A Little Old Essay About Food and Dead Mothers

Happy Thanksgiving

I find it harder and harder with each passing year to celebrate Thanksgiving. This year, that feeling is magnified by the crisis in the Middle East, as so much of its nature hinges on the idea of occupied land, of what belongs to who, and of the ramifications these events will have for millennia (if we humans last that long; doubtful). What are we celebrating when we celebrate Thanksgiving? Occupation. Extermination. Manifest Destiny! We’re celebrating the history as told by the winners, because that’s who gets to tell the stories of how we got here.

It also doesn’t help that I recently watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the American buffalo, which is as much a story about the animal as it is about the horrors inflicted on native Americans by European settlers and white Americans. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

What I do look forward to each year is time spent with family (whether through blood or choice) and the food, drinks, and laughs we’ll share. And so it seemed apropos to dig this old essay out, especially considering that my kids are home from school most of this week, leaving me little time to write an essay. Still, I wanted to share something.

I wrote a this essay few years ago, exploring the way food ties us to our history. It was originally published on the outstanding literary site Catapult (RIP) and was one of the first things I was ever paid real money to write. In a way, I consider it my first big success as a freelance writer, one who was still under the delusion that maybe I could make a living writing personal essays! Lulz.

And so, whether you, like me, struggle with the why of Thanksgiving, bear in mind that, if nothing else, it keeps our dead close to us.

I hope you enjoy this essay. And have a great holiday, however you celebrate it.

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My Family’s Secret (Recipe) for Immortality

Food one was of the methods I employed to stay close to Emily during the long stretches when we were apart. The first few years of our relationship found us away from each other for weeks and months at a time, leaving us to build the foundation of our being as a unit via texts, emails, and phone calls.

Every day we’d talk and every day the conversation would be similar to the day before.

“What are you doing today?”

“Driving.”

“All day?”

“All day.”

“How was last night’s show?”

“It was amazing/great/good/okay/bad/terrible.”

“Where’d you sleep?”

“On someone from the opening band’s floor.”

And then she’d ask, “What’d you guys eat?”

This question is where the mundanity of being a touring musician would end, and where the conversation with my then-girlfriend, now-wife would begin in earnest.

Being on the road is the same exact day hundreds of times over. Wake up, drive all day, unload the van, soundcheck, eat, play, drink, load the van, sleep, repeat. Two-hundred-and-fifty times a year. Eventually, the towns and cities all look the same, the various interstates seem to merge into one, the local bands sound eerily similar and it becomes hard to discern one club from the next.

The punk houses that would let us crash all had the same distinct smell of rotten beer, stale cigarette smoke, and cat piss. The highway rest stops all offered the exact same snacks, trinkets, and DVDs, in the exact same location in every store, no matter where in America we found ourselves.

With all of that mundanity, food was the variable. The chicken in Memphis is inherently different than the chicken in Oxford. Tacos in LA gave way to Mission burritos in San Francisco. The breakfast omelette our hosts in Iowa City made us possessed some little kick that I will never be able to quite place. And to experience the barbecue from North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama all within days of each other highlighted the nuance of each area’s famed cuisine.

About halfway through a tour, my conversations with Emily would evolve to include not only what I ate the night before but what I craved when I got home. There was always a list that had to be checked shortly after any tour’s conclusion.

Vanessa’s Dumplings, Patrizia’s in Williamsburg, a dirty water hot dog in Washington Square Park and Number 1 Chinese on Orchard Street when we lived in Lower Manhattan; Pizzeria Toro, Mediterranean Deli and real Carolina barbecue after we moved to Chapel Hill.

And salad. Lots and lots of salad.

“I haven’t had a green in months,” I’d joke.

More than anything, I wanted to stand over our stove beside Emily, showing her the intricacies of the gravy my mother once showed me to make, spending an entire day with her in our little Lower East Side apartment or our big Chapel Hill house, cooking in the same clothes we slept in, doing nothing, not loading in or loading out, and definitely not driving. Just watching the pot, stirring, adding, tasting, smelling, and recounting the stories of my mother and the pot of bubbling gravy before us, stories Emily had no doubt heard hundreds of times before, yet always welcomed with a smile.

“I’ll make the gravy as soon as I get home,” I’d promise.

*

Two years ago, after nearly a decade of working ourselves exhausted to the tune of those two-hundred or so days each year, our band played its final show. A sold-out party at a club mere blocks from where we played our first gig nearly a thousand shows before, it was a beer-drenched exaltation of everything we came to represent: hard work, good times, and loud, propulsive rock and roll.

But now I’m home. And home is different. Home is routine.

We watch Jeopardy every night and I have a bit of disposable income again, which means I can go record shopping and take care of Emily and do the little things that make her happy,  like paying for the boring shit like laundry detergent and shampoo.

