Talking with My Mouth Full (5 page)

I grew up with a comfortable relationship to food, never seeing it as evil or associating it with guilt. It was incredibly healthy, both nutritionally and emotionally.

After college and almost eight years of being a vegetarian, I found myself ravenously hungry and craving steak. My doctor said, “Eat meat. Perhaps you are a bit iron-deficient.” So I did. And I never looked back. My stomach is still not perfect; in fact it is quite sensitive and at times a downright hindrance. I’m sure I’m allergic or averse to something, but I don’t want to know what it is, and I haven’t been tested. My greatest fear is that a doctor will tell me I’m lactose-intolerant or have a gluten allergy, and all of a sudden I’ll be out of a job!

Back home, food was always about pleasure, family, tradition—never about excess, junk, or fad dieting. There was never a lot of candy or overprocessed food in our house. We had fast food on rare occasions, as a treat on vacation perhaps, but we ate salad and lots of fresh veggies at every meal, fish, and chicken. Instead of peanut butter and jelly, we ate coquille St. Jacques (the “fancy” name for scallops) and tandoori chicken.

As a consequence, our friends’ parents were afraid to invite us over for lunch, intimidated as they were by what they imagined to be our hyperdeveloped palates. Of course, back then we just wanted to eat what our friends ate. We craved hamburgers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. (People still tell me all the time that they are afraid to invite me over for dinner, when in fact I love nothing better than a simple home-cooked meal.)

It was a different story when kids came for dinner at our house, much to the dismay of our young guests. Instead of mashed potatoes or carrots, zucchini was usually the side dish of choice. One night, my brothers’ friend was over for dinner. Like a lot of kids, he was a picky eater. When my mother set down a zucchini dish in front of him, he turned up his nose.

“We used to have another child,” she explained sadly. “But he died of zucchiniosis, because he ate so much zucchini.”

A detour for dinner on a family trip to Seattle

Of course, the boy went home and told his mother about his traumatic experience. His mother called my mother, very upset, exclaiming, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you lost a child!” My mother was shocked to learn the little boy had believed her.

“What were you thinking?” I asked her years later. “You scared the shit out of that poor kid!”

As silly as it seems, zucchini has become emblematic to me of the way my parents expanded my understanding of the world. As far as vegetables go, zucchini is not first on most young people’s lists. It might not be sexy, but it’s packed with nutrients and it can be turned into delicious things, like my mother’s zucchini bread.

That was so telling of who my mother was: a little more interesting, a little more colorful. Why use a banana when you can use a zucchini? That’s what we grew up with as the norm.

Anyone could go to Florida. Anyone could have a puppy. Anyone could make banana bread. But my parents went to Africa and Costa Rica, had a parrot, and cooked zucchini with abandon. They challenged us. They made us look in less obvious places to find ourselves. It gave me a sense of adventure. And to this day there is zucchini in my fridge.

THREE

Montreal Bagels

IT’S A FREEZING
night in Montreal. I’m on the way back to my apartment from a bar on Rue Saint-Laurent. Back home, my parents have a painting hanging in their kitchen of the Fairmount Bagel Bakery, and that’s where I’m headed. I can smell the bagels from a block away—sesame with an underlying sweetness, like burnt toast with honey. The bakery’s windows are fogged up as always. The ovens run twenty-four hours a day, fed constantly with wood. Bagels roll down the conveyor belt and fall into their bins. The line moves fast. There’s no chitchat. You get your bagels and you move along. Smoked trout salad and cream cheese fill coolers nearby, but I don’t want anything but bagels. They’re soft and doughy and perfect. I eat one right out of the paper bag while it’s still hot. It’s like cake, sweet and delicious. It’s warmth and comfort on a cold city night. My breath catches as I step back out into the frosty air and continue the walk home.

Montreal is the second-largest city in Canada, and the second-largest French-speaking city in the world after Paris. Not unlike Manhattan, it’s an island, surrounded by the Saint Lawrence River. Montreal is named after Mount Royal, the small mountain that now anchors a park built by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park in New York City. French is the official language, but most people living there are bilingual. There’s a wonderful European feel and café culture. The city’s residents are stylish and perpetually chic.

I lived in Montreal for four years, attending McGill University, an Anglophone college, often called “the Harvard of Canada.”

My degree was in humanistic studies, a specially designed program for people who didn’t really know what they wanted to do. You had to choose a concentration as well as a second language (not English or French). I chose Anthropology and Spanish.

My mother and both her brothers had gone to McGill, so it holds special meaning for my family. In fact, my uncle Mel (class of ’51) was the first Jewish president of the McGill Student Society. He went on to become one of the most admired judges on Quebec’s court of appeal.

I loved going to school in a major city, as opposed to a small college town. Besides the excellent French food, the great thing about Montreal is the extensive array of ethnic cuisines—Chinese, Lebanese, Greek, Thai, Vietnamese. And because those foods are usually inexpensive, that’s what you end up eating when you’re a student.

