America I AM Pass It Down Cookbook (12 page)

“. . . Like my grandmother and other African American families adapting to a large Northern city amidst the second Great Migration, my parents stuck close to home—shopping for pork chops, ham hocks, and ground beef at the local butcher, and buying the fruits and vegetables of their childhood from a stand on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia. They stayed well within the boundaries of their own neighborhood and shopped among people who looked as they did.”

I
t was a day in 1969.
I don’t recall the month so I don’t know the season. Whether we were eating Jersey tomatoes or Pennsylvania Dutch Country apples escapes me. What I do recall are the details of the pronouncement.

“I’m going to make lasagna,” my older sister, Deborah, informed my family.

It was as if someone had run a needle across Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” to abruptly bring an end to a house party. My father looked up from his
Scientific American
, puzzled, if not stunned. My mother carefully leaned her broom against the stairwell wall and took a seat near him at our white, octagonal Formica dining room table. I stood at our back door, hand on the door handle. I was seven years old and ready to go out to play. But I stayed glued to the spot because I knew, somehow, that something big had just happened.

“An Italian girl from my home ec. class brought in a recipe for her grandmother’s lasagna,” Deborah continued, “and I want to try it. You have to use fresh garlic when you make the meat sauce. So I’ll need to buy some things like the garlic, Parmesan cheese, dried basil . . .”

If silence is golden, then a very deep amber light had just flooded our small Philadelphia row house. Debbie, my parents’ pride and joy and, at age fifteen, their dependably compliant daughter, had just violated a rule that ordered our home and, for that matter, my mother’s kitchen: the rule of cultural insularity.

My parents grew up in the segregated South, my mother in Alabama, my father in North Carolina. They met at North Carolina A&T University, each the first in their family to go to college. In 1949, a few years after graduation, they married and settled in North Philadelphia, joining my paternal grandmother. And like my grandmother and other African American families adapting to a large Northern city amidst the second Great Migration, they stuck close to home—shopping for pork chops, ham hocks, and ground beef at the local butcher, and buying the fruits and vegetables of their childhood from a stand on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia. They stayed well within the boundaries of their own neighborhood and shopped among people who looked as they did.

It didn’t take long for my mother to fall for Philadelphia. She loved its revolutionary history, its cobblestone streets, its cracked Liberty Bell, its spirit of independence. But the love affair was not without its challenges. For both my father, an electrical engineer, and my mother, who had studied to be a teacher, it took longer than they’d imagined to find employment.

My parents made sure we understood that racial discrimination had stalled and delayed each of their careers. Add to that the limits of brotherly love in 1950s Philly, its neighborhoods shaped by a stark ethnic geography, and you had two recent somewhat shell-shocked transplants who were wary of Italian, Polish, and German areas, and who avoided the unfamiliar, from stores to people. My parents traversed Philadelphia with a deliberateness aimed at dodging the sting of a racial epithet and staying out of harm’s way. By sticking close to home and sticking to the familiar, they believed we would all be safe.

And yet, intentionally or otherwise, they had put their children on a different path. They raised us as the children of integration, and as such, we believed that all of Philadelphia belonged to us.

So, on a Saturday morning some time after the Great Lasagna Declaration, we piled into our blue VW bug and drove to 9th Street to the Italian Market. Deborah had lobbied for this day and now it was here, though the road had been long and parental resistance had been fierce.

“The Italian market, in South Philly?” my father had asked. “A market for Italians? That’s where you need to go for garlic? Sport (my mother’s nickname), are you hearing this?”

“It’s not for Italians,” my sister said, throwing up her hands in exasperation, “anyone can go there.”

“Can’t we get garlic at the A & P, Debbie? Surely we don’t have to go all over creation for it. Besides, I still don’t see why you can’t use garlic salt or the powder.” My mother was irritated.

With my parents clearly intent on treating travel to South Philadelphia like a trip to the moon, my sister realized that she needed to call in reinforcements. They came in the form of Madelyn Crocker, our intrepid next-door neighbor. Eastern shore of Maryland-born and city savvy, Mrs. Crocker knew Philadelphia like the back of her hand, and it seemed she had been everywhere within its city limits at least twice. She had the ability to charm my parents. Conspiring with my sister, in a lilting voice that was both mannered and direct, she explained that everyone and their brother could be found at the market, even “colored people.”

As soon as we were parked, my sister, barely containing her excitement, leapt out of the car.

“Slow down,” my mother called nervously as she ran to catch up, apprehension and curiosity animating her face. My father and I trailed behind, his hand firmly grasping mine as we neared the bustling street.

