Talking with My Mouth Full (6 page)

There was usually celery remoulade to start, along with Linda’s own spicy roasted nut mix. There were always delicate blinis, with perhaps a bit of smoked salmon. The soups were from scratch. She would pour two kinds of soup in the same bowl to make a yin-yang pattern: a yellow pepper and a red pepper soup, garnished with fresh chervil. For the main course: salmon or halibut, served with a lemon wrapped in cheesecloth so you could squeeze it without the seeds falling out. The cheesecloth was always tied with a chive, making a dainty purse.

Her salads were made of tender greens and pomegranate seeds and served with fresh lemony vinaigrette. For dessert, a French apple tart with whipped cream and caramel sauce, cooked to a deep mahogany with a wonderfully smoky, burnt-sugar flavor. By the end of the night, we were eating the sauce by the spoonful out of the bowl.

Linda loved dining in restaurants, too, and took me out on a number of special occasions. She would also take me shopping if I needed anything during the school year, because my mother wasn’t around and, to be frank, hated to shop. I never cared about expensive clothes, but Linda wanted to get me out of my ripped jeans and worn T-shirts. Besides, she had incredible taste and loved spending my mother’s money on me.

“Renée,” she would say to my mother, “I will do these things for you. I will take Gail shopping. I will deal with her messy hair and her corduroys
if
I can pick out the wedding dress when she gets married. That will be my reward.” My mother was all too happy to agree.

Suffice it to say, Linda’s cooking, fashion, and all-around style had a lasting impact on me. Until Linda, cooking was something my mother did so naturally and organically that I never thought of it as stylish, let alone an art form. I took it for granted. And for all the mediocre food I ate in college, there was Linda, a beacon of light, good manners, and good cooking.

FOUR

Heartache and Hard-Boiled Eggs

WE STEP INTO
the cider house, a big ancient barn in the Basque country, and pour ourselves hard cider from one of the floor-to-ceiling barrels that line the room. The cider is delicious, like beer but unfiltered and just slightly sweet. It’s loud and there’s music: a Spanish guitar, the inconsistent rhythm of hands clapping. The floors are dirty and damp. There’s conviviality in the room, and in the food. We are served a salty omelet, with
bacalão
(salt cod), whole fish with olive oil and fresh herbs. There is also a steak. I haven’t eaten red meat in more than six years, but I know I’ll have no choice but to try it anyway. It’s char-grilled with a thick salt crust and very rare. They slap it down on the table in rough metal platters. I devour every bite.

Taking a semester abroad wasn’t a common thing to do in Canada when I was in college (unlike in the United States, where many more kids seem to go away for their junior year), but I was desperate to travel and decided to go to Spain with two of my girlfriends, Annaliese and Rachel. Both are super-tall, statuesque blondes. Annaliese, a friend since summer camp, was the life of the party, with a wickedly sharp sense of humor. Rachel was an outdoorsy beauty who, after we graduated, spent several years leading adventure tours through Asia and Europe.

Through the University of Wisconsin we found a school in Seville. For us, this was a massive privilege. We were going to learn Spanish, study art, and explore.

I left for Spain in January of my third year at McGill, but with a heavy heart. My boyfriend, Mr. Hershey’s Cookies‘n’Creme, was struggling with anxiety and depression. My brother Alan was sick and still in the hospital, and my family was caring for him without me. It was a situation both completely out of my control and still devouring every ounce of my life, and I needed to escape.

Within less than a month of leaving, I discovered said boyfriend was cheating on me. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself that semester, torn between the turmoil at home and the excitement of the foreign culture around me. But thanks to these two girlfriends and a small but close crew of new ones, as well as the lure of late-night tapas bars, I still managed to have a wonderful time.

We were three Canadian girls in a program of about three hundred American students. We thought it would be a semester of learning the history and being immersed in the culture. What we discovered was that most of the other students were just there to drink. For many of them it was the first place they could drink legally. For us, this was not nearly as exciting, since the drinking age in Canada is eighteen or nineteen (depending on the province).

The food in southern Spain is quite different than in the rest of the country. It’s simpler and much more traditional. Seville, in Andalusia, is Spain’s historic and cultural capital but hardly an economic hot spot. Due to the proximity of Morocco, there is a strong Moorish influence. In many ways, it feels more North African than European.

Annaliese and I lived with a family. We ate with them five days a week, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On the weekends we’d fend for ourselves because most of the time, we were traveling. We lived with Remy, a single mother, and her two daughters, Maria Remy and Maria José, who were eight and fourteen. Annaliese and I shared a tiny bedroom, so small that we would crash into each other if we tried to stand up between our beds at the same time.

