Taste: My Life through Food(5)
One piece of fruit. (Apple, pear, or orange.)
One highly processed, prepackaged, store-bought dessert. (Twinkie, Devil Dog, Ring Ding, or Ho Ho. The names of which in retrospect seem as inappropriate as their ingredients.)
The fruit and the dessert were standard fare, but it was the sandwiches that were the marvel, and oftentimes made me the envy of my friends.
My dear friend Ricky S—— and I would trade sandwiches every now and again. The reason for this was that he was given a Marshmallow Fluff sandwich on white bread every day of grade school. (Today this would be considered a form of child abuse.) However, in those days no one cared—least of all me, who was more than happy to relinquish my gourmet fare for the unhealthiest schmear between two slices of bread known to man. I am sure he was equally happy to ingest something from which he could derive midday nourishment for once in his very white life. It is important to note that for the most part my exotic and coveted lunches were directly related to the previous night’s dinner. A typical week of said lunches might have looked something like this:
Monday: Meatball wedge. As we had meatballs in a slow-cooked, homemade ragù with pasta for Sunday dinner, this lunch was a natural choice.
Tuesday: Chicken cutlets on Italian bread or a wedge with the smallest amount of butter or mayo and lettuce.
Wednesday: Eggplant parmigiana wedge. The eggplant parmigiana was not breaded. It was made in light tomato sauce, had very little cheese, and incorporated thinly sliced potatoes.
Thursday: Veal cutlet sandwich or wedge with a small amount of butter and lettuce. This was in the days of affordable veal.
Friday: Scrambled egg, pepper, and potato wedge. As the food budget was wearing thin by the end of the week, this was an inexpensive lunch my mother might whip up on Thursday night after a simple dinner of pasta and salad.
Lunches on the weekends were catch as catch can. Whether friends were at my house or vice versa, we would raid the fridge and make stacks of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As we got older, we would make sandwiches of every ilk: tuna salad, bologna and mustard, ham and cheese, liverwurst and red onion, turkey breast and mayo, American cheese and mayo, all on whatever bread was available (sliced white, Italian, bagels, kaiser rolls, etc.). We ravaged jars of dill pickles and sweet gherkins, bags of Ruffles potato chips and Fritos. We washed it all down with gallons of milk, orange juice, apple juice, or lemonade (did any of us ever drink water?). For dessert we emptied the freezers of ice pops of every unnatural color and flavoring. During school breaks we did the same, but in winter we added hot chocolate (Swiss Miss, with little marshmallows, from individual packets) to our gluttonous midday rampages.
During summer vacations we followed the same routine like crazed ants at an endless picnic. I don’t remember anyone in our neighborhood ever going on an extended summer vacation, so we all just hung around together for those two humid months, going from one dwelling to another, eating our own and each other’s parents out of house and home. I found summer vacations so joyful. The days were long, allowing us to play outside until nine p.m., at which point we would have already negotiated a sleepover at one or another of our homes so that we might never be parted even in slumber. Summertime also brought my favorite holiday, besides Christmas: Independence Day, also known as the Fourth of July.
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When I was a boy, Fourth of July celebrations were very important in our family. At this time all or most of my family members who had been part of the great wave of Italian immigrants were still alive. Compared to the abject poverty of the Italian south, America held for them everything Italy could not offer or would not allow. It was in America that their dreams of a new and successful life came true. They created Italian enclaves all over the country by sending for family and friends once work had been secured. America gave them the best of both worlds: a country where prospects were many, and the opportunity to surround themselves with extended family. In this new world, they would birth new generations who had options available to them never thought possible in the poor and corrupt towns of Southern Italy. In America they worked together, grew together, and sometimes grew apart together.
Food was the connective tissue that brought them, again and again, into each other’s homes, backyards, front porches, campsites, beaches, and hearts. The lubricant that is wine ameliorated any squeaky emotional wheels, just as at times it was fuel for any dark and dormant emotional fires.
I remember many of these Independence Day celebrations being held at our house in northern Westchester. We would spend days preparing for the onslaught of relatives from both sides. Out of paper, string, and poster board, my father would make all of the decorations, from hand-painted pennants to red, white, and blue stovepipe hats. With the welding equipment he used to make steel sculpture, he would cut fifty-gallon drums in half lengthwise and place them on sawhorses. They were then filled with charcoal, and old steel fridge/freezer shelves were placed across the top, thus creating two enormous barbecues. Over these makeshift grills, the ubiquitous hamburgers and hot dogs were cooked alongside Italian sausages, a simple culinary representation of the melding of two distinctive cultures. The sausages were served on long wedges with slowly sautéed onions and red and green peppers. Jug wine was served, as well as glasses of beer straight from a frigid keg. In those days the ice came in blocks, not in bags of cubes, and as a young boy I relished the task of breaking it into smaller chunks with a deadly ice pick so that they would fit around the portly beer keg that sat in a basin wrapped in thick canvas, waiting to be tapped. For dessert, besides peaches soaked in wine, my mother always served a homemade rectangular sponge cake decorated with the Stars and Stripes. The surface was covered in white icing, with fresh strawberries comprising the red stripes and blueberries making up the blue field behind the stars.