A Departure...Food

When I started thinking about writing this blog, I wanted to write about what has long been my greatest interest, interior design, with a special focus on the challenges inherent in decorating a home that also happens to be inhabited by an 85-lb Chocolate Lab (and Labs are a whole other blog entirely). But lately I've been thinking a lot about food.

It all began with my ex-boyfriend. He was Jewish, and during the year we spent together I was re-introduced to the major Jewish holidays (I say "re-introduced" since my childhood best friend had also invited me to many seders, et al, at her home, but I don't remember very much about what we ate.) Gefilte fish aside, I enjoyed many holiday dishes served by my ex's family, and I became interested in learning more about Jewish food traditions. A few years later, the boyfriend is gone, but my interest remains, and gets sparked every few months or so, when another holiday season comes around.

In my family, which is Catholic, and of Irish descent, there are few holiday food traditions. We always had Thanksgiving at my paternal grandmother's, and, for the rest of my life, her Thanksgiving dinner will always be my gold standard for a Thanksgiving meal. But that was about it. My mother made Irish soda bread on St. Patrick's Day to take to her work friends, but my taste for carraway seeds and raisins didn't develop until I reached my 30's. (A recipe quite similar to hers was recently debunked in the NY Times as being not traditionally Irish at all. Whatever.) No special Easter or Christmas recipes--one grandfather hated ham; the other, turkey. Any food traditions from Ireland were discarded when my ancestors hit the shores of America.

My family does have a few favorite dishes, such as "Mrs. Rombauer's" Gaston Beef Stew and Chicken Cacciatore--my grandmother refused to call it The Joy of Cooking and it always seemed to me that she considered the author a friend. My grandmother also made a potato salad that will forever be the taste of summer for her children and grandchildren (and I believe a key ingredient is a variation of "Mrs. Rombauer's" french dressing). My mother makes a delicious chili that is perfect on a cold winter night. But we had no Italian or German Christmas, Greek Easter, Jewish Passover. It was more or less a post-WWII, white, solidly American take on cuisine. As an adult, though, I wish we had grown up with more food traditions, that maybe we had held on to hot cross buns on Ash Wednesday, pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, mutton at Easter, or even created our own new traditions.

So now I find myself requesting noodle kugel recipes from that childhood best friend of mine, or baking her grandmother's mandelbrot, and reading with fascination (and hunger!) the New Yorker's recent profile on Claudia Roden and her Middle Eastern and Jewish cookbooks. All in all, though, creating a personal cuisine from your own traditions, borrowing favorites from others, is essentially part of creating your own home--or sense of home--and therefore is not unlike decorating. I'm sure my big brown lab will be delighted to sample whatever comes out my oven.

P.S. If I can figure out how to do it, I'll add a link to that childhood best friend's blog, CookieStuffs. Read it--and you can find those kugel and mandlebrot recipes too.