River of Words

I was too short to reach the faucet, so to ask my mother for a glass of water, I said “un vas d’aigua, si us plau.” But if I had to ask the maid, I said instead “un vaso de agua, por favor.” Somehow I knew to speak to my parents, my aunts, and my grandparents in Catalan, a Romance language born of the sloppy Latin of the Roman soldiers who occupied the northeast of Spain. But to speak to the maid, who came from the south, I used Castilian, another descendant of bastardized Latin.

When Ferdinand and Isabella unified the various kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in the 15^th century, Castilian, known in the rest of the world as Spanish, became the official language of the new country, and a centuries-long suppression of regional languages such as Catalan and Basque began.Growing up under Franco’s dictatorship, my generation wrote and spoke Spanish, which was enforced as the language of public life, more correctly than Catalan. But for all his efforts to eradicate it, Franco could not erase Catalan from the dining room table with its cruet of olive oil and its bottle of dark red Priorat, or from the bedtime stories, the nightly prayers, and the lullabies.

Although as a toddler I didn’t think much about the difference between Spanish and Catalan, I was acutely aware of the distinctions between barceloní , the variety of Catalan spoken in Barcelona and by my father and his family, and lleidatà, the variety spoken in the province of Lleida, a mere eighty miles away, where my mother came from. Although as a city kid I should have spoken barceloní, my heart belonged to the horses, pigs and chickens, the wheat field and the grape arbor of my maternal grandparents’ farm, and I proudly spoke a countrified lleidatà.

But whether barceloní  or lleidatà , I spent my childhood swimming in a river of language that flowed over and around me and sometimes threatened to engulf me.  If you had asked me in my earliest years what adults did, I would have answered that they talked. At our house the radio was only turned on for selected programs, and there was no television. So people talked, all day and far into the night, as a kind of sport.

My mother and her sisters talked while they mended their stockings, ironed their blouses, or braided my hair. If one of them gave an opinion, the other countered it. If one told a story, the other corrected, expanded, and topped it with an even better one. When my father came home from rehearsal at the Liceu, the Barcelona opera house, he told us about the fabulous all-Black American company that had come to perform Porgy and Bess, or the amazing ballerina Maria Tallchief--also American, and a real Indian. Back from the bakery with the midday loaf of crusty bread, the maid relayed what she had heard the baker’s wife say as she stood in line.

After the meal I would sit on my mother’s lap while the adults lingered at  the table, talking. With my head on her chest I could predict by her intake of breath when she was about to say something. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I knew if she was feeling excited or angry by the rhythms of her breathing and the resonance of her voice inside her rib cage—the same rhythms and sounds that had lulled me during the nine months I had inhabited her body.

Words, followed by sudden pauses and then more words, swirled around me as I drowsily pressed a moistened fingertip onto the tablecloth to pick up the last crusty crumbs of bread. People gestured and exclaimed, burst into laughter, interrupted and talked over each other. This was not considered impolite, but rather a sign of interest and engagement.  Failure to participate prompted anxious inquiries: “You haven’t said much.  Are you coming down with a cold? You should have worn a sweater this morning. Let me feel your forehead...” (To be continued.)

When Did Bread Become Bad?

It used to be the staff of life.  Now, you'd think it was the staff of death.

If the latter is true, it's a miracle that I survived my Barcelona childhood, for my days were punctuated by slices of bread.  Bread and butter for breakfast and, after school, bread and chocolate, or pa sucat amb oli--bread drizzled with olive oil.  And bread with lunch and dinner.

I can still hear my mother's serrated knife cutting into the brittle crust as crumbs exploded everywhere.  The pale yellow and gray tiles of the dining room floor had to be swept after every meal.  But before that, as my parents and my aunts lingered over a dessert of almonds, oranges, or dried figs I would lick my index finger and press it into the little shards of crust on the tablecloth and eat crumbs until only flour dust remained.

When we moved to the land of Dixie in the late 50s, the supermarket shelves only stocked variations on Wonder Bread, and my father used to say, wrinkling his nose at the floppy white square in his hand, "this bread--it's like eating a piece of towel!"  There were no crumbs to sweep up after those meals.

Me, I even kind of liked Wonder Bread, but then, in the 1970s, when my children were young and I was trying with all my might to do the right thing, I found a recipe for whole-wheat bread that was supposed to be healthy and nutritious.  For years I spent Sunday afternoons baking six-loaf batches, which I would then slice with an electric meat slicer and freeze.  That bread was nothing like the crusty Catalan bread of my childhood, and my kids were embarrassed to take it to school in their lunch boxes, but it was sweet, nutty and robust and oh, how the kitchen smelled on Sunday afternoons.

