Cherries in Winter Read online

  She wrote a volume of poetry called Lyrics for Losers and a children’s story, which I think is the only piece she actually submitted for publication. It received a terse reply: “We are unable to find a place for it in our publishing program.” She didn’t let that discourage her. She kept writing, chronicling the events of her life in would-be book chapters and entertaining herself and my mother, who was a child at the time, with her Nutty Nursery Rhymes:

  Peas porridge hot

  Peas porridge cold

  Peas porridge in the pot

  Nine days old—

  Ugh.

  I know now, from what Mom told me, how much Nana had wanted to stay in school and go on to college. But I’d never known until finding all these articles, poems, and chapters for books that would never be published how much Nana loved to write. She would probably have eaten pea soup every day for the rest of her life if she could have been a writer, even a laid-off one. I’ve always loved what I do, but now I approach even a small assignment with a large amount of gratitude.

  • • •

  As far as food is concerned, I write about it a lot better than I can cook it. In fact, my editors at the magazine said that one of my best articles was the one about ruining Nathan’s birthday dinner. I was glad something good came out of those grey, overcooked tuna steaks and that firm, underdone cauliflower.

  When I lived alone, it never mattered much that I couldn’t cook. I had dinners out with friends, or I ate single-girl food—steamed vegetables and brown rice from the Chinese restaurant around the corner. (I went there so frequently that one night the manager said, “Where were you yesterday? We got worried.”) Now that I’m married and the one who does the cooking—especially since I’m home all the time—I want to cook well. Or, given my lack of natural talent, better.

  I like to say that I never really learned how to cook because I was like Nana; we both started working from a young age and, as a result, knew our way around an office much better than a kitchen. This is a flimsy excuse, though, because Mom became a secretary at the same age that I did, and she’s always been a natural cook. Give her spices she’s never worked with before, and the scallops will sing.

  “You have your Nana’s hands,” Mom has told me for as long as I can remember. Even though Nana died a long time ago, it’s odd that I don’t remember her hands because they were always in my small sphere—holding me, pouring out a bowl of Frosted Flakes into my own special bowl, clutching one of my miniature versions of hers while we watched Chiller Theater on Saturday nights.

  Then my mother will hold one of her hands next to mine and say, “See, I have Grandpa’s hands—big, strong, man hands.” I remember his more vividly, maybe since Grandpa outlived Nana by seven years. I remember them gutting the bluefish he’d just caught for our dinner; I remember how precisely those huge hands poured his nightly shot of whiskey; I remember him clapping one of them, palms smooth from years of farm and construction work, over my burning ear after I pulled a birthday cake too close and my hair caught fire.

  And Mom will sigh, “You and Nana have the same long, slim fingers, the same beautiful nails—hands that should play a piano.” Neither of us ever did; instead our fingers played typewriter keys. She’d had no choice in the matter, but when I graduated from high school with purple hair, average grades, and zero plans, I simply lacked direction. “I don’t know what I want to do,” I mumbled.

  “Then you’re going to secretarial school,” Mom said.

  “What? Why?”

  “So you can learn what you don’t want to do.”

  I had the benefit of being trained on an electric typewriter. Nana had to learn on a manual machine, yet she was always the fastest and most accurate typist in any of the offices she worked in (those long piano fingers).

  Which is likely why, as Mom and I read Nana’s recipes—most of them typed single-spaced on her manual typewriter in the days before Wite-Out and correction tape—we notice that there is maybe one mistake on a page here or there. Among the typed pages, yellowing at the edges but otherwise in perfect condition, are a few worn-looking handwritten recipes.

  “How come she typed most of these?” I ask.

  Mom takes one of the pages and brings it close, lowering her glasses to get a better look. Then she smiles and nods as the memories come back. “These,” she says, “are the ones from the Ladies of The Grange.”