I can make all of my buddies’ weddings and their bachelor parties and the christenings of their new babies and their weekend get-togethers, no longer having to pass due to my being in Ventura or Boise or Minnesota or Louisiana. I can create a home with Emily. I can help around the house. I can fold laundry and build shelves and put together light fixtures and do the heavy lifting and put away the dishes. I can crawl into my own bed and read. I can build a life and a community here in Chapel Hill.

I can make gravy. I can spend entire Sundays beside the bubbling pot. I can stand beside the woman that became my wife, stirring the gravy, explaining to her what each of the ingredients is offering to the whole of the pot.

And just as food kept me close to Emily as I drove every mile of American highway, it keeps me close to my mother, enjoying the connection that our gravy provides as often as I chose, as she grows further and further away from me with each passing day.

My mother was a world-class Italian-American cook. One of the first things I selfishly thought when we learned that she wouldn’t survive her battle with cancer was that I needed to learn to make her signature dishes.

She knew why I asked her then. She happily obliged, telling me that it would be one of the myriad ways she would stay close to me long after she died. She knew how limited her time was and it made her happy that the children I might someday have, the children she would never meet, would one day eat the same pot of gravy that she made for me nearly every Sunday.

*

Time has passed. While I’ll never get over the pain of losing my mother, I have learned how to live with the sadness. I’m able to process and compartmentalize the heartache in a way that was entirely impossible in the first few months and years after my mother’s death.

People always tell you that loss gets easier with time. That’s bullshit. It doesn’t get easier. You simply figure out how to deal with it better. You become an expert in the management of sadness.

There’s not a day I don’t think about my mother in some capacity. Even when I’m not actively remembering her smile, her laugh, her goofy nature, her thick-as-tomato-paste Jersey City accent, she’s in the back of my mind, lingering between the mundanity of daily life—the checklists that never end, the routine of being a husband, a father, a homeowner—and the grand and existential wonder, fear, anxiety, and anticipation that hides in the dark corners of all of our thoughts.

But on gravy day, she is right next to me at my stove, tasting, talking, laughing, smiling, alive. And my heart is full and the sadness disappears.

This is the strange power that food has over us. It’s tactile. It’s aromatic. It’s visual. And thus, it is wholly immersive. It commands all of our attention, thus it allows us to feel comfort often in ways that no other medium does because of its wholly enveloping nature. For me, it is a time machine. For my mother, it is immortality.

*

Sunday. Our front door is wide open and the benevolent North Carolina sun douses our hardwood floor with light. It’s unseasonably hot. I think. Perhaps it’s normally hot. I’m new to the South. Back in New York City, fall has begun to make her early bite. Sunday morning music lilts from our stereo. Jonathan Richman or Comet Gain or Wings or Patsy Cline. It’s not even eight in the morning and I’m wide awake, a dense wave of caffeine courtesy of three or four cups of black coffee coursing through me, my kitchen operating at full bore.

Sundays are gravy day.

Though hardly labor intensive, the making of a proper Italian-American Sunday gravy should take at least six hours on the stove. At least six hours of bubbling crimson stew. Six hours of not doing much of anything, save the occasional stir with a gravysmith’s most trusted weapon: his wooden spoon.

Each of the four burners on our stove is accounted for. On one stands the herculean lobster pot I grabbed from my mother’s kitchen in the days following her death, which is the primary vessel for the tomato sauce. The other three burners are full with pans of crackling and popping meat that will soon go in the grand pot.

Once the lobster pot is half-full with the sauces, tomatoes, onions, and spices on the stove, the time comes to add the meat. The pork chops, the steaks, the meatballs, and the sausage links don’t get cooked on the stove top. Rather they are browned in olive oil and garlic, and tossed in the lobster pot with the tomato sauce, where they will spend the next six or seven hours fully cooking through, slowly becoming the fall-off-the-bone fare that dance in the dreams of North Carolina’s famed BBQ pitmasters.

As the meat cooks, their fats, marrows, and juices blend with the tomato sauce, abiding in its evolution from red to something that is almost brown, a rust color with a brim of black crust around the surface edge.

“See that,” I always tell Emily, pointing to the black upper rim of the gravy. “See how it’s not really red anymore? That’s how you know it’s getting there.”

It’s a sentence, word for word, my mother would tell me as she scooped out an early meatball for me to eat when she was healthy, or later, sick, when she was still here. Her lips would smack with excitement at the gravy she had made ten thousand times before, as though this pot would be more perfect than any that had ever come before.

“Oh, that’s good,” she’d say, slurping a bit from her wooden spoon, eyes closed, corners of her mouth upturned in smile.