The downfall of bread began shortly after that.  First, we were told that it was fattening;  then there was concern that its carbohydrate load would cause hypoglycemia;  and finally, millions of people developed wheat allergies that ranged from annoying to life-threatening.

I was one of the many who developed a sensitivity to wheat, and for a year I abstained from it altogether, a sacrifice compared to which giving up cigarettes in my twenties was a snap.  Now I can eat wheat, as long as I don't eat too much, or too often.

I come from generations of bread eaters.  True, they didn't grow nearly as tall as milk-and-meat-fed Americans, but they were healthy enough, and not a single one was obese.  So what has changed?   Did the old varieties of wheat have something that the new ones don't, or vice versa?   Have our bodies evolved away from this most basic of foods?

These days I hardly ever eat bread, for where is the pleasure in eating only a little and not too often?  If I have to monitor every bite, I'd just as soon do with no bites at all.  But still, I mourn the absence of bread from my life.

I may some day look into the matter of wheat varieties, and see if there are any that are less noxious than others.  And if there are, I know how I'll be spending my Sunday afternoons.

My Mother And The Mediterranean Diet

If my mother, who turned 95 last week, could understand it, she would feel pleased and vindicated by the recent brouhaha about the Mediterranean diet.  In case you have been news deprived lately, this has to do with the large study in Spain which had to be halted because the positive effects of the diet on the experimental group were so strong that it was deemed unethical to deprive the control group (who were eating a "healthy" diet based mainly on lettuce and such) of its benefits.

Here's what to do if you want to live forever.  Eat little dairy and meat.  Eat fish three times a week. There's no such thing as too much olive oil. Eggs are fine, as is chicken, in moderation.  You can eat all the nuts you want, as well as veggies, legumes and fruit. Chocolate and wine are good.  And, this is my favorite part: several times a week, saute onions and garlic in olive oil, then add tomatoes and simmer;  eat this on rice or pasta.

I was born a few blocks from the sea in the days when Mediterraneans still ate the Mediterranean diet.  My mother used to buy olive oil in four-litre cans, and garlic by the braid.  Every morning she or the maid (in post civil-war Spain you didn't have to be wealthy to have a live-in maid) would grab a basket and go to the market to buy bass, whitefish, mackerel, sardines, octopus, squid, mussels or crayfish, which we would have for the main meal, between one and two in the afternoon.  Dinner, around ten at night, was a one-egg omelet, cooked in olive oil.  For an after-school snack, I was given the food of the gods, pa sucat amb oli i xocolata--a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with olive oil and salt, and a piece of barely sweet dark chocolate on the side.


Our diet varied according to the season:  salads and green beans and melons in summer;  cauliflower and swiss chard and dried beans in winter, with almonds and raisins, and the occasional orange, for dessert.  A glass of wine with every meal.

Except for the after-school snack, everything we ate had to be prepared at home.  Meat and vegetables had to be washed, trimmed, sauteed.  Sauces--the garlic and onion sofregit, the velvety bechamel, the almond-based romesco, the divine allioli--had to simmer patiently.  The table cloth had to be laid and the table set, the family summoned.  After each meal the dining room had to be swept (you wouldn't believe what a mess all that crusty bread makes), and the dishes washed and dried by hand.  Food was not a casual affair.  It kept women from becoming lawyers, accountants and astronauts.  It was a daily ritual that enslaved its priestesses.

One thing people hardly ever cooked at home was dessert.  The only home-made one I can remember was the crema catalana, similar to creme brulee, that my aunt who lived with us made on the feast of Saint Joseph.  All the other desserts came from the pastisseria, the neighborhood pastry shop:  tortell de Reis for the feast of the  Epiphany;  mona de Pascua at Easter; coca de Sant Joan at the summer solstice;  panellets and ossos de sant (saint's bones made of marzipan) at Halloween;  and turrons for Christmas.  These formal, celebratory desserts were washed down with champagne and followed by a tiny cup of extremely strong coffee. 

One thing that my mother, whose mind was taken away by encephalitis three years ago, still reacts to is Mediterranean food.  She rejoiced over the turrons that one of her granddaughters sent her at Christmas, and for her birthday I mailed her a package containing the soulful combination of a wedge of manchego, a sheep's milk cheese, and a chunk of membrillo, a barely sweet, fruit-scented concoction made from quince. 

