Our CSA* resumes today after its winter break, and I am unreasonably excited. It’s not like we don’t have access to excellent produce in the winter. We visit a Sunday farmer’s market just two blocks from home, so we can track the winter’s progress from pear to pomegranate. I chat with the egg farmer about how her “ladies” hunker down in their coop when it rains. I buy honey sticks from neighbors whose bees live in the community garden, four blocks away.
But, still; the CSA means spring to me. Despite twenty years living in a state where something can always be harvested, despite witnessing that winter harvest every Sunday at the market, I still, deep down, expect a winter shutdown. Winter is for seed catalogs and spring, now, is for the first sprouting seeds.
I love the CSA because of all the ways it differs from choosing food at the market. I don’t get to choose green d’anjou pears over red, I don’t get to pick out the easy-peel satsumas instead of minneolas: I take what they give me and figure out what to do with it (a task really made easier by the fact that our CSA share always comes with recipes; I think many others do, too). We’ve learned that we all really love agretti and that cardoons are an interesting change of pace. I love the schedule (a midweek collection fits perfectly with my weekend market habit) and the pick-up location (my sons’ school) can’t be beat. As a lucky bonus, our CSA farmer happens to be a terrific writer, so the vegetables come each week with a newsletter with his musings about dirt, windbreaks, strawberries or whatever else strikes him that week. I look forward to the newsletter each week almost as much as I do the vegetables.
Are you signed up for a CSA? I’m curious to hear when it begins, and how it affects how your family eats. I’ll start posting some of our favorite CSA-inspired recipes in the coming weeks. And if you’re not signed up for a CSA, you can look for one in your area by checking out Local Harvest.
The real name of this dish is a Salvadoran quesadilla, but rather than confuse readers looking for a Salvadoran version of the familiar Mexican dish, I’m giving credit to the mother of José Carlos Ramirez, one of the folks Lynne Anderson interviews in Breaking Bread (click here for my review of the book). José left El Salvador in 2002, and now lives in East Boston with his wife, daughter, mother, sister, and several nephews. A dish like this is a very good way to satisfy a crowd like that. It’s slightly sweet, like a cornbread, so it’s nice for an afternoon snack with tea, and the boys have been eating slices at breakfast, too; but it’s not so sweet that you couldn’t eat it with some stew for dinner. You can also adjust the sugar and parmesan depending on what you plan to serve with the bread.
1 c heavy cream
1/2 c ricotta cheese
1 egg
1/4 c cream cheese, softened
1 T freshly grated parmesan
3/4 c sugar
1 1/2 c harina de arroz (rice flour)
1/4 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
1 T sesame seeds (we didn’t have on hand, so skipped)
Preheat the oven to 350.
Mix the heavy cream, ricotta, egg, cream cheese and parmesan in a large bowl until smooth. Add the sugar and mix well. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking soda. Add this to the cream mixture and mix just until the ingredients are incorporated. Spread into a lightly-greased 9-inch cake pan and sprinkle with the sesame seeds. Bake until the cake springs back when touched in the center, about 30 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes before turning out of the pan.
When I am feeling nostalgic for my east coast childhood, I open up a bottle of my dad’s maple syrup. My kids have never experienced sugaring season; our school vacations never sync up with the less predictable week or two each year when the temperature dips below freezing at night but the sun shines brightly on the trees during the day. But I can tell my sons about tromping through the snow or mud to help my grandfather gather sap in old milk pails and bring it in to the farmhouse kitchen, which the boiling sap turned into a faintly sweet sauna. I can tell my sons how my dad digs out his old brace and bit every year just to drill holes in the trees; he has a good supply of proper sap buckets now, but I remember days when he would gather sap in anything he could hang from the spigot he put into the tree: a mason jar, an old yogurt tub. I share these stories as I pour syrup on their waffles, and for a moment my grandfather – gone these last 25 years — and my dad – 3,000 miles away — are present to us all, alive in my kitchen.
I love how food inspires stories, and how those stories build bridges across time or distance. I’m lucky that the bridges I build in the kitchen don’t have to reach too far, and they’re not too fraught. The grandparents who are gone can be remembered warmly for their long and fulfilling lives; the distance between my parents and me is not the result of economic or political hardship. But of course for many, that’s not the case, and those are the stories Lynne Christy Anderson gathers in her wonderful collection, Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens (University of California Press, 2010). Anderson is an English teacher in Boston, and in her teaching life began to meet so many immigrant cooks she wanted to learn both about their cooking lives in Boston and how also they were affected by their own or their parents’ move to the United States.
