I need to preface all the rest of this with the following caveat: I have a terrible memory. I have only a handful of memories from childhood that I can pull up consistently and accurately. Most of them are culinary, and this is one of them. More surprisingly, I was probably no more than seven at the time, and maybe as young as five.
The story could stop there. Most kids of my generation, even the boys, probably got to help Mom in the kitchen a time or two during their early years, but with the boys, it usually stopped there. For me it did not, and there are at least three reasonable explanations that would fit.
One is that I really did love cooking from the start, and would beg to help as much as possible. By the age of ten, I was cooking on my own, no supervision, and this was some fairly complicated cooking for a ten year old. I could do this with my Mom's trust and blessing, because I had earned it. By that age I was cooking a lot. The next reason seems obvious to me now, but until recently I never would have considered it: I think my Mom looked at me and knew "This one is never going to get married". Not necessarily just because I was a gay in making, but I am, and always have been, a very free spirit.
It helped that my Mom worked nights (cocktail waitress in a supper club), and she was raising four kids on her own, no help from my Dad, the government or anyone. Never on food stamps, never on General Assistance. I think instinctively we all wanted to try and take some of the load off for her, so (mostly) me and my sister Pam took over a lot of the cooking and cleaning. My mother's standards were very high with both of these duties, and I think that setting the bar high at an early age wasn't bad in the least. She expected no less than she did, and I can thank her for my perfectionism, which I see as an asset, not a character flaw.
Remember now that this was the 60's. The extent of processed food could be summed up thus: Swanson TV dinners, Kraft Mac and Cheese, Top Ramen (still the staple of moneyless college students and welfare families everywhere), Campbell's Soup and Spaghetti-0's. That meant that unless you were a hapless bachelor with little money and barely the skill to boil water, one would tire very quickly of the food and move on to more challenging culinary turf, just from sheer lack of variety. The quality (palatability) of those mentioned was borderline passable, yet they were probably less toxic and more nutritious than the processed foods of today. The processed food landscape was, in few words, exceptionally bleak. Thank God!
So I started to cook, and cook well the vast majority of the time. I had the occasional flop, meaning that I either screwed it up, or I was attempting dishes beyond my skill level at the time. But I continued to challenge myself, never feeling that I had mastered cooking, and as a result, I became a pretty exceptional cook.
Now as I said, we were pretty darned poor, so that meant that as much as possible, we grew our own produce, went to pick our own at the pick-it-yourself farms at the edge of town, or went to farm stands (the precursor of the modern Farmer's Market). An interesting aside: most, if not all of these small family farms on the perimeter of my hometown have disappeared (which I would venture to guess is not at all uncommon elsewhere in the US today). They were at what was the edge of my town in the 1960's so it won't take Miss Marple to figure out what happened: suburban sprawl swallowed all of this land. The farmers were given offers they couldn't refuse, for what they thought was land that didn't have nearly the value that it actually had. The developers got hold of this, and these parts of unincorporated Missoula (the town in Montana from where I came) are now strip malls, casinos, big box stores and fast food crap holes. They started legalizing gambling in the late 70's, and as they have legalized more and more gaming, casinos have sprouted up like cockroaches. Probably the only thing keeping up with that pace with the growing number of casinos is the number of Gambler's Anonymous meetings that continue to sprout up.
Our grocery store meats were average by the standards of that time but probably still superior to today's meats at the big grocery chains. What we bought at the grocery store was supplemented with a number of fantastically lucky gifts. First was freshwater trout (my home town is at the confluence of three major rivers). This we either caught ourselves (my Mom used to be a decent fisherman) or it was donated from friends. We were also lucky to have friends that were either cattle ranchers or avid hunters, so we had a pretty reliable source for amazing beef (grass-fed and unlike anything you find today) and spectacular game meats: elk (my personal favorite), venison, antelope and wild water fowl (mostly ducks and geese) were the most common game meats we were given.
In many ways, I was the luckiest poor kid on earth. Here was my mother, raising two rowdy teenage sons, an eccentric daughter (who unfortunately fell down the rabbit hole of mental illness in her teens, never to recover), and a rather shy, sensitive, artistic and emotive young boy (me) on the salary of a cocktail waitress. Though we didn't have a lot of luxuries, we always had good, high-quality healthy food, and generally in abundance. If not abundance, at least we never suffered for lack of good food.