  4

  THE LADIES OF THE GRANGE

  Snowbound Steak, à la Montana

  To make a snowbound steak, you need first a good piece of steak. A T-bone or Sirloin, at least one-inch thick. First of all, you season the steak lightly on both sides with salt and pepper. Then, using a meat hammer or some other such device, you pound flour into the steak until it just won’t hold any more. But, remember … the steak must be thoroughly saturated with flour. As in the case of all good steaks, the cooking is the most important factor of all. So give special attention to these cooking details. They should be followed to the letter, or your snowbound steak won’t be worth the effort. Heat a well-greased frying pan or griddle until it’s sizzling hot. Then you place the flour-saturated steak in the pan and sear until it is golden brown … about 1 minute on each side. Be sure the pan is good and hot so that the juices and flavor will be sealed in during the cooking which is to follow. After searing the steak, turn the heat down, cover the steak, and cook it until it is done. This usually requires just about 10 minutes cooking. And, remember, the steak should be turned once during the process. When the steak is cooked, lift it onto a platter and use the fat, steak juices, and the residue of the flour in the frying pan to make delivious [sic] country cream gravy.

  NOVEMBER 1944

  SARATOGA, NEW YORK

  Matilda knew how to make a few simple dishes, like roast chicken and German potato salad, from watching her mother. But her experience in the kitchen really started when her husband, Charlie, came home early from work one day and said, “Tillie, I’ve bought a farm.”

  Charles Patrick Kallaher, an Irishman born on Saint Patrick’s Day, had at one time trained to be a prizefighter but went into a more sensible (albeit slightly less glamorous) line of work as a milkman. This decision served him well during the Depression, but years later, after the owner of the dairy company promoted his son to foreman, Charlie walked out. When he heard about a 200-acre spread available in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, Charlie had a vision of himself and his family living off the land.

  The first Matilda saw of the family’s new home was the day in September of 1944 when she, Charlie, and two-year-old Carolyn moved into the twenty-three-room farmhouse that had been built during the Revolutionary War. They drove through an orchard of apple trees and past wildly, almost menacingly, overgrown berry bushes up to the main house. The crumbling building had fireplaces for heat, a pump for water, and an outhouse in the garden. The kitchen was in the servants’ quarters and consisted of a wall-length hearth with compartments to warm, cook, or bake. (Later, they’d upgrade to a wood-burning stove.)

  Charlie, ready to be a farmer, went out and bought five hundred chicks, eight dairy cows, two horses, and a herding dog.

  His bucolic fantasy was short-lived. The land had gone fallow, having not been actively worked for years, and the soil was too rocky to plant. Nor were the horses much good at plowing; one had the slow lope of a mule, and the other took off like a refugee from the Saratoga Racetrack. Faced with a barren field, the cows took it upon themselves to wander up the road to the neighbor’s farm, where they feasted on the lush front lawn and shat in the newly bald patches. They were roaming free in the first place because nearly all the stone fences on the farm had fallen down, and the dog, Happy, had never actually been trained to herd animals—he preferred to wait by the side of the main road to chase cars. Matilda, meanwhile, was trying to figure out how to cook meals in a 150-year-old hearth, and September in Saratoga was starting to feel like the dead of winter had in the Bronx.

  “You’ve got to do
something,” Matilda said, “or we’re going to be the only farmers in Saratoga who starve to death.”

  “Jesus H.,” Charlie swore, shaking his head. “All right. I’ll go down to the factory and see what they’ve got.” What they had was the night shift, so Charlie started commuting thirty-five miles to work each sundown.

  As fall approached, deer began sauntering into the apple orchard and eating the bark off the trees. “It’s Bambi!” Carolyn said excitedly. Charlie threatened to shoot them, so while he was at work, Matilda put out some of the cows’ feed for the deer. “There,” she said to Carolyn, “now they won’t kill the trees, your father won’t kill them, and everybody’s happy.” The plan worked fine during the week, but the jig was up on Saturday, when Charlie was home and wondering aloud why the deer were waiting patiently by a bucket outside the barn.