Montreal’s dedication to affordable ethnic food is best noted by the entire city’s allegiance to the traditional Jewish deli. Rue Saint-Laurent, otherwise known as The Main, is the old Jewish drag, where Eastern European immigrants came during World Wars I and II, bringing the flavors of their native countries. What North America has come to know as “Jewish deli” came from Hungary, Romania, and Poland and evolved individually as each population learned to preserve and transport it to where they settled. This is why there are so many subtle regional nuances. In New York, it’s pastrami. In Montreal, you have smoked meat—pastrami’s slightly fattier cousin, which has been smoked and then steamed. The city’s standard since 1928 is Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen. It’s the Holy Grail of cured beef.

Montreal also has the best bagels in the world. Every time we go, we bring some back, and I try to convert my fellow New Yorkers. Many of them don’t get it.

“What is this?” they say. “It’s okay, I guess, but it’s not a bagel.”

Montreal bagels—and they are bagels—are slightly sweet because there’s no salt in them and they’re boiled in honeyed water. They’re then baked in a wood-burning oven. They’re thinner, but dense, not a giant ball of bread like in New York, or the rest of the country for that matter.

I lived in a residence hall that first year, subsisting on bad vegetable jambalaya, frozen stir-fries, chocolate milk, and broccoli cheddar puffs that I’d warm in the toaster oven in my dorm room. I then shared an apartment with three close girlfriends for the next two years, minus a junior semester abroad.

Only in the last year at school did I take control of my food situation. I started looking for better restaurants than the local dives where everyone ate cheap falafels, greasy burgers, and
poutine
(french fries with gravy and cheese curds), one of Quebec’s greatest contributions to the global culinary landscape. Cheese curds are a common impulse buy in Montreal and sit on the counter at convenience stores alongside the gum and breath mints.

I realized there was no food coverage in the school paper. Since we were all living on our own and eating at the same five places, I thought it would be helpful if someone was seeking out good, cheap places to eat, so I convinced the editors of the
McGill Tribune
to let me write reviews. In my explorations of the city, I wrote about a local fondue joint (“Eating Fondue Is Worth the Hassle”) and a tiny Peruvian restaurant in the Plateau neighborhood, where I tasted ceviche for the first time: slices of raw fish, marinated with chilies, thin slices of onion, lots of lime, then sprinkled with popcorn (“Home Cooking Latin Style”).

That year, I also learned to cook properly. Nothing too fancy. Simple things like vegetable lasagne or spinach-and-ricotta-filled pasta with fresh tomato sauce. I’d call my mother, and she’d talk me through the roasting of a chicken. Somehow, I got my hands on Mollie Katzen’s
Vegetable Heaven
and cooked from it a lot, especially her root vegetable and lentil soups, perfect for those long, cold Montreal winter nights.

During that year, I lived just off campus, in a section of Montreal affectionately referred to as the “McGill ghetto,” with two of my closest girlfriends, Cami and Shana. We paid $900 cumulatively for a three-bedroom tenement apartment on Rue Durocher. It was massive, all things considered. You had to walk through the living room to get to the kitchen, but the kitchen was big enough to hold a huge breakfast table, and that’s where I would set up to do my cooking. I made a mess at that table with my mother’s extra Cuisinart food processer, which I’d lug from Toronto.

Shana at the time worked a few shifts a week at a restaurant called Grano that served high-concept mix-and-match sandwiches, fries, and all kinds of sauces and seasonings. She smuggled home ingredients for us to incorporate into our concoctions: marinated eggplant, roasted red peppers, thinly sliced Havarti, roast turkey. Cami, meanwhile, subsisted quite happily on candy. Her father was an orthodontist and her mother took health food very seriously growing up, so of course she rebelled by eating industrial-sized containers of sour gummies, red licorice shoelaces, and pink, sugarcoated strawberry marshmallows. She kept it all strategically located under her bed, so she could reach for it at all hours. She liked her candy slightly stale so it would have a chewier texture—sort of like dry-aging. Because of Cami, that’s how I now prefer my candy, too.

There was also lots of bad food. I used to make a casserole that my stoner friends went crazy for. It started with a can of cream of broccoli soup and a bag of frozen hash browns. It had tons of chopped garlic, onions, broccoli, cheddar cheese, and sautéed mushrooms. I would mix in sour cream and bake it, with more cheese and bread crumbs on top, for forty-five minutes. It was the perfect hangover food, especially the next morning with a fried egg on top. (I find most things are better with a fried egg on top.)

Montreal winters are abysmal. Some days it felt as if the city were entirely encased in ice. To stock up for the bitter winter months, my roommates and I would make trips to Costco, filling our cart to overflowing with peanut butter and paper towels.

On those trips I would also buy boxes of Hershey’s Cookies‘n’Creme candy bars, because it was the only food my boyfriend at the time would eat. It was because of him that I realized I might care about food more than most people. You see, he just didn’t eat much, and that made me insane. Looking back, I realize the poor guy was wasting away.

