The BLT
Yesterday, Lisa Renee dropped a pearl of blogging goodness into the sea of dreck here on Medium. Strangely, it happened a day after Veronica Montes gaves us this:
Coincidence? Hah! I have my conspiracy theories, but since I also caught a glimpse of Hilal Isler updating her “Strawberry Fields” series, I have to think that either the planets are aligned or it is “Old Home Week” here on Medium.
It couldn’t have come too soon.
For the recent arrivals… and you know who you are… you marketing bots that use “ethnic” names, millennial photos, and don’t bother to write a bio before you “follow” 7,000 people… this harmonic convergence of writers is like having Aoide, Melete, and Mneme walk the earth. It can’t help but make you want to write more.
I want to focus on Lisa Renee’s story to illustrate what makes grade-A blogging goodness. I’ll link to the article. Go read it and when you are done come back here. If you get distracted, don’t worry. This story will still be here in five days. Nobody will be able to find it, but it will still be here. All the dreck remains on Medium, gently composting down to ones and zeros on the Medium server farm. PRO TIP: Add the article you want to read to your reading list with the ribbon icon. The reading list on Medium works really well. Who knew?
You read it, right? You wouldn’t skip over that plug, would you? I thought not.
Since this post is already too long and I may not get a chance to talk about myself, I will summarize the goodness in easy-to-digest bullet points.
- It’s a personal essay. A post-death-of-personal essay personal essay offering. You see, the “Chinese gold farmers” of content waded into the rain forrest of blogging diversity, harvested the personal essays, and then left us a landscape with the artistic nutrients of a piece of linolium. Our bloggosphere has been denuded, yet here is Lisa Renee planting a seed in the garden! Veronica Montes did the same thing, which is why we can dub this the “Summer of the Personal Essay.”
- Lobster Tale is food blogging, and food blogging, like travel blogging, is total junk, because most people are on the take… except Lisa Renee. If you read the piece you know that the Maine Department of Tourism isn’t giving her a free camping pass. The Lobster Lobby only cares about selling to East Asia nowadays, so they’re not giving her any coupons. We can be sure that this is uncorrupted blogging.
- It’s a finished piece of writing. Unlike the stuff I burp out, Lobster Tale is clean. That takes work. She did that work for you!
All this is to say that after reading Lobster Tale, I thought I should pick up on my old food blogging series. Then I looked and, too my horror, realized that I haven’t added to it since June of last year. I don’t know what happened, but now I am inspired.
Part I: What You Need to Know to Understand the Symbolic Importance of Bacon in My Life
Many food memories, I’ve discovered, also are cooking memories. There’s a connection between cooking and eating. There is enjoyment to be derived from making something and eating it yourself.
There is also enjoyment from the acquisition of competence. I described in the toast post how making toast was an important culinary milestone. I don’t exactly know the sequence. The lower order functions are making cereal, toasting bread, compiling milkshakes in a Waring blender, and, eventually being able to poach an egg. In our house, being able to cook bacon was the “raft test” of being at the stove. Bacon grease gets hot. It pops and splatters. We had an open flame, so there was the possiblity of a grease fire. Younger siblings could not get near the skillet. Most of all, bacon takes constant attention. Bacon cannot be left unattended.
Now the Internet has turned bacon into a “thing”, which I resent. Bacon is the ethnic food of my people. My brother can explain in detail how he was introduced to bagels at age 11 (we lived just outside of New York City). I never saw pasta cooked in a pot, ours always came from a can. We only ate rice with pork chops, and it was minute rice. We had pizza once, maybe twice, a year. Once upon a time, meat and potatoes really meant meat and potatoes. This was a time before hot sauce. Salt was the primary condiment, so we didn’t have much in the way of gustatory diversity, but we had bacon. We fried bacon almost every Sunday, then used the grease for cooking for the rest of the week.