  One morning Matilda was washing dishes in a pail full of water that she’d dragged in from the pump when she heard the cows heading up to the neighbor’s yard. She ran after them with a switch, screaming, “Get back, Evelyn! Go home, Madeline!”—many of them having been named for the relatives in the Bronx whom she missed.

  But the cows were determined, and Matilda found herself apologizing again to the owner of the neighboring farm, Truman. Matilda was so pretty that Truman would just laugh it off. But in the early mornings, when he was driving his butter-and-egg route to town and caught Charlie on his way home from the night shift, he’d give him an earful. “You’ve got to mend those fences of yours, Charlie!”

  On one of the days Matilda was trying to beat the cows back from Truman’s lawn, Blanche, Truman’s wife, came out and asked Matilda if she and Charlie would like to join the local branch of The Grange, the national farmers’ organization. “You’ll get to know some more people in the area,” Blanche said. “You should come.”

  So they did. Truman took Charlie to meet the men, while Blanche introduced Matilda to the other farmers’ wives. She didn’t exactly fit right in. The women were friendly enough, but they stared, and after the first few introductions, Matilda figured out why. Still new to farm life, she was wearing her city clothes and makeup. Some of the ladies commented on her pretty hairstyle. When she shook their hands, she noticed the contrast between their bare fingers and her painted nails. She looked at the women around her, who were dressed in neat but sturdy clothing and who probably wore lipstick once a year for a wedding or a funeral. “And they were looking at me,” she would later tell my mother, “like I’d just dropped in from outer space.”

  One of the activities of the Service and Hospitality Committee of The Grange was the sharing of recipes. One woman had a recipe for baked beans; another, for Virginia Batter Bread. “Do you have something you can contribute, Matilda?” asked the woman leading the meeting.

  Matilda couldn’t think of anything she knew that these women didn’t, as far as cooking went. Unsure of what to say, she looked down at her red fingernails for a second and suddenly had an idea. A risky one, she thought, but what did she have to lose? More nothing?

  “Tell you what,” Matilda said. “I’ll make a deal with you: You teach me how to cook, bake, and can, and I’ll do your hair and makeup. What do you say?”

  And this, Mom tells me, is the origin of all the neatly typed pages of recipes in the file: Apple Crunch. Quick Apple Cake. Swedish Meatballs. Rolled Shoulder of Lamb. Chicken Pie à la Mississippi, Old-Fashioned Method and Modern Recipe. Making Bread at Home—Rolls, Lesson II for Homemakers. The Grange ladies dictated their recipes, and Nana typed their words almost perfectly as she collected their instructions.

  And the farm women of Saratoga Springs began to look a little prettier that winter.

  5

  THE FIRST NATIONAL COFFEE CAN AND SAVINGS BANK

  Mom’s Liver with Bacon and Onions

  4–6 slices of bacon

  1–2 onions, sliced

  1 lb. calves’ liver

  Cook bacon in a pan. Remove and drain on paper towels. Use bacon fat to sauté onions until golden. Put cooked onions with bacon. Use remaining fat to sauté calves’ liver, turning after a while, until cooked through. Put bacon and onions on top of liver and serve to petulant child.

  • • •

  NOVEMBER 2008

  HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

  I haven’t wanted to look at my 401(k) statements for a while now, afraid of what I’ll see. But all the financial experts say that I should, so I gather my courage and rip open the envelopes.

  I remember how I went to the maximum allowable contribution last year, comfortably well off enough to be able to do that without even really feeling it. Now the account looks as though I hadn’t made any contribution at all. Anyone who followed the rules and did what they were supposed to do has gotten screwed in the collapse of the stock market, so reading my monthly statements is yet another piece of financial advice I can go back to ignoring.

  The state of my retirement plan brings to light something else I haven’t wanted to face. I’ve been telling myself that everything is fine because I exceeded the recommended six months’ worth of living expenses one is supposed to have set aside in case of emergency. I saved enough to live on for a year, as long as Nathan and I don’t get any fancy ideas about going to high tea at the St. Regis. The problem is what comes after a year.