Since Montana has four real seasons, that meant there was a much shorter growing season than here in California. That meant that if we wanted to have that quality produce year around, we had to preserve it. Can I digress here again? Now that I am eating outdoor-grown tomatoes, and have been for the last few weeks, can someone please tell me why we Americans decided to accept those crappy hot-house cultivated orbs of pale red cardboard trash that are called tomatoes? Calling them vine-ripened is a guise, in case you didn't know it (and an insult to vines everywhere). Once picked, there is very little ripening that happens with tomatoes, so they spoil, but unless you define spoiling as ripening, then this is a bullshit phrase. All ripe tomatoes are vine-ripened. Tomatoes grow on a vine, so that is the only place where they can ripen. I guess that after enough years of seeing that moniker used in labeling these mushy or chewy, mealy and tasteless pieces of junk, most people will forget that real tomatoes that taste like real fruit have to be grown outdoors and in the dirt, not hydroponically in a growth substrate and fed a chemical stew in corporate hot-houses.
But back to preserving food. Back then, if one's family was at the bottom end of the income scale (aka, the poverty line), or if one grew up in a farming family, or if one's parents grew up in a farming family and grew up during the depression (that would be my Mother), then one "put up" for the winter.
There are 4 basic methods of preserving food: canning, freezing, fermenting and dehydrating. I attempted a little dehydrating as a kid (apple rings) with moderate success, but other than that, canning (especially) and fermentation seemed like hocus-pocus. My mother didn't do any brine and crock fermentation (coleslaw, barrel pickles, etc.), but she did do a lot of canning (primarily) and freezing. The extent to which I was allowed to help encompassed a little stirring, but mostly, it was watching. For the record, I'm thankful that she didn't have me do a lot of the cooking with hot pack canning (heating the food to boiling before packing in a sterilized jar, as opposed to packing cold, otherwise known as raw pack). I'm also thankful that she kept me at a bit of a distance until my late teen years with this and with candy making for the same reason: boiling sugar (and gloppy food) is like napalm if it gets boiling too hard and starts to splatter. I've yet to meet anybody who has done any substantial amount of canning or candy-making who has not given themselves a nasty blistering burn at one time or another. Speaking for myself, it has happened more times than I can count, which is why I try to remember to keep a big bowl of ice water at the ready before I start canning or candy-making. If I'm being totally honest here, I'm a bit of a klutz. I always have been, and my Mom figured that out rather quickly. The bowl of ice water, by the way, is a good hint. It's also a great idea if you're working with hot glue.
But back to canning. About the most that I did was help make jam and seal the jars, since at that time, it was standard to seal the jars with melted paraffin instead of vacuum sealing in a hot water submersion bath. This is now not ever recommended, since it is at best a suspect airtight seal. They leak all the time. I'm still alive after years of eating jam from paraffin-sealed jars, but it's still not that safe. The wax was hot, but not that hot (ask any pervert with a fetish for having hot wax dripped on them), so my Mom wasn't that worried.
(Skip to Saturday night/early Sunday morning: two days later)
Well, as is my lot of late with all this Interferon crap, my days and levels of energy are unpredictable. As a general rule thus far, the unpredictability seems to rarely work out in my favor. This has forced me to be even more adaptable to the situation than Chronic Fatigue Syndrome already did, or the consequences were more than unpleasant. I've definitely become a lot more obedient to the limits my body is imposing on me, rather than trying to fight it, overdo, exacerbate the symptoms, and set in motion an infinite loop of exhaustion, frustration, fallibility, vulnerability and ultimately, bouts of depression here and there. Thus far, this has all been manageable, but I'm keenly aware that this could change at any moment for no apparent reason, and I think that this realization, more than anything else, has finally taught me to listen when the body says "no more". I've always tried to fight that (emphasis on try), and most often I have failed.
So to make a short story long, every week I'm having more lengthly bouts of post-Interferon symptoms, and it's also become more unpredictable. Mondays are a given, that is my "glued to the couch watching movies" day. Tuesdays are becoming more and more like Mondays, and sometimes it creeps well into Wednesdays. So the rest of the week I try to play catch-up: pay bills, do my banking, maybe a little housecleaning, maybe a little time in the garden before it becomes stinking hot. Then, every now and then, a bad day (or two) will creep up on me insidiously and knock me down for the day. This has been a great lesson in patience, adaptability and acceptance.