My most vivid food memories are of what I ate in our Spanish home. Breakfast in Spain is always quick, a café con leche on the go. Waiting for us every morning was a simple thermos of instant coffee with cream, which was completely delicious, and little Magdalena cakes, sort of like French madeleines, but a commercial Spanish version, spongy and sugary.

We had a break for siesta every day from one to four o’clock. This included lunch, the biggest meal of the day, for which we would usually come home. On occasion we’d take our lunch with us to school—a
boccadillo
(a sandwich) perhaps filled with traditional tortilla (Spanish-style omelet with potatoes and onions) and a piece of fruit. But when we came home we ate a much larger and more traditional Spanish meal. Our “
madre
” would prepare a big stew or soup or paella, but it was always quite basic and inexpensive.

She kept us fed well enough, but always seemed to overcook the vegetables. We would drool over enormous globe artichokes on the counter when we left for school in the morning, bowls of garbanzo beans, potatoes, onions, and carrots. When we returned for lunch they had inevitably been turned into a bowl of slop, boiled for hours until they were brown and practically disintegrating.

Thankfully there would always be oranges to finish. Spanish
naranjas
are big and juicy and intensely sweet. They cost about twenty-five cents for one as big as your head. The juice would drip down our chins and arms, all over our shirts. It was heavenly. Annaliese took to calling me “hungry boobs,” as there was always something running down the front of my shirt, halted on its way to the napkin in my lap by the shelf my chest created. It wasn’t pretty, but it was true.

We’d go back to school from four until seven or eight and then eat dinner quite late. Dinner at our house was always kind of random and on the cheap. A classic meal was spaghetti with ketchup and a fried egg on top. Or the family’s version of pizza, with a chewy homemade crust, ketchup, and a can of tuna fish. It was borderline cat food. The ingredients probably cost about forty cents.

All the while, we knew Remy got a stipend from the school for boarding us. We couldn’t help but notice that while we lived with her, she bought a new microwave, a new washer-dryer, and a new mini countertop deep fryer. She made good use of it, though, by feeding us an endless stream of fried potatoes. Spaniards love their mini countertop fryers. Every household in Spain has one. They fry everything. Some days I would come home to find Remy even frying little calves’ brains for herself for dinner. She never served them to us, though. She knew better.

Because our host family wasn’t exactly going out of its way to teach us the pleasures of the Spanish table, we found great meals elsewhere. Southern Spain has the most sublime produce: strawberries and olives and tomatoes.
Pan con tomate
was a staple. It’s the simplest thing, garlic and tomatoes rubbed on toast. When we would travel on weekends, we’d go to the local store or market and buy loaves of bread or rolls and tomatoes and cheese, chorizo,
salchichón,
or another Spanish cured meat, and make
boccadillos.
That was what we survived on every weekend for the entire semester.

At this point I was still a semivegetarian, not eating red meat at all, just a bit of
jamón
because it was hard not to, and not even very much of that. It’s a shame when I think back on it now. I was living in close proximity to an endless supply of Serrano and Iberico ham and didn’t feast on it at every given chance. In a cruel twist of fate, it’s now one of my most beloved foods in the world. But back then, I would hold back on the pork and pile on more Manchego instead.

We ate a lot of cheap tapas on our travels, too. A lot of
tortillas españolas
, marinated mushrooms, and tuna in oil. I probably ate my weight in olives and
pan con tomate
that year. Traveling to Lisbon one weekend, we discovered a traditional Portuguese fish stew, with giant prawns and razor clams, mussels, and poached fish in an amazingly rich broth.

Due to our limited student budget, our drink of choice was
tinto de verano
, which translates to “red wine of summer.” I call it the poor man’s sangria. We drank a lot of sangria too, but when we couldn’t get our hands on it, we’d buy a $2 box of wine and a bottle of Fanta and mix them together. Presto magic: the original Four Loko. It was very wrong, yet it always hit the spot.

When the semester ended, Annaliese, Rachel, and I made it up to northern Spain, and that’s when I noticed a marked shift in food culture. In Barcelona and San Sebastián, the food is far more diverse. I walked into a bar in San Sebastián and was awestruck by the beautiful
pinchos
we discovered.

