Echo.

Jamie Harrison on the relationship between eating, love, and memory ...

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. By seventeen I was fighting for the Calvados and hiding the cocaine. When I took my little sister to the first Star Wars, we carried along a paper bag of Mrs. Chiang’s dry-fried beef for snacking, and ignored the people who stared; we drove to the theater in a dented red Chevy Vega that stalled in first gear, which my father and I had pooled our money to buy. A few years later he sold the rights to the three novellas of Legends of the Fall and the wine budget changed, but by then I’d moved to New York.

I slid some of the family dishes in the novel—the effort, serving, and clean-up rather than recipe details. We cook them all, still, as well as things from the subsequent forty years’ worth of cookbooks that cover a wall in the kitchen and fill boxes in the garage and basement. It’s a joy, but I feel the echo in the room. Almost everything I cook makes me think about someone I miss, living or dead.