Now that her ability to comprehend and communicate has vanished, food remains as a vehicle for emotion, an assertion of her will to live.  Unlike most people in her dire circumstances, who shrink  with each passing day, my mother in her great old age has grown round, almost spherical.  Her vital signs, the nurses assure us, are excellent.  She has never lost her appetite.

If I could, it would give me joy to reciprocate the earliest gesture that she made for me, the offering of food.  I would make for her a long-simmered sauce from my own tomatoes;  a simple omelet from my own hens' eggs;  and a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with olive oil and salt, with a hunk of dark chocolate on the side.

My Carnivorous Childhood

I grew up on the Mediterranean diet--the real thing, not the kinder, gentler version popularized in the U.S. by a culinary and nutritional establishment compensating for decades of over-consumption of beef products.  In my Mediterranean diet, we ate animals twice a day.  (Here, I am counting eggs--which we typically ate for dinner--as animals, since my grandmother's hens ran with roosters, which meant the eggs were fertile.  Michelle B. and her legions will applaud me for this, I'm sure.)

Most of these animals appeared on my plate with many of their attributes intact:  fresh little sardines with eyes and heads and fins and tails;  whole baby octopuses, less than two inches long, swimming in my favorite soup;  squid, cut into rings but slathered in a magnificent black sauce made from their ink, which made the serving platter look like something from Goya's black period.  And the mussels, clams, crayfish and tiny lobsters that inhabited the Sunday paella, complete with the black, gray, ecru, or translucent shells in which they had lived.

That was just the first course, for which my mother shopped in Barcelona's fabulous fish markets.  It was my grandmother, from her farm in western Catalonia, who sent us the birds and beasts we consumed next.  My grandparents kept pigs--huge, pink, sausage-shaped beasts--and slaughtered  a couple every autumn.  I was never present at this ceremony, but I loved every ounce of the results:  rich, greasy serrano hams (today one of the most expensive foods in the world);  crisp little cubes of fatback that brought to life a serving of beans;  and garlands of sausages made by my grandmother's hands:  butifarra blanca, butifarra negra (blood pudding), xorisso....

My grandmother kept rabbits--cheap to feed, prolific, and a source of high-quality protein.  In the summer, I would watch her slaughter one in the courtyard of the farm house.  It was like a speeded-up film sequence:  grab rabbit by hind legs, stun with blow to head, cut off same.  Hang body from hook.  Cut circles around hocks, and somehow (my vision was hampered by my short stature) yank off skin in a single motion, like a glove.  Cut open abdomen, scoop out entrails, call cats to feast.

An hour later, a rabbit arm lay on my plate, reddish-brown and transmuted by a sauce made with mortar-chopped almonds.  Next to the arm lay a special treat for me, the single child among twelve adults:  two small bean-shaped organs, what my grandmother called the ouets, the little eggs.  Were they kidneys, testes, ovaries?  I never thought to ask.  Were they good?  I don't remember.

There were chickens, too, and for Christmas, a couple of capons instead of a turkey.  Not a part of these was wasted.  Breasts and thighs and legs were brought to the table, but while we ate them, the next day's soup was simmering on the stove, made up of chicken backs, and heads, and legs.  For some reason, the comb---la cresta--perhaps because of its decorative merits, was brought to the table.  And yes, served to me.  Can't remember how it tasted.

What else did we eat?  Very little beef.  No milk after age two.  Gallons of olive oil, entire braids of garlic, ovenfuls of crusty bread to soak up all that oil and all those sauces.  Seasonal vegetables in moderation.  Every month or so, there was a religious holiday with its own special dessert, which you always bought ready-made:  turrons at Christmas;  tortell for the January feast of the Epiphany;  crema catalana on St. Joseph's day, in March;  la mona de Pascua at Easter....Otherwise, it was fruit and nuts.

If she knew what I eat today, my grandmother would be mystified.  For some reason, I have become reluctant to eat anything that looks like an animal.  Anything remotely anatomically accurate, I'd rather do without:  chicken knees, turkey wishbones, the blood of a cow oozing off a steak.  Is this hypocrisy?  Does it mean I'm o.k. eating meat--say, "chicken tenders"--as long as it doesn't remind me of the death of a living being?  Do I think eating meat is immoral?

I want to make it clear that I don't think eating meat is morally wrong--or I would be a hypocrite for drinking milk and eating eggs, which condemn to death 99.9% of the males of the species.  I do think that consuming the meat (or the eggs, or the milk) of animals that have been kept in inhumane circumstances is immoral for those of us who have the resources to make other choices.