But enough about that; let's get back to the canning. Thus far, Saturdays have been predictably "ok to good". This means that my morning involves hitting the Farmer's Market, then back home to canning, or whatever other preserving I'm doing. Now that the fire has been lit under me, I really savor the satisfaction that comes with the art and ritual of canning. I've pretty much taken up its practices with a faith that is almost religious. But as I was getting ready to talk about before I pooped out on Thursday, leaving this post unfinished, canning is kind of magical. To be honest it had always seemed somewhat surreal and supernatural to me, bizarre as that may sound. You have this very sanitary hygenic ritual, governed by a doctrine of unbendable and/or unbreakable laws. In this case, the wages of sin (well, breaking these rules) can potentially be death. Yesterday (Friday) my final weapon in my arsenal that will take me through the battle of the microbes one can get from unsanitary food handling practices is now mine: my brand-spanking new pressure canner-cooker.
I didn't just go for your garden-variety, typical little household pressure cooker. No sir, this is THE industrial shit. It is a 30 quart All American forged aluminum gasket-less metal to metal (pot to lid) vessel which is secured shut with 6 big eye bolts. Today I did 13 pint and 1 half pint jars of beets. And this is why I love this pressure cooker so: I processed every last one of them in a single batch, instead of the usual 7 jar batch that my old water bath canner maxes out at. And this is some serious shit. If it were any bigger, I really doubt I could fit it correctly onto the cooktop. This is no small cooktop either, mind you, it a 5 burner, 36" cooktop that has yet to have found a pot that it couldn't handle. It can handle this one just fine, but I think that I'm pretty close to its capacity, at least in size, with this cauldron.
Then, after I finished that little all-day project, I decided to try a little recipe in the book that came with the canner: chocolate bread pudding. The recipe is simple and the ingredients are ones that most cooks have in their kitchen: bread, milk, eggs, sugar, chocolate, vanilla and salt. The recipe is a very simple one, that is, long as you follow the recipe. Well, I guess that was too much for me. I had the custard ready to go in the cooker, when I got the last-minute inspiration to add some chocolate chips, just to tip the scale over to "fabulous". I grabbed a handful of chips, scattered them over the top of the custard, put the dish in the cooker, clamped down the lid, cranked up the fire and let her rip.
Unfortunately, I forgot to read that last crucial instruction: you (well I guess except for stupid me) are supposed to cover the dish before starting the cooking. D'oh! I don't think I need to fill you in much on the gloppy details, but suffice to say that I'm just thankful that it didn't leave custard splattered all over the interior of the new cooker. I had another bright idea: I would put it under the broiler (low heat broiler) and cook off some of the excess moisture. In the meantime, I was going down to the market and get more milk, because I didn't have a ton of faith in my fix-it idea, and I was going to make it right AND tonight, gosh darn it.
Good thing my expectations were low, as it was an only slightly satisfying fix. What I got out of it after browning under the broiler was a lovely, caramelized chocolate-laden crust with a lot of gloppy unset overly-moist separated custard (the kind of custard looks like scrambled eggs instead of a smooth pudding-like custard. And when I say gloppy, I mean saturated with so much water that it was ridiculous. And then back to the races I went.
My closest grocery store is a small local chain (no more than three in total) that is very yuppy but has great food, exceptional produce for a grocery store and has incredible real old-timey fish and meat markets and a gorgeous bakery. There are doors on two sides of the store; on the north and south walls and directly across from each other. If you enter through the south doors you hit the full service deli, and if you come in through the North entrance (as I usually do) and did tonight, you pass the bakery. This led to another epiphany: Brioche! I ask the bakery girl if they have brioche, since I've never gotten it there before, and lo and behold, not only did they have it, but it is the real thing. Better yet, it was sold in small loaves, about 1/3 of the size of a typical loaf of brioche. And it is divine. When I opened the bag, I swear to God, I smelled Paris. Back home I go to seek some pastry redemption.
