Memory.

Jamie Harrison on food and memory ...

Tiny NJ’s grocery in Lake Leelanau, where we were allowed to run a huge tab between rare paychecks, mostly offered frozen peas, carrots and potatoes and onions, beef and pork and chicken, Gallo Hearty Burgundy and French Colombard (what was that, anyway?), but we had a garden, amazing despite hail and the learning curve, which I loved despite garter snakes and daddy long legs.

Remembering her dad ...

Though my father might have been born a poet, and born an eater, he was definitely not born a cook. His passion for tarragon chicken in the early seventies, and his talent for delivering it to the plate slippery and lukewarm; his general life-long impatience with grilling temperatures and times; the time he used the wrong stomach for menudo, and we all ran outside retching as the smell permeated the house; another exodus when he overheated chilies in oil for an early Chinese attempt, everyone running out of the house screaming and clawing at their eyes while the pan caught on fire. He was not good at details and he was not patient—he never reclosed a jar in his life; he never ceased to quarrel about cooking times with my husband—and he always thought more was better (garlic, peppers, wine).

He remained, at heart, a pork chop and herring kind of guy, but he was spurred by a deep competition with my mother and with close friends who knew what they were doing: a Frenchman named Guy de la Valdene, and the painter Russell Chatham, who would arrive in early October for grouse and woodcock hunting and stay three inspired, somewhat sodden weeks. We went from pot roast with iceberg and blue cheese dressing (not that there is anything wrong with these things) to grouse with grapes, ravioli with truffles, salmi de bécasses. By fifteen I was making spring rolls and screaming at failed meringues. 

A refrigerator-worthy thought ...

The French edition of my father’s food writing collection, A Very Big Lunch, has the epigraph, To cook is to love again. I’m not sure when he wrote or said this, but food is love, food is memory, food keeps people you love in the room of your head, even if you can no longer prove your love by feeding them. My father is the constant urge for more, in every part of life; my mother is everything we touch, still.

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