If you really know what you’re doing, at some point or another, the uppermost layer of your pot may very well resemble something more akin to motor oil rather than something you’d douse over a bowl of pasta shells. When it’s closer to black than it is to red, greasy, spotty, and oily, is when gravy is at its best.

This is the point when “sauce” becomes gravy.

The recipe is simple, really. The ingredient list short. Canned tomato sauce and paste, diced tomatoes, fresh tomatoes blanched and cut into fat chunks, thick as small stones, garlic, white onions, olive oil, salt, pepper both black and red, and fresh basil. Throw all in a large pot on medium-low heat, wait, stirring occasionally.

Of course, as the Italian adage goes, the final, unequivocal and most important ingredient is a little bit of love. As my mother would often remind me, “to cook with your heart is to cook perfectly. Cook with love and you’ll never make a bad dish.”

In the Italian-American household, gravy is sacrosanct. It’s more than just a pasta dish. It’s an heirloom, a link from past to present. It’s having my mother, right there in my kitchen next to me every time I devote my entire Sunday to a pot of gravy. It’s having my great-grandparents and their great-grandparents around my little stove, each adding their own little secret to our communal pot. Someday people who will never have met me will be sitting down over a bowl of the same gravy that I make today in my North Carolina kitchen.

It is because of this that my family’s gravy is more priceless to me than any piece of jewelry passed through the generations, than any story, legend, or anecdote that is routinely recounted every holiday over the family table. Perhaps it is that those artifacts, at their inception, were the property of someone else, someone specific. Conversely, this bubbling pot is ours. No single person has ever owned it. Every time it sits atop my stove, it is a marriage of the past and the present. It is the confluence of all Italian-Americans. It’s our universal inheritance. It is the singular thread, the living heirloom that ties us all together.

Once the meat has been browned and is tossed in with the sauce, the rest of the day is of relative leisure. You need nothing more than to stir the pot every ten or fifteen or twenty minutes as the tomatoes, the acid, the natural sugars, the marrow from the bones of the meat, the basil, the pepper, the salt, the sugar all work together and dance their fierce, boiling ballet inside of the massive pot.

When you think of it as such, you become ancillary to the gravy itself. You’re no more than a stirrer, a facilitator, whereas the parts of the whole become the cook.

As pragmatism is often the best sous chef, always listen to your pot when making gravy. Let the gravy be your guide. Tastes like it needs salt? Add salt. Too tangy? Add sugar. Not enough onions? Add more onions.

My mother always said, “You don’t need no fuckin’ recipe to make this stuff.”

Start with a little bit of everything. If it’s not enough, add more. If it’s too much, don’t use so much next time.

Stir, stir, stir. Six, seven, eight hours into the cook, still we sit, occasionally sneaking meatballs, eating them from a coffee mug with a tiny dab of gravy on top, just like mom taught me.

“That’s the best way to eat ‘em,” she would always tell me about the fist-sized meatballs. “Just make sure you don’t eat ’em all. Leave enough for Daddy.”

Eventually, the lights go off and a single bulb above our stove is the only thing that illuminates our kitchen. The gravy still bubbles in the pot, the stirrer occasionally stirs.

When it’s time, we pour the gravy over top a pile of airy and bouncy shells or penne, topped with fresh grated Pecorino Romano, with our homegrown basil providing the perfect aromatic counterpoint to the gravy’s pungently aggressive tone.

*

We had our first baby recently, a little boy we named Julius. Watching Emily become a mother makes me wonder how I ever chose to spend so much time away from her, how I ever survived without her every single day. I wonder how we did what we did, how selflessly she allowed me to chase my dreams.

I think of the gravy and the dumplings and the chicken and the Number 1 Chinese, the phone calls and the texts and the ways she reminds me of my mother. I think of the way we somehow made our relationship work, despite the thousands of miles so often between us.

I look at her holding our Julius, our Jules, our Julie, and my mind can’t help but wander to my mother. I think of how much she’s missed out on in death, how she’ll never get to hold or rock my son to sleep, never get to see him grow or watch his soccer or football games, never see him ship off to college or dance with him at his wedding, never get to see the parts of her that manifest in him; the stubbornness that she gave me, the resolve, the forgiveness, the passion, the empathy that I hope will someday compose the core of who he is.

I promise myself that I won’t be afraid to talk to him about my mother, that I’ll tell him everything I can about the grandmother he’ll never meet, as he is who he is because of who she was. And I’ll tell my little boy the stories about my mother that I love the most and I’ll remind him of her goodness and her kindness and her patience and her toughness and her attitude and her accent.

And someday, I’ll show him how to make her gravy. And someday we’ll stand together in the kitchen, lording over the pot as the bubbling sauce magically transforms into gravy, aprons on, wooden spoons in hand.

And in those moments there she’ll be, in our kitchen, standing beside the little boy she never got to meet.