“There are a lot of us here,” my father mused under his breath.

He seemed to relax. Soon we were picking through the produce of overflowing stands, entering stores with their strange smells and stranger products, part of the throng of people enjoying the ritual of shopping outdoors. In the car on the way home, I assessed my sister’s bounty. I had never seen garlic up close. Its white, papery skin was smooth to the touch. My sister pointed out its individual cloves and whispered that she would have to peel and chop them for the sauce. We traveled across Philadelphia reflecting on our journey. It would prove to be the first of many Saturdays at the Italian market.

The smell of the lasagna fresh out of the oven filled our small row house. My mother reported to my father that she had only shadowed my sister while she prepared the dish.

“Deborah made it all by herself,” she beamed. “She chopped the garlic, made the sauce, cooked those noodles, even grated the cheese like she’s been making this for years.”

My mother may have been a little wistful. She was, after all, my sister’s original cooking teacher, instructing her in the African American Southern style of cooking. Now my sister had taken those basics and run with them, all the way to another continent.

“Enjoy,” Deborah said after serving us a portion of her masterpiece, a look of pride lighting up her face. When we each asked for seconds, her triumph was clear. Lasagna would become her signature dish. She would take requests from relatives and friends, toting her Pyrex of Italian goodness to all manner of parties and special occasions. She made it for us at least once a month.

In September of 1971, a month before her 17th birthday, my sister died. A brain tumor struck her down and laid my family low. Perhaps because in my grief the longing to be like my big sister intensified, it didn’t take me long to find my way into the kitchen. By the time I was in junior high, I could whip up a lasagna—fresh garlic and all—using my sister’s recipe and bringing Deborah’s memory to the table.

Italian food, it turned out, was just the beginning for my culinary explorations. I would take my mother’s Southern approach to cooking all over the world—seasoning meat ahead of time; seeking out fresh fruits and vegetables even if it meant growing your own; appreciating the joys of chit’lin’s, pigs’ feet, and other cheap cuts of meat, known in the high-end food world as “offal”; and knowing that homemade cornbread makes most meals better. And in the spirit of my sister I would seek out unfamiliar ingredients for recipes from India, Thailand, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, France, Spain, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Brazil, Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, and most recently Poland (love will take you places you’d never expect). I’m a restless cook. Who knows where I’ll go next? I just know that wherever I go, my mother and sister will be with me.

Donna Daniels’ Sumac Roast Chicken

Guilford, Connecticut

SERVES 4 TO 6

Heart &Soul

To cultural anthropologist Dr. Donna Daniels, roast chicken is both a Sunday meal and a comfort meal. She says she has taken this dish in many directions over the years—making it with an Asian influence using soy sauce and sesame oil along with garlic and onion, as well as using parsley, scallions, shallots, and roasted garlic as a variation of her mom’s recipe. Lately, sumac has entered the anthropologist’s spice cabinet thanks to her interest in flavors from North Africa and the Middle East. “I learned to love spice and seasoning from my mother and am always expanding my knowledge and experience. Roast chicken is always a favored canvas for me to try something new,” she says.

1 tablespoon kosher salt or to taste
2½ teaspoons fresh ground pepper or to taste
1 heaping tablespoon ground sumac, available in Middle Eastern stores
*
2 teaspoons urfa chile or Aleppo pepper available in Middle Eastern stores
*
1 4- to 5-pound chicken, preferably organic
5 large cloves of garlic, sliced thinly
10–12 thyme sprigs
3 large shallots chopped
¼ cup olive oil

Preheat oven to 425° F.

Make a spice rub with salt, pepper, sumac, and urfa chile. Rub spice mixture under the skin of the chicken, taking care to season the breast and the legs well. Also rub some of the mixture inside chicken as well as on top of the skin.

Slide garlic slices, thyme sprigs, and chopped shallots under skin and in cavity. Rub chicken all over with olive oil and place in a roasting pan.

Roast chicken for 50–70 minutes, depending on size of bird. Begin with the breast side up, then turn chicken over about 30 minutes into cooking and baste with pan drippings every 20 minutes for the first hour.

Turn the bird over again so the breast side is up for the last 15 minutes of roasting. Insert a meat thermometer between leg and thigh. It should read 165° F. When pierced, the juices that come out of the thigh should be clear, not pink.

Pass It Down variation: Sumac Roast Turkey
This unusual roast chicken makes for a delightfully different Thanksgiving turkey as well. Simply triple the seasonings for a 15-pound bird, or more, proportionate to the bird’s weight. For example, multiply seasonings in the recipe by four for a 20-pound bird, by five for a 25-pound bird, and so on.