  When the Great Depression started, did Nana think it would be over soon, as politicians were no doubt trying to reassure the frightened public? My 401(k) and my savings account were meant to bolster my income when I got older—I stopped saying “when I retire” a while ago, when Nathan and I realized that retirement is probably out of the question for our generation, even though we live modestly. Now it’s out of the question for my parents as well; they can’t see a day when they’ll be able to afford to stop working.

  No one knows how long this “economic situation,” as the financial experts call it, will last, or what life will be like when the dust settles. This explains why I’ve been doing things like making Recession tea—letting a teabag steep for half the time it should so I can use it again for a second cup later, which I have with the other half of a home-baked muffin. It ain’t high tea at the St. Regis, but it’ll have to do for now.

  • • •

  “Are we heading for another Depression?” a morning news anchor intones dramatically over scenes of frantic customers banging on a failed bank’s doors. Some of them brought suitcases so they could withdraw all their money. Nathan, who’s watching the little TV in the kitchen while sitting at the counter, stops eating his bagel in mid-bite. We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetime; it looks like the part in It’s a Wonderful Life where the townspeople mob the Bailey Building and Loan—except it’s real.

  I don’t recognize the name of the bank that failed today—it’s not one of the big ones getting bailed out by the government—and to me it doesn’t look like much of a bank. These days, my idea of a safe place to keep money is a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can.

  Coffee cans were a fixture in both my grandparents’ home in the Bronx and in my mother’s apartment in Manhattan, but for different reasons. In the fall, Grandpa started saving up bacon fat, pouring it from the skillet into an empty coffee can and storing it in the fridge to harden and keep. It got bitingly cold by the shore, and sometimes the water froze over. During the greyest days of winter, Grandpa would take the fat-filled can and a bag of bread ends and go to the water’s edge. The seagulls knew him, and when they saw him coming they’d swoop overhead, waiting. Grandpa used the stale bread to scoop up the bacon fat from the coffee can, and he tossed the pieces up, laughing as the seagulls caught them in midair and gulped them down. “The fat will keep them from freezing to death,” he explained.

  Back in the city, my mother used a coffee can for another kind of sustenance: “We’re saving up for a vacation,” she announced one day. “Every bit of spare money we have is going into this can.”

  It occurs to me now that we didn’t exactly have much in the way of
spare money in those days. My parents divorced when I was two, and most of our bills couldn’t get paid on my single mother’s salary until the words final notice appeared at the top. We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment where the living room doubled as Mom’s bedroom and our dining room, depending on whether the convertible couch was opened or one side of the drop-leaf table was up. When I told her our television was broken, Mom said we couldn’t afford to fix it. “What am I supposed to do until you get home?” I whined. “Go to the library,” she said in a voice filled with warning, “and get a book.” (My reading level shot up from fifth-grade to high school level that year.) Since economizing was our regular way of life, what Mom meant was that we were going to cut back even more than we usually did.

  • • •

  SEPTEMBER 1971

  NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

  “I won’t eat it.”

  “It’s good,” Mom said, trying to entice me.

  “I hate liver.”

  Now her tone was stern. “You want to go on a vacation? Eat the liver.”

  “What’s so great about Bermuda anyway?” I pouted, picking the bacon off the offending organ meat.

  “Don’t know,” Mom said. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  The couple of dollars she saved by buying liver instead of ground beef—every Tuesday and Thursday night—went right into the coffee can, as did our movie money. Before the TV broke, I had to be content with watching giant rats swarm a model of a cabin in The Food of the Gods on Channel 7’s 4:30 Movie instead of joining my friends for the latest Planet of the Apes installment. For her part, Mom took the bus and the subway to work instead of treating herself to a cab in bad weather. Every dollar, quarter, dime, and my penny collection went into that coffee can.