The brilliant Sarah Gailey has been hosting a series of essays focusing on the intersection of food and our memories and emotional lives. These are all wonderful reading, and they have me thinking along similar lines.
I’ve been thinking about this topic for many years, all the way back to my college years and my introduction to cooking and to food writing: the cookbooks of Jeff Smith, a.k.a. “The Frugal Gourmet”. This was in the early 90s, way before Smith’s career came to a crashing halt when he turned out to have been…well, you can look it up. Suffice it to say that it’s kinda gross. But Smith has been dead for years now, and I still find myself returning to his books and recipes, from which I learned so much when I was just starting to extend my cooking beyond “What can I add to the ramen noodles or the box mac-and-cheese mix?”
One of Smith’s major themes in all his work, both in print and on teevee, was the interplay between food and memory, and how we often turn to certain foods because they make us remember. One example that I recall, from an episode of his show he did on American breakfasts (which you can watch online!), was an experience Smith had when he came downstairs and found his father cooking cornmeal mush, a dish that his dad had previously indicated was something they often ate because they had nothing else to eat. Young Smith asked, “Why do you want to eat it now?” And Smith’s father responded, “Because I need to taste it again.”
Food. Memory.
It’s why we go to such lengths to preserve the recipes our parents and grandparents leave behind. It’s why we feel a catch in our voice or a tear forming in our eyes when we thumb through our parents’ cookbooks and notice which pages have more wear than others, which actually have food stains on them, because that’s the page that contains a recipe that showed up on the table with some frequency. And when we actually cook the foods we remember, we strive to make them taste just the way they did in our memory. We recall the specific aromas: the cinnamon of the apple pies, perhaps, or the sage and poultry seasoning on Thanksgiving. And even though we may have developed our own culinary skills quite a ways beyond what our parents and grandparents might have done, somehow we never feel that we got it quite right, do we?
Other foods bring up different memories, not all of them wistful. I can’t look at a coconut cream pie without at least smiling, thanks to Gilligan’s Island and my life-long love of the “edible missile”, as Monty Python put it. And then there’s fried chicken, the source of my very first fight with a girl in college that I’d just started dating.
Spoiler: I ended up marrying that girl and as I write this she’s upstairs showering, so it wasn’t that bad a fight, and it was more a goofy culture-clash than an actual fight.
What happened was this: One day, not long into our relationship—no more than a few weeks—I suggested that we go to the KFC across the street for dinner. She liked fried chicken too, and especially KFC, so naturally she agreed. There it was: Dinner at KFC on, I don’t know, Wednesday.
Wednesday rolls around, I attend all my various classes and get back to my dorm room around 3:00pm or so. There, on our dry-erase board, is a note from The New Girlfriend: “Hey, I though we were going to KFC! I waited around for 15 minutes! Way to go, dummy!” Maybe a smiley-face, maybe not. But at this point, I’m annoyed, because I very clearly said we’d have dinner at KFC. Seriously, what the hell was this about?
(Did I mention that this was in Iowa, and that while I was there from Buffalo, she was a native Iowan? With that piece of information you can probably already determine just what the error here was.)
Anyway, I got all mad and stuff and it was all pretty dramatic for a few hours until heads cooled, we figured out the problem, and later that night walked to Dairy Queen for the first make-up ice cream of our relationship. (Far from the last of those.)
The problem? Like I said: a bit of culture clash. I, coming from Buffalo, call the three main meals of the day Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. She, being from Iowa, called the three main meals of the day Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper. So I had meant to invite her to the evening meal that day, but she heard me inviting her to the noontime meal that day.
Well, we got that all fixed up and we did get to KFC at some point, and we’ve loved fried chicken (and its Midwestern cousin, “broasted” chicken) ever since. Now, about ten years ago or so, a wrinkle was added that took KFC (and, when they arrived in WNY, Popeye’s) off her menu permanently: she was diagnosed celiac. We have found a few places here and there that do it, but for the most part, gluten-free fried chicken is not the easiest thing to find. One of our favorite places that offers it is a tiny joint in Webster, NY, about 90 miles away, and yes, we have been known to road-trip out there with stopping there for fried chicken the main reason for the trip. (We include other stuff, too, but the conversation often goes, “Hey, we should go for fried chicken at BC’s Chicken Coop. Where else should we go while we’re out there?” It helps that there’s a great used bookstore down the street, among other things.)
I also eventually cobbled together a gluten-free fried chicken recipe of my own, which I’m admittedly overdue in making, since it’s pretty labor-intensive, especially as if I’m going to go to all that work I’m going to fry up a lot of chicken. I won’t reproduce my recipe here, since this is getting lengthy already, but you can find it on my site, with background and pictures of the process. It whips up pretty well, I must say, and there’s just something about the way your house smells—for days—after you’ve made fried chicken.
And it occurs to me that I should probably get fried chicken on the menu again, soon.
(Oh, and since she relocated to Buffalo along with me, she has long since become a Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner person, and really, we’re all the happier for it.)
Until next time,
-K.