Archive for the ‘Memory’ Category

Going Home

The glass mostly full (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I am strangely at home navigating unfamiliar places. Especially those beneath the earth – the metro in Paris or DC, the London tube, the convoluted network of U-bahn and S-bahn lines that crisscross Berlin like a twisted mesh net. Ever since New York, I’ve learned to love the reliably unreliable rush of trains hurtling to a stop, the stiff speech of the recorded station announcers, the always incomprehensible intercom crackling that the rest of the line is out. Change trains now.

But I digress. Every place has its own rhythm, a tattoo that makes it unique. Yet here and there, in this city and that, patterns repeat, like a subtle three-bar refrain the ear can’t hear but the feet feel. So the unfamiliar, or new, can have an inexplicable echo of what is familiar, or what is old.

Right now, I’m sitting in Tegel, whisking the foam from an overpriced cappuccino as the baristas gossip about their bosses in the repercussion-free feel of the 5 am airport. I’m on my way home for the holidays. » Continue reading this post...

Smells Like Fall: Uncle Richard’s Apple Cider

Apples (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

It is one of my last evenings living in Neukölln, and I’m feeling prematurely nostalgic about the scratch of car wheels roughing up rain outside my ground floor window, the headlights shining in through the curtains, the soft glow of lights in my little room, and the way it’s always cold no matter how much you wear. For that reason, and because hot drinks are so well suited to nostalgia, I’ve warmed myself up a cup of homemade apple cider and am sitting here at my desk researching moving truck prices and trying to figure out what Kbpi/s means.

I made my first batch of  homemade apple cider last week, listening to soft music and letting the warm smell of cinnamon waft through the apartment. A few weeks before that, my uncle had sent around an email with his recipe for apple cider.

My uncle, who lives in West Virginia, is an avid and experimental cook, reconstructing his favorite dishes by taking them apart and building them back up again. I store the recipes in an email folder, saving them for a rainy day or an alignment of the proper stars. I have yet to try the French onion soup, Moroccan-style boneless pork ribs, and Pho broth, but this fall in Berlin has been gracious, and that’s enough stars to spend a day with a pot of cider simmering on the stove. » Continue reading this post...

City of Memory

In the Louvre (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

“Paris is a great blind love, we are all hopelessly in love, but there is something green, a kind of mist, I don’t know.”

Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar

I remember eating snails for the first time. I was fifteen, in a dim small bistrot in the Quartier Latin, and the waiter laughed to see the foreign teenager eager for garden pests. I remember scooping them out with a little fork and slurping the salty flesh, the dusky mouth feel of butter, garlic, and herbs. The bistrot was split over two levels, and I sat with my family on the upper level, looking down on the heads of the Parisians below. Young and golden-haired girls. I don’t know why that made such an impression on me. The table was darkly wooden, worn smooth by elbows and swipes of the kitchen rag and the whole place was dark. Deep red tapestries on the wall and strange, small knick-knacks powdered with dust on wooden ledges. Every now and then, the grit of sand between my teeth.

I feel beautiful in Paris. As if the cobblestones kiss my feet, and the wind blowing up the green Seine smell is a caress along my cheek.

I remember once, sitting in a café in Montmartre, before I went back later and it all seemed forced, sitting there with friends and a carafe of wine and a basket of pain, feeling very old. Paris was fresh, wrapping me up in its magic cloak, and of course the wine was bad and the checkered tablecloth covered in tannin spots and bread crumbs, but there beside our table were the artists with their thick trompe l’oeils of the Eiffel Tower, the Lautrec posters I bought by the ream to later hang in my college dorm room, the cafés the cafés the cafés with tiny tables and even tinier wickerwork chairs. » Continue reading this post...

How to Be Southern: Classic Fried Chicken

how to make fried chicken (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I want to be a Southern grandma when I grow up. I want to have a sweet drawl and spoil my grandchildren and make fried chicken every day.

Not just any fried chicken. This fried chicken. This crisp on the outside, meltingly soft on the inside, salty and a little bit spicy fried chicken.

