The other day, moved to mild panic by the quantity of ripe tomatoes piling up on our kitchen counter, I rang my mother. Back in March, while suffering a kind of seasonal affective disorder brought on by cardboard-tasting grocery store tomatoes, I had planted enough tomato plants to supply a medium-sized chain of pizza restaurants. These I’d fussed over through April and May, and by the beginning of June, when we returned from a couple of back-to-back trips, a tidal wave of enormous heirloom tomatoes was about to crest. The first week was heaven: salads, tomato sandwiches, and salsa at every meal; tomato pie and pasta sauce in high rotation. Still, they kept coming. Running out of ideas, I called the most resourceful cook I know.
My mother, who despite being eighty-three and widowed, still grows enough produce to feed a vegan commune, had all the answers. Blend them with cucumbers, bell pepper, garlic and sourdough bread to make gazpacho soup by the gallon, she advised. Roast trays of chopped tomatoes with onions, garlic, basil and olive oil, then puree the delicious results into sauce. And if I still had too many, just puree the damn things raw and freeze one-pound quantities—the amount called for by the average sauce or casserole recipe. She was right, as usual. In half a rainy Saturday, with a stick blender and a box of ziplocks, the crisis has been averted, the counter reclaimed, and the freezer filled with pound-sized parcels containing the very essence of summertime.
At times like these, an energetic cook with a scarcity mentality and a horror of wasting food is a useful source of advice. Time and again, when facing some culinary conundrum—an unexpectedly successful fishing trip, say, or trouble with hollandaise sauce—I’ve called her up; she always has the answer. As a result, most of the dishes in my repertoire bear the signature of my mother’s kitchen. They incorporate her techniques, approximate her ingredients, and adapt her recipes according to the seasons and the produce available, here in my adopted home. Since we are successive generations of culinary expatriates, I suppose this is to be expected. My mother was born and raised in England, then emigrated to Australia with her young family in the early 1970s. There, she set about adapting the very English cooking style she’d learned from her own mother to the different (and frankly, better quality) meat, seafood, and fresh produce available in her new home. In Australia, her repertoire evolved without ever losing its English underpinnings. I’m fairly sure, for example, that during sweltering mid-summer Australian Christmases, ours was the only family sitting down to roast turkey with sage and apple stuffing, while everyone else was having a barbecue and going to the beach. I wonder what she would have done with the culinary traditions of Louisiana.
"This got me thinking about how family food traditions are their own kind of inheritance—how feeding your family is about far more than sustenance. Feeding your family is cultural transmission: nighttime dinners encoded with memory, love, and belonging."
This spring, our daughter has graduated from college, and our son—a rising junior at the University of North Carolina—has moved out of his fraternity house and into a shared rental. So, suddenly, both kids are cooking for themselves. A week ago, I drove with our son from St. Francisville to Chapel Hill, to help him move into his house for the summer. Before we got on the road, my wife and I spent an enjoyable evening gathering recipes for his favorite childhood dishes into a kind of homemade cookbook. As we wrote out the recipes, I couldn’t help noticing how many could be traced straight to my mother’s kitchen, albeit with various detours into Louisiana cuisine along the way. This got me thinking about how family food traditions are their own kind of inheritance—how feeding your family is about far more than sustenance. Feeding your family is cultural transmission: nighttime dinners encoded with memory, love, and belonging.
In the week since I left him fending for himself in North Carolina, our son has called or texted home often with questions: about how long to sauté onions, celery, and bell pepper for an étouffée, say; or how long to braise chicken thighs. Each response adds another building block to his culinary lineage. His repertoire will be different from ours, and from those of his grandmothers and great-grandmothers before us. But all those cooks, the meals that they made and the people they fed, are part of that lineage, binding him to us, to them, around the long dining table of time.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