In each chapter, Anderson sets the scene with some background information about each cook. The chapter about Nezi begins, “There is nothing quiet about Nezi’s kitchen. In the midst of four chattering parakeets in a cage by the window and the whimpering of Kiki the dog begging for scraps, Nezi’s nine-year-old grandson, RJ, break-dances past the stove.” We meet Xiu Fen at the market, “in her element today, wheeling her carriage purposefully down the aisles of C Market, a large grocery store in Chinatown… Xiu Fen calls my attention to the things she likes to buy here: piles of leafy green pea tendrils, eggplant, water chives, Chinese celery and baby bok choy. There’s a certainty to her movements I don’t recognize. When I usually see her, bagging groceries at the large American natural foods market on the other side of town, she always looks a little tired.”
After each brief introduction, Anderson transcribes the cook’s own observations about his or her cooking life, offered while Anderson sits with them in the kitchen, shops with them in the local market, or even, in one case, forages for grape leaves in a local botanical garden. A fabulous contrast develops between the diverse voices — which are lively, weary, hopeful, discouraged — and Anderson’s own observant, keen-eyed introductions. The interviewees range widely in age, background, and economic standing, but as they talk about food, common themes emerge: the differences – in food, in childrearing practices, in gender roles, and in education — between the US and the home country; the power of food to carry you back to family and the familiar; and the importance of using food as a bridge to connect one’s children to a culture they may not have experienced first hand. As Anderson writes of her immigrant cooks, “For them, going back isn’t always so simple. But they can cook. And that brings home a little closer.” Or as Limya says, “It’s hard, because my kids don’t know anything about [my mother]. When I talk about [her] they just look at me like they’re confused. So when I cook now, I try to talk about her. When I do the hodra, I talk about how my mother would prepare it, how she’d cook the meat and onions with it, and how we’d all eat it together.”
I loved the discussion of specific foods and ingredients. Some of Anderson’s subjects find connections to other cultural groups in Boston, noticing that other immigrant foods are similar to their own. For example, Ines, from Cape Verde, observes that her katxupa is like a Cuban sanocho and comments, “When I talk with Caribbeans or Latinos, they make the same food we make – maybe slightly different – but it’s still beans and rice.” Others find that the home country persists in Boston, like the sisters from the Dominican Republic, Riqueldys and Magdani, who say “It’s not that different here; even the food’s the same. It’s like we live in a small Dominican Republic, because there’s so many Dominican people, and all the bodegas, the markets, are Dominican, too. Just the weather’s different. The way we eat, it’s the same here as it was there. We eat the flag. That means we eat rice, beans, and meat. That’s the flag, and Dominicans eat that almost every day.” But later in the same interview Magdani says, “The flour’s not the same… Some of the recipes we can’t do. A lot of the food back home is just better.” Sehin, from Ethiopia, similarly struggles to find the teff, millet flour, she needs to bake her injera. “You could get the teff before—we used to get it in Washington, D. C.—but it’s become very scarce. There was a guy in Idaho or Texas who used to farm it and sell it to restaurants, but I don’t know what happened to him.” And Shirley brings salsas and spices home to Boston every time she visits Costa Rica: “I gotta pack a whole suitcase of food I know I won’t have for a year or two.”
Each section offers a handful of recipes, and funny moments occur when Anderson tries to pin down specific amounts for recipes: “While I’m listening to Ana, I realize that Aminta has already begun to pour ingredients into the bowl for the quesadilla. “Cuanto?” (How much?) I ask, pointing to the bag of rice flour Aminta has in her hand. She shrugs and indicates with a finger approximately how full it had been before she started cooking. I copy the ingredients into my notebook as Aminta tosses pinches of salt, baking powder and small handfuls of grated parmesan into the bowl faster than I can write, and all the while Ana is still talking to me.” But Anderson’s interviewees have the same trouble. Soni, from India, says, “My husband started copying [my mother’s] recipes into this little book for us. He brings it to India every time we go. He makes her give him quantities and tells her to describe exactly what she’s doing. He’ll say, “No, don’t just say, ‘this much curry powder.’ Tell me exactly what you’re putting in.” Yasie, from Iran, teaches cooking classes and offers Anderson printed recipes: “She points to the recipes she’s printed for me, explaining that she’s noted how to replace the kashk if I’m unable to find it in my supermarket. I take them from her gratefully, the first time I’ve ever been handed recipes in the course of writing this book.” Barry gets cooking tips from his mom in Ireland via Skype, and Shirley calls her mom a couple times while making tamales to make sure she’s getting them right.