It was unfathomable to me that someone wasn’t hungry. All I knew was that he needed to eat. And my instinct was to feed him. I tried with all my might and I failed miserably, except in my ability to procure Hershey’s Cookies‘n’Creme chocolate bars. The relationship did not last, but interestingly enough he went on to receive a PhD in psychology.

That was around the time that my brother Alan first got sick. He was living in New Mexico after graduating from St. John’s College when he went missing. Several months went by with no word at all. My parents alerted the local police and even hired a private investigator to find him. I went through various phases of emotion about it. For months, we all wondered where he was. That summer, while backpacking through Australia with Cami, I found myself on a bus one night, listening to my yellow Sony Sport Walkman, watching the landscape go by, and facing the stark reality that my oldest brother could be dead. I silently said good-bye to him.

My parents were beside themselves with worry. They contacted all his old friends, even his ex-girlfriend, who lived in New Mexico, asking if anyone had heard from him.

Several months later, in January of 1996, just after New Year’s, the ex-girlfriend called my parents’ house in Toronto and Eric answered the phone. “I saw your brother in the center square,” she said. She didn’t give many details, but she stressed with some urgency that my parents should come quickly. They flew to Santa Fe and she brought them to him. They found him living on the street.

My parents took him to the hospital in Santa Fe to stabilize him—he was in the grip of a severe mental break. They stayed with him there for about a week, then transferred him back to Toronto, to the Clarke Institute, now part of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where he was admitted for evaluation. I came home from school shortly after he was admitted and saw him, but he wasn’t in any state to have a conversation. Over the last fifteen or more years, he’s been in and out of hospitals and assisted-living arrangements as he’s gone on and off his medication, in what we have learned is a common cycle. But common doesn’t make it easy.

Before he was found, I had come to terms with the fact that I might never see my brother again. When he came home, I knew he wouldn’t be the same Alan, the brother I remembered from my childhood, my hero. At least it wouldn’t be all of him. And I was right. A piece of him had been lost in the desert of New Mexico. Of course, “lost” is a subjective term in the blurred boundaries of mental health. He may see it very differently. Still, sometimes when he’s at his most stable, in his best moments, he’ll make me laugh. He’ll tell an old joke or give me fashion advice or make fun of our parents, smile mischievously with that twinkle in his deep blue eyes, and I’ll see my brother’s charisma, humor, and kindness shining through.

During this same period when Alan was first hospitalized, Kim, Eric’s girlfriend (who later became his wife), found a small lump on the side of Eric’s face, which turned out to be a tumor. It was benign, but pushing on his facial nerves. If it grew any larger, it could do serious damage, so he had to have emergency surgery. There was a short period when my mother and father were shuttling between hospitalized sons, one at the Clarke Institute and one at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto.

My family’s issues were weighing heavily on my mind while I was at school, as you can imagine. It was hard for me to be away at such a difficult time. I felt completely helpless and scared for my siblings. I was trying as hard as I could to keep it together, but the littlest things would set me off. Once I accidentally put a pair of red shorts in with my white laundry. When I took out the wash, I had turned everything pink. I came upstairs and started to cry, and I just could not stop. My roommates didn’t know what to do. Eventually, Cami called my mother.

“Do you want me to come to Montreal?” my mother asked. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“No,” I told her, trying desperately to pull it together, “you can’t leave. You have bigger battles to fight right now.”

Thankfully, my mother’s best friend, Linda—the one who’d made the marriage bet—had moved back to Montreal several years earlier. Every Friday night, Linda would have me over for dinner. No matter what dramas unfolded in my life, I knew that one day a week I would eat well and be mothered.

Linda lived in Hampstead, a beautiful part of the city filled with old homes. She had a small kitchen with a little wooden breakfast table in a nook and very little counter space. She had a wall-mounted convection oven in addition to a regular oven, but otherwise, she didn’t have much in the way of serious gear. It was extraordinary to me that Linda could prepare these intricate and elaborate meals in this tiny kitchen.

In those days I was a bit of a ragamuffin. To Linda I must have been like a Pygmalion project. Linda is a most regal-looking woman, elegant and stylish, with silver hair that she wears either down and long or slicked back in a perfect chignon. She’s about five foot nine, rail-thin, and utterly graceful, with the carriage of a ballerina. Her clothes are custom-made. You wouldn’t think this woman ate if you saw her. How could she cook? you might wonder. She might break a nail! But she was a force in the kitchen.

My mother cooked intuitively and never had patience for kitchen minutiae. Linda, on the other hand, was all about the details. She followed recipes to the letter and was always poring over cookbooks and magazines. She was methodical about her cooking, which was new for me. She swore by that age-old rule: never serve something for guests that you haven’t made before. Unlike my mother, who lived to experiment, Linda would dutifully practice and perfect her dishes.

Every Friday night, Linda’s table was full with family and friends. I became a kind of adopted daughter. I usually arrived for dinner in my overalls and secondhand brown cardigan. She never commented, but her younger son would always tease me.

Here, she served an elaborate, multicourse dinner. It was the first time I saw salad served at the end of the meal, or multiple forks and knives, or cloth napkins. It was a very different world, foodwise, from what I was experiencing in college.