I love when you have one of those moments where you’ve built something up so high that you know it can never be as good again – like a trip to your favorite childhood city or heroin – and then it’s just as great as you remember. The heroin is hearsay, I promise.

eggy goodness (Eat Me. Drink Me.) fried chicken (Eat Me. Drink Me.) fried chicken (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

This fried chicken is like that – Jamie and I made it a few summers ago (two?) in Brooklyn. We’d had one too many sweet tea vodka cocktails on the back porch while we gossiped like old ladies about everyone we knew and forgot the chicken we’d left to brine up in the kitchen. Late in the evening, when the summer sun was already starting to set, we remembered that the actual goal of the evening was to fry the chicken, not just bathe it. We swept our thoroughly brined chicken through buttermilk and a dredge of flour, salt, pepper, and Jamaican jerk seasoning, then fried it in a pan of hot oil. A crisp crust cracking open to reveal a steamy pocket of juicy meat – it was the best fried chicken I’ve ever had.

Jamie came to visit me in Berlin for Thanksgiving this year. I guess you can’t call two years in a row a true tradition, but it already feels like one. Of course we roasted a turkey and made all the traditional fixin’s – and this year, Jamie even brought a bag of marshmallows and a can of cranberry stuffing across the ocean – but what I really, really wanted to re-create was that fried chicken. » Continue reading this post...

In the Beginning, There Was Butter: Bagna Cauda

bagna cauda recipe (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

“You start with nine sticks of butter,” my aunt says, giving me the recipe for a dish which, at the end of its life, will contain fourteen sticks. Her voice is a Florida twang, an accent no one else in my family seems to have picked up as strongly, though when I am with her, I find my own vowels stretching out. I becomes Ah, as though I’ve been stuck into a Twilight Zone dentist’s office and every personal statement is a chance to glance at my sweet tea-ravaged cavities.

“This is the easy way, but the real way is, you’re going to want to chop up about three things of garlic – at least.” Except it sounds like, Yer gunna wunna

My aunt is referring not to cloves of garlic, but to heads, because this is the famed family recipe for banyacotta, which is the phonetic spelling for a dish which is actually a famed Italian recipe called bagna cauda. The recipe is basically the same. But I think my family uses more butter.

bagna cauda (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Banyacotta is a familial rite of passage. Lovers, fiancés, new spouses, children – you’re not a part of the family until you’ve eaten banyacotta.

This is mostly due to the fact that for a full two days after eating it, you trail the scent of garlic behind you thicker than Pepe le Pew on an amour trail. It is imperative, for this reason, that everyone in the family partake, so that we don’t notice our stench, naïvely wandering through the world in our own little garlic reek.

For a long time, I had no idea that banyacotta was not just something that had been handed down in my family from generation to generation. All of the friends I told about the dish – it’s a dip of butter, garlic, and anchovies and you eat it on cabbage – were disgusted (but then again, that isn’t quite the favorite foods lists of an eight year old). » Continue reading this post...

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my grandmother's wooden spoon (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

This spoon was a spoon that my grandmother held. She stirred soups with it, melted butter into noodles, nudged vegetables in a pan. All that’s left of it now is the wood that’s worn smooth and what was once a cupped surface that looks as if it’s been licked too many times. The handle is polished with palms and bent, warped from the heat of a skillet. My grandmother has been gone for years. I barely remember her. Although if I close my eyes I can still hear a laugh that I think belonged to her. I have nothing of hers except my name, and that too is shared with my other grandmother. But now I have this spoon.

It was probably once longer, and straighter, and more useful to use. And yet, this is how a wooden spoon should be – well worn, paced, serving until it disappears piece by piece into the dishes it stirs, and these hereditary splinters connect us. » Continue reading this post...

The Tea and the Honey Pot

the tea and the honey pot (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

If loneliness had a shape, it would be a cup of tea cooling on a white table. It is important that the table be empty, except, perhaps, for an open jar of honey and a naked spoon, just as it is important that the tea be cooling. The things themselves, hot tea and a honey pot are comforting things, but they are starkly separated on the table like sentinels. Nearly touching, but not. The cup will be blue and the honey pot smeared with stickiness along its sides. The type of tea won’t matter, but it should be sliced ginger and mint, so that the weak wisp of steam rising from the cup carries a faint, hopeless whisper of exoticism. The spoon will rest on the table like a compass point, as if to offer an answer. But the cup and the honey lie passive, waiting for an active agent – it must be the drinker of the tea – to dip the spoon in the honey, to drop a knob, sweet and the color of corn silk, into the tea. Are they any less lonely then, the cup and the pot? Or is it like this: the honey dissolves into the hot tea like a shipwrecked man in an ocean and the ocean is a little changed, but impassive and its own thing, alone. » Continue reading this post...