(gentle readers: the events surrounding the exile of my pastor last month have apparently been traumatic enough to knock the creative wind out of me, temporarily. While I am getting my groove back and unmixing my metaphors, here is something I wrote last year. It was a response to the wonderful Recipe Narratives of A. Massey, and in that way it is really about interdependence as much as it is about spaghetti sauce.)
Red Sauce Stories (for Massey)
Waiting for the red sauce recipe that is the Meaning of Life, I remind myself of my own little stories:
Story No. 1: The story of how quickly the feudalism, Italian words, Albanian words, poverty, separation, loss, struggle, war, humiliation, alienation are erased and forgotten by the very next generations until all that remains is the food and memories of food. And a very few songs.
Story No. 2: Once upon a time there were no recipes. There was The Way We Do It. And there were many wrong ways, all of them outrageous and deliberately provocative and shameless in their wrongness.
Story No. 3: By your sauce shall you be known. What kind of people are we? We are Not the kind of people who: Put sugar in their sauce. Put carrots in the sauce. Put wine in the sauce. Put anything less than two kinds of meat in the sauce. Sicilians put sugar in their sauce. We are not Sicilians. But we liked the Godfather. But we're not like the Corleones. They probably put sugar in their sauce.
Story No. 4: The story of the gallons of sauce in my grandmother's freezer that my parents rationed out for a year after she died, so that on any given Sunday at their house you might find yourself still being fed and loved and fussed over by my beautiful dead grandma. Bonus story: On the day we buried her, a hundred or so people gathered afterwards for lunch and on every table there were baskets of sweet bread that my grandmother had baked and kept in her freezer to give to people she loved.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
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4 comments:
Oh Suzanne, the story about Grandma feeding her loved ones after her death had me burst into sobs.
I made sauce from my dead friend's tomatoes back in November. Her beloved gave me the tomatoes which were languishing in two Safeway paper bags for a week or two after Stacy died.
I roasted and pureed them, cooked them down into sauce with the addition of the last of my own basil. Got 4 pints of sauce. Gave 3 Stacy's beloved, kept one for Tara and myself, as Stacy was Tara's best friend.
So there is a piece of Stacy in my pantry. I take out the jar and just hold it sometimes to remember Stacy.
Thank you for this.
Maddy
sweet maddy-
You know what I am talking about. Maybe we will be lucky enough to have our gardens, or our cooking, or our generosity outlive us and bring some comfort to the people who love us. I am thinking about you and Tara and the loss of your friend Stacy.
I think I will shamelessly steal story #4, so to speak. the same thing happened on the day we buried my grandfather. he'd made an elaborate thanksgiving meal a few days before his death, and there we all were, eating the leftovers in mourning. it was a ricotta and dried fruit torte. and it was *good*.
Thanks for this. Red sauce recipe to be unveiled soon, as soon as my hand-winders develop enough momentum.
This is great info to know.
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