I don't know what's right--do you?  It's possible that some people's physiology makes it impossible for them to thrive without daily servings of meat.  On the other hand, other people's preferences/philosophies/aesthetics make it important for them to avoid animal products.  This is a uniquely contemporary debate:  never before have such choices been available in such abundance.

How do you feel about eating animals?

Snail Hunt

There's been a lot of talk about food in the Zeitgeist lately and, in these parts, talk about hunting:  the local game supper (bear, deer, moose et al.);  who shot at a deer with a huge rack, and missed;  whose posted land was violated by out-of-state felons with guns.  All this has brought back the snail hunts of my childhood.

My grandparents' farm was on a fertile valley just south of the Pyrenees, in the westernmost province of Catalonia.  Summers were dry, and on the rare occasions when rain threatened, we would gather on the covered terraces at the top of the house and watch the storm come galloping towards us:  thunder and lightning, followed by fat drops splashing down on the dusty roads.  And the mineral smell of rain on parched ground.

It never lasted very long, but afterwards, while the last drops were still falling from the broad leaves of the fig trees, we would get our baskets and go snail hunting.  A long, straight dirt road led from the house to the threshing floor and barn.  The road was bordered with apple and pear and fig trees, and blackberry brambles, and long grasses, and that is where we looked for snails.

These were not the fattened molluscs, already evicted from their shells, that you can buy in cans in upscale markets.  These were real wild snails (cargols in Catalan), their shells less than an inch in diameter, who after a rain came out from their hiding places and climbed to the very tops of the dessicated grass stems, leaving a slight iridescent trail behind them.

It seemed in those days that anything good had to be waited for a long time--Christmas, summer, a new pair shoes--and snails for supper were no exception.  After the hunt, we turned the snails over to my grandmother, who would decant them into special baskets--vertical, narrow containers where the snails would fast for several days to empty out their digestive tracts.

When the time was right, my grandmother would announce the cargolada, or snail bash.  My mother and her sisters would go into action, wrapping aprons around their middles, picking parsley, chopping garlic, fetching bottles of tomato conserve from the attic.  While the maid scrubbed the shells with a brush, my grandmother would prepare the salt bath that would rid the snails of the last vestiges of slime.

One of the reasons I loved a cargolada was the sound.  No other dish was so musical.  The shells being dumped out of the baskets, swished around in the salt bath, stirred in the pot, made a unique and musical clacking.   This, together with the smell of garlic and parsley sauteeing in the big red earthenware cassola, and the continuous arguing of the cooks ("don't burn the olive oil!  don't stain your blouse!") filled my senses to overflowing.

Like all mollusk dishes, the cargolada didn't take long.  I helped set the table while my grandfather swatted the heat-dazed flies in the dining room.  And then we sat down, ten or twelve of us, glasses of rosy wine at each place (my water barely tinted, but enough to taste), and the cassola was brought in and everybody went ohhhh!  My mother sliced thick slices of bread for sopping up the sauce.  My aunt passed around little sword-shaped plastic toothpicks.

A portion (very small, snails supposedly being hard to digest) was ladled, clack, clack, onto my plate.  I picked up a shell, grabbed my green sword, stabbed the snail and gave a little yank.  At the spot where the muscular foot joined the beginning of the intestine, I pressed down with my thumb and the two separated neatly.  I popped the snail into my mouth, discarded the shell, soaked some bread into the sauce, drank a little pink water....

For dessert there was melon sweet as only dry climates make them, picked by my grandfather and sliced by my mother.  I always interpreted my mother's slicing of the melon as a sign of her special standing in the household.

I have since lost my taste for snails.  The idea of buying them in cans, then stuffing them into shells, seems as absurd as wrapping orange peel around the orange sections in Southern ambrosia.  Even in Spain, the last time I attended a cargolada, the thought of those little snails starved, brined, and cooked alive made me concentrate on the sauce alone.

The thick sauce of my childhood, redolent of garlic, parsley and tomato and, because this was Catalonia, the sweetness of ground almonds.  And a big slice of bread, crusty on the outside and yeasty on the inside.  And my grandmother looking over at me saying "Don't eat too fast now.  Chew it well."

The Post-Prandial Bone

Twice a day, after their meals, Wolfie and Bisou chew a bone. Even though our house looks like a midden, with so many bones lying around, Wolfie and Bisou always chew the same bone, passing it back and forth between themselves. They make an amazing racket. After a long session of this, they fall over on their side and go to sleep.

