Driving Through What & To Where

Last Sunday K’s family had a reunion in a park to the west of the Twin Cities. We occupied an open shed, and before the food, we prayed and sang, and after the food we chatted. It was a pleasantly informal gathering and had the feel of people who don’t see each other very often getting better acquainted.

I’ve been around K’s family for decades but am not part of it, so no one knows quite what to do with me, and, I must admit, the converse is equally true. But lots of smiles and chatter about ancestors made it all quite tolerable.

Now I can confess that the part of the day which made me truly glad was the hour and some drive away from the city and through countryside, which when I traversed it on occasion as a child, was rural. Nothing but farm houses, fields, silos and the usual accoutrements of the agricultural trade.

That was several decades ago, and the intrusion of national enterprises, from gas stations to restaurant chains to big box retailers, has changed all that.

Even so, there are stretches where one sees nothing but corn and soybeans, growing quickly towards the harvest, and behind the fields or next to the road were family farms, one after another. Occasionally, there would be an informal sign about the “Fresh Corn” for sale, and one could see members of the family gathered around a table under a shade tree, drinking coffee and chatting, while they waited for customers to stop by.

The day was pleasant, full to the brim with sun and blue sky, and the hum of the car lulled me so that I felt I was floating along, in a time not quite the past and not the present either, and that my trip had some meaning beyond a drive to and from a family reunion.

I do not know what great significance there might be in several members of a family, sitting around a table drinking coffee, eating home baked muffins, and talking to each other, whether they are at a reunion or just waiting for somebody to buy a dozen ears of corn.

In a world of frequently fetid monologues, demagogues, and spinning of the truth, a family conversation may be both rare and undervalued, as much for what is not said as what is.

And in the silence between the words, one can be struck by the sounds of the wind through the trees, songs of the birds, and even the sound of the traveler in the car passing by, headed for a conversation down the road.

No radio, no tv, no game boy, no cell phone, no PDA…what could be better on a fine clear August morning than the songs sung by families along the open road?

Remembering Julia Child

One of the first cookbooks I ever bought was “Mastering The Art of French Cooking,” by Julia Child and Simone Beck, and to this day, I am unable to explain why I did. As a bachelor in his first teaching position, my idea of cooking was cubed steak, chipped beef, hot dogs, and hamburgers. There was the occasional tuna salad, but rarely any fish, and nothing ever very complicated.

The core of my my bachelor cuisine was the hamburger, and it was clear that this apple had not rolled very far from the tree.

My parents’ idea of dinner was meat, potatoes, sometimes accompanied by soup or a salad, and dessert, and my mother was happiest if someone else would prepare it, and any bipedal mammal met her minimum qualifications. When she found herself desperate on Tuesday…nearly every Tuesday, she would prepare cheese soufflé, and in the summer this would be accompanied by petit pan squash. I learned early on to get on the phone Tuesday morning to see whether I could cadge a dinner in a non-cheese soufflé home, and to my good fortune, there were many such households.

About two years after I had been cooking for myself, I realized that I was in a rut which was beginning to resemble an abyss, so it was Julia Child who helped me climb out. Most of the recipes were far too complex for me, especially the one for making French bread which took more than a dozen pages, and I will confess that I didn’t prepare many of her dishes.

What Julia Child did for me was to show me that cooking could be serious and fun, and that the journey could be fascinating and very tasty, and the easiest way for me to learn was to read cookbooks. So I have for the last several decades, and they have led me in interesting directions, just not as far as I once might have hoped.

It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable in the kitchen, and over the years I’ve subjected lots of guests to some good food and some flaming failures, and invariably the failures are more interesting than the successes.

These days, I keep things simple – having a bad hip tends to limit my time standing at much of anything, but come the autumn, I’ll be back making bagels (I never have had the courage to return to that French bread recipe.)

With Julia Child’s passing, an era in cooking, cookbooks, and cooking on television has drawn to a close, but it was Julia who led us down the path of discovery. As she said once, if it hadn’t been she, it would have been someone else, but someone else might not have been as warm, as self-effacing, as natural as Julia was.

She was not only a cook; she was one of the great teachers in our lives, and we were oh so lucky to have been able to come along on part of her long and wonderful life.

Bon appetit!