Like all cooks, these men and women make adaptations based on supplies and time. Aurora, who moved to Boston from the Philippines, is a professor of behavioral sciences and doesn’t always have time to cook everything from scratch. Anderson writes, “When she stops in front of the freezer section and grabs a box of platanos maduros, prefried frozen plaintains, she laughs: ‘This is my short-cut version. Anything short-cut I like to do. Besides it’s midterms now.’ She says she doesn’t feel guilty about not making everything from scratch, that her mother often did the same thing, because she, too, worked full-time. ‘Here’s another lazy thing,’ she says, tossing a box of prepared empanadas from the freezer into her basket.”
These cooks are nothing if not realistic, and they’re rarely sentimental about home – whether they’re discussing the home they left or the home they have made in Boston. Johanne, from Haiti, talks about the racism she encountered as a teenager new to Boston: “Every day there was a fight. They didn’t want us here. They’d say, ‘Go back to your country! Take the boat back where you came from!’ They called us boat people. I didn’t come on a boat; I came here on an airplane!'” Yulia, from Latvia, remembers how her father, a new immigrant to the US during the Vietnam war, was surprised to find that Americans could be as close-minded and influenced by propaganda as the Russians he had left behind. Sehin wants to live again in Ethiopia but feels cautious: “I would like to do something that would be useful, and I’d like not to have to be afraid that I would end up in jail if I said something. Even though things have improved, we’re still not there yet.”
But, Sehin concludes, bringing it all back to the food, “if I want to visit, one of the main things I could do is just go around and eat.” The pleasure in reading Anderson’s book, with its lively voices and rich details, is in feeling like you have shared a meal with her cooks. The words satisfy. And so I’ll conclude with one more voice, Ivory Coast’s Zady, who says, “you know, when I was growing up, whatever my mother made it was always the best thing of the day. I grew up eating her food, so it was the ultimate; there was never anything better. And I think when you go home and you eat your mother’s meal, that’s when you can say, the day is over and I can go to bed, because now I’ve been fed.”
Come back later this week for a post about some of the book’s recipes!
The one day a year I am very happy to take orders from my kids is on their birthdays, when they know they can order up a day of special meals, culminating in whatever birthday cake they like.
Ben’s birthday today falls on a school day, so I have no say over his lunch, but I’m mixing up waffle batter for breakfast. Then for dinner at home, the boy has requested homemade sushi and a lemon layer cake for dessert.
The layer cake is one I haven’t made since a friend’s baby shower four years ago, but it’s a classic 1-2-3-4 cake that’s a good one to have in the repertoire. I’m using the Martha Stewart recipe for a lemon version, with The Joy of Cooking’s lemon curd filling (because it uses whole eggs rather than the just-yolks version Martha suggests) and a lemon cream cheese frosting. And then, because my boy loves candied citrus peel, I’ve made candied lemon peel to decorate the top. Ben, claiming birthday boy prerogative, is not assisting with the baking (even I don’t bake my own birthday cake), but his younger brother volunteered as an enthusiastic sous chef, and wound up pretty much handling the project on his own. He just needed me to read the recipe:
I don’t think I’ll leave the baking entirely to him anytime soon; after all, it feels like a privilege to bake something delicious for my favorite nine-year-old.
We recently had one of the most fun dinner parties we’ve had in a long time. Great friends, who love to eat, brought over their son for my son, along with a terrific chard and mushroom lasagna inspired by their CSA box. We met at our house so Ella could have a friend over as well. Good times were had by all. We had a separate table set for the kids, and they had a lovely time eating, but even more fun doing whatever it is kids do when grown up s ignore them: dress up, Lego, spying, giant block cities…
To figure out what to make for dessert, I looked around my kitchen, then looked out my window.
I remembered the Orange Polenta Cake I made last year, which is one of my most favorite cakes. Ever. It’s moist, crumbly, and a little bit of bitterness offsets the sweetness. It’s perfectly seasonal. The recipe is online, thank goodness, since I hadn’t bothered to save or clip it. But it’s here, now, too, and you should try it. It’s terrific with coffee, too.