This reminds me of feast-day meals in Catalonia, when I was a child. Epiphany, St. Joseph's, Easter, Corpus Christi, Saint John's--there was at least one every month, complete with office and store closings and huge family meals. These meals took place in the middle of the day, that is, two in the afternoon, in Spanish terms.

They would begin with an "entremes": at least four kinds of olives, roasted sweet peppers, thinly sliced dry xorissos and butifarras, and some anchovies and capers to make sure you were thirsty enough to drink lots of vi blanc. A few leaves of endive, sprinkled with olive oil, and lots of fabulous crusty bread. Then there was a paella, bursting with fresh crayfish and clams and mussels, with some green peas for color. Chicken or rabbit would follow, with a tomato sauce and more bread to soak it up, accompanied by a glass of vi negre (red--not black--wine). Dessert varied according to the occasion: the ring-shaped Tortell de Reis for Epiphany, Crema Catalana (the best creme brulee you ever dreamed of) for Saint Joseph's, Mona de Pascua, a fancy cake crowned with a chocolate egg, for Easter. We (yes, even I) drank champagne with dessert. We didn't eat cheese--formatge--as part of a festive meal because we ate it on regular days.

But I digress. I meant to get to the post-prandial part, which consisted--though I wasn't allowed to participate, being a child--of coffee (strong, in tiny cups), brandy (in tiny glasses), and cigarettes or, on really big occasions, cigars. We would sit around the table, idly sweeping bread crumbs off the tablecloth (I used to eat every one I could find), and the grownups would sip, and smoke, and talk, and loosen their belts. And then everybody would go and take a nap.

Just like my dogs. And, just like my dogs, nobody was fat.

Bread With...

This Thanksgiving, I passed the ceremonial turkey baster to my older daughter and her husband.

By now I figure I've hosted almost forty Thanksgivings, mostly at home, but some at restaurants. Some of the latter were terrific, some mediocre, but it was always a relief not to have to worry about having everything hot at the same time, and especially not having to thicken pints of gravy with the guests seated slavering at the table.

This year it was good to sit and slaver while my offspring stirred the gravy.

All the talk about food at Thanksgiving got me thinking about the foods of my childhood—not the major holiday feasts, but my everyday after-school snacks. The name of these snacks always starts with “pa amb...” (meaning “bread with...” in my native Catalan). By “pa” I mean a substantial loaf of bread so crusty it would scrape your palate raw, with a soft, elastic crumb that would soothe the pain as it turned to sugar on your tongue. Here are some that I remember:

“Pa amb oli i sal.” This was the ur-snack, endlessly accepting of embellishments but sufficient on its own. You take a thick slice of the above-mentioned crusty bread (if you have a very hungry kid, you slice the bread lengthwise) and drizzle dark, fruity (none of that anemic extra-virgin stuff) olive oil onto it while squeezing the crusty edges together so the oil is evenly absorbed. Take a pinch of coarse salt and sprinkle it over the bread. Hand it to the kid and send her on her way.

“Pa amb tomaquet.” This—not paella—is the true Catalan national dish. Prepare the above recipe, then cut a ripe tomato in half and rub it cut-side down so the bread absorbs the juice (you can also rub the bread with garlic before applying the tomato). This was not, strictly speaking, an after-school snack, since tomatoes were not in season during the school year. It was what my grandmother fixed for me in her shady kitchen when I came in from my afternoon rambles down the hot, dry roads of summer.

“Pa amb oli i raim.” This was a late-summer snack, consisting of oil-soaked, salted bread which you held in one hand, and a bunch of grapes which you held in the other. The grapes had to be white—red would not do. You took a bite of salty, oily bread, then a bite of cool, sweet grape, and you walked down the road, kicking your espadrilles into the dust, listening for the thunder of the village sheep being herded home from pasture.

“Pa amb oli i xocolata.” A city snack, this made the sadness of autumn afternoons bearable. First, I had to change out of my school uniform. Then my mother would hand me a slice of pa amb oli i sal and a hunk of dark, bitter chocolate. I would eat this—a bite of bread, a bite of chocolate--as I skipped down the long, dark hallway of our apartment. And the saltiness and acidity of the oil, the sweetness of the bread and the bitterness of the chocolate would console me for the fact that I was skipping down a hallway in my leather school shoes, instead of down a dusty country road in my espadrilles.