In another 5 or 10 minutes I have another batch whipped up, and back she went into the kettle, this time with not just a lid, but a sheet of foil that was held down by the lid and created what turned out to be an exceptionally moisture-proof covering. Then, as I let that cook up, I finished up cleaning and chopping the greens from about 12-15 pounds of beets, then blanched and prepped them for freezing. They are in the freezer overnight, so by tomorrow they will have set to a nice flash-freeze firmness, which will help then hold up really well to thawing and cooking.
Oh, and how could I forget! I made my first batch of sauerkraut today. I have now officially popped my fermentation cherry. It seems to be (so far) pretty darned easy. You chop a lot of cabbage, one head at a time. You then put the chopped cabbage in your crock (I'm using a typical restaurant twenty two liter thick food-grade plastic canister). Then you sprinkle three tablespoons of kosher salt over the cabbage and you don some rubber gloves (unless you have a pain fetish for hundreds of little stinging abrasions from coarse salt), and then you stick those latex-clad fists into the salty brine, because you have to pound the crap out of the cabbage. I am not playing here either, you make a tight fist, and you beat the hell out of the cabbage, using that combination of physical force plus the osmotic nature of salt to draw all the water out of the cabbage.
You basically do this until you have drawn out enough of the water from the cabbage to fully submerge it in the brine. You then find a cover that will go down on top of the cabbage and is as close as possible in circumference to the inside circumference of the crock. You place that cover (mine was a large heavy dinner plate) over the cabbage and then weigh it down with sufficient force to keep the cabbage packed and fully submerged (I filled a gallon ziplock with brine and packed that closed ziplock into a foodsaver bag and heat-adhered the seal at both ends). This is highly unlikely to leak, but even if it does, all is not lost, because since the bag is filled with brine, at worst there will be excessive brine that I can then ladle out.
The crock is then covered with a towel, in order to both allow airflow, which is required unless you want nasty cabbage, and to also keep out foreign matter, like dirt, dust, food particles, whatever. Every five or so days, I'll remove the towel and inspect the surface of the brine. If it's scummy, I'll skin off the scum. As long as the cabbage is fully submerged in the brine it won't spoil and I needn't worry. If things are going perfectly I should have fantastic, homemade sauerkraut, which makes what you get at the supermarket such an inferior product that you feel sorry for it. My grandma used to make her own in one of the old pickling crocks in the root cellar and the family would have enough sauerkraut until the following summer.
I still to this day remember two things about my Grandma (my mother's mother): her sauerkraut and her Swedish rosette cookies. Mind you, she has been dead since 1986, and the last time I saw her was around 1974. I always thought it was funny that one of the two foods whose preparation she had truly mastered in my mind was a Swedish dish. My Grandma was a spectacular cook, and it's something that one might not have expected of a girl that was coming of age in the aristocratic class in England, when in the middle of WW1, she met my Grandad, a humble farmer from Idaho. She gave up all her riches and privilege (she was a model at Harrod's Dept. Store in London as well, so she was no slouch) to move to the US and become an Idaho farmer's wife. She was a beautiful charming sophisticated and gracious lady.
That lady could cook circles around most anyone. She was an amazing gardener, and every summer of my mother's childhood and well beyond, harvested and preserved as much of the bounty of her garden as she could. She also had a smokehouse for meats (mostly game and fish) and the fish especially was amazing. Her home where she retired in Southern British Columbia, just across the border from Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, was on a lake. Actually, it was a lakeside home on one of the largest lakes in North America and west of the Rocky Mountains: Kootenai Lake. That lake was teeming with fish, at least in the 60's and 70's, the years where I spent the most time there. My memories of that time are sporadic, but especially in regard to my time at my Grandmother's, I have many distinct, clear and detailed memories.
So here I am, I've managed to lead you on the long and circuitous journey, but I did do it for a reason. I wanted to put my culinary obsessions in perspective. Hopefully I've painted a picture that comes at least slightly close to describing the combination of my love of good cooking, perfectionism and desire to create these transcendent gastronomical experiences has brought me to this point. Either that, or I've confused the hell out of you.
But it's not about you, it's about me. I don't say this selfishly or with hubris, but this is my journey. You are either the lucky or unlucky hitchhiker that I picked up on some dusty country road on a warm late summer day, perhaps to go search for wild berries out in the woods. On the other hand, you might not really like the artistic flourish that some of us authors tend to use when waxing sentimental. In that case, just don't read the last paragraph of my posts.
Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.
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