in the morning, Ben will call my dorm room: “Gaga is gone,” he tells me. A massive heart attack in the middle of the night.

  “Don’t come—don’t even try to get home,” he says as I stand at the window facing west over Commonwealth Avenue. Enormous snowflakes the size of half dollars flutter past me; the wind blows them up and sideways and down; I can’t focus on them. Ben’s voice is distant, as if he’s calling me from another place and time, and I can barely hear him. On that morning, an early April nor’easter—a freak springtime snowstorm—will blanket and shut down the entire East Coast within hours. The trains will stop running and the airports will shut down and the roads will be abandoned. I will never have the chance to say goodbye.