Pinchos
(
pintxos
in Basque) are basically tapas, small bites, often in open-faced sandwich form, that you eat at the bar while you drink traditional
txakoli
(an effervescent Basque wine). In Basque country they lay the tapas out on display for you to choose, each one like a little jewel box, a perfectly constructed work of art. And here, I fell in love: with little pieces of toast with olives or shrimp or anchovies, tomatoes or cured vegetables, soft, fluffy omelets or fried fish, calamari or lightly grilled clams. Every morsel was carefully presented, colorful, and appetizing.

From there, we spent several weeks backpacking through Europe together, from northern Spain into southern France, through the top of Italy down to Rome, then up into Switzerland, to Germany for a music festival in Nuremberg, and on to the Czech Republic, where I spent the morning of my twenty-first birthday wandering alone through a castle in Prague. From there, we went up to Holland and into Belgium, where in Bruges I visited the school my mother had attended so many years before, and to Paris for several days. I ended my trip in London, staying with family friends. I went to the Royal Ballet Theatre and a performance at the newly opened Globe Theatre. These experiences—not to mention the mountains of crêpes, frites, and cheap beer we consumed along the way—allowed me to get over my breakup and appreciate the larger world outside my door. It forced me to realize I had put so much weight on one relationship, when there was a whole universe of people out there worth getting to know.

This wasn’t the first time that travel coincided with heartbreak for me, or that food helped me recover from it.

Upon graduating from high school three years earlier, my then-boyfriend and I decided to spend the summer in Israel. We’d both been before, he with a teen tour the previous summer, me when I was sixteen for a family friend’s bar mitzvah. He was fluent in Hebrew. It had all the makings of an idyllic rite of passage before going off to college.

It’s amazing that my mother let me go away—to the Middle East no less—with a boy at the age of eighteen. She later explained that I would probably have gone anyway and she trusted I would find my way back. He was smart, but a pretty punky kid at the time (and yes, another musician). We had a very intense teenage romance, because he was a very intense guy. He was a talented guitarist and serious as only eighteen-year-old boys can be. Music defined him, and so music became me, too: we spent endless hours in his basement that year, listening to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, studying every lyric, every guitar riff.

Ten days into our trip to Israel, he broke up with me. We were sharing a room, living on a kibbutz near the city of Nahariya with six hundred strangers. He just said, out of the blue, “I don’t think we should be together anymore.” There was no talking about it. And that was the end. I was alone on the other side of the world.

Well, not literally alone. We continued to live and travel together for the next two months of our trip, which is incredible, now that I think back to it. It didn’t even occur to me to kick him out of the room for a couple of weeks. Most days I called my mother sobbing. I wrote my best friend, Vanessa, long letters about how devastated I was.

At least kibbutz life was fascinating. Kibbutz is basically a small town: ours had a shoe factory, extensive greenhouses, and farmland. Everyone did the chores that keep the community operating. The concept was founded when Israel first gained independence in 1948, as a way to work the harsh and often inhospitable land.

The tiny village was made up of about six hundred people, living communally. The children from a certain age would all live together in dorms, although their family homes were close by. The first time most of the kids would see the outside world was when they were called to join the Israeli army, which of course is always at war. They rarely went back to the kibbutz when they finished their service, because they had finally discovered the greater world, which is one of the reasons the kibbutz ideology, as it was imagined, is slowly and surely falling apart.

The kibbutz we were on was already starting to show cracks in its surface. We made friends with many of the teenagers who lived there. They were smart and fierce but painfully bored and mostly dysfunctional. Volunteers like us from around the world kept a steady flow of alcohol, drugs, and pop culture dreams flowing in and out of the place, which made the lure of the cities and the larger world even more tempting.

In our first jobs we were assigned to the chicken house, the
lol
, as it is called in Hebrew. They had four massive chicken barns, each the size of an airplane hangar, and each with thousands of chickens. The chickens weren’t confined to pens. They were able to run around, and they had little cubicles where they could lay their eggs several times a day.

We were in charge of picking the eggs. Simulated daylight was on them almost twenty-four hours a day to help them produce. We picked eggs four to six times daily, thousands of them, making our way through all four silos again and again.

You had to wear sterile gear so you wouldn’t contaminate the
lol.
You also had to shower when you came in and when you left so you didn’t bring germs in or out. By the time we left each day, there was just enough time for a swim to cool off and then we would go to dinner.

It was not easy work. The chickens would fight you when you tried to take their eggs. Chickens are not the smartest of animals—there’s a reason they’re called birdbrains! They attack you. They attack each other. If an egg breaks, chickens rush to eat the fatty, protein-rich yolk and will swarm you, or swarm each other. Make no mistake: they are cannibals. As I write it all down on paper, it occurs to me that this has the makings of a great horror film.