My first memory of cooking bacon on my own is a tale of shame. I cooked the bacon, let it sit on a brown paper bag from the A&P to drain the fat, made two pieces of buttered toast, and put together a sandwhich. When I bit into the sandwich I realized that the bacon was horribly undercooked. Inedible. I don’t know how old I was at the time, maybe 10 or 11, so I handled the problem the way any good adolescent would. I cleaned up the skillet, then hid the sandwich behind the cellar door so that nobody would find my wasted bacon in the garbage. I’m not sure why, but the sandwich grew no mould. It became dessicated, a mummified sandwich behind the door that only I knew about. It’s spiritual rebuke grew as it lost moisture. In time, it had a monstrous presence, a shadow that had to be slipped past everytime I headed down the cellar stairs. You might ask, “Why didn’t you just throw it out?” By asking that, you betray the fact that you are not 12.
Part II: My Mother
My mother wasn’t meant to cook. She never liked cooking and actively resented it. She had cooks as a child. She didn’t get married until she was thirty years old, which was considered delayed in her day. She had gone to Tufts to become an occupational therapist and then left MacLean hospital to work as an insurance adjustor.
When she got married to my father she “played nice” for a while. There are stories of her fucking up a leg of lamb and undercooking casseroles. They aren’t really funny stories. They are the kind of stories that are told in families to remind you where the battle lines are drawn.
For a while, when my youngest brother was born, we had a “domestic servant” from Barbados who did a good amount of cooking. When she moved out and became our “cleaning lady,” she could no longer be counted on to give lift to our day-to-day dinners. That role reverted to my mother.
Make no mistake. My mom was smart, and tough, and powerful, but she was no match for cultural expectation. She put together some kind of dinner every day of my childhood. My father’s expectation of having her cook dinner never relented. Not at atom. Not even when his teenage sons would say “who the fuck cares” to him over the phone when he called at 3:00 PM to ask, “What’s for dinner? Do you need me to pick anything up.” I don’t know what generation of feminists we are on, but I know that my mother, who said out loud “I hate to cook”, cooked almost every single night.
The BLTs
My mother hated to cook, but she did not hate food. She was, instead, rather food obsessed. Her self-mythology was that she was a “fat” child. I’ve looked through the photographic evidence and she was, perhaps, “chubby” by modern standards during a brief period around age 13. She was traumatized by the fact that her athletic father, who had gone to flesh, died of complications during a kidney stone operation. His weight was part of the problem. Her mother was “plump”, and her sisters both became “fat” after children. Her “bootstrapping” to thinness narrative went like this; “I took the weight off by eighteen, and kept it off.” She avoided “starches” (those Italian kids are fat because they eat all of that pasta) and sugar (“I used to eat…” and she would describe a Suzy-Q… and then she would make a horrible face and say, “so sweet!”}. She ate things to “get a taste” and little more. She wasn’t above spitting out food that “wasn’t worth it.”
If you think I just described the grandmother of eating disorders, you’d be right. She was a carrier. I am thankful I never had a sister. One of my mother’s favorite things to do was look at a plate of food and say, “You’re not going to eat all that, are you?” She would comment on anything you made. She would watch you spread mayonnaise and ask, “don’t you want it to go to the edges?” She would say, “I think that is overdone” when you took toast out of the toaster. There wasn’t a meal in the world that she didn’t have an opinion about. Which makes sense, because the woman was hungry. Her sons grew up ignoring the running commentary from the family food cop. We learned that saying, “I don’t care, this is delicious” while stuffing a sandwich in our mouth was a double dose of passive agression directed at the short, thin woman hovering over our shoulder.
I tell you all this because you have to know that while my mother didn’t like to cook, she cared very much about food. I won’t go into what she made well. My brothers and I have about five or six things that we can’t recreate. On everyone’s list would be BLTs.
There were four of us. We ate at five. My mother and father ate at seven, so there was a “children’s meal” where my mother acted as waiter, cook, and referee. When she made BLTs, she cooked the bacon, sliced the tomatoes, and broke up the iceberg lettuce before she called us to dinner.
My mother could cook bacon. It has taken me four decades to achieve her level of proficiency.
With four of us seated at the kitchen table, she would stand at the counter and assemble the BLTs. She cut the sanwiches into fourths and gave us each a triangular quarter. We would then wait until the toast popped up and she made the next sandwich. One of my younger brothers would eat his quarter slowly so that he was never without food on his plate. I usually ate quickly and then watched the toaster. Either way, eventually there was too much sandwich. My mother would keep the assembly line going until all of us were sated. If there were a left-over quarter, she would eat it. An indulgence!
We had to wait until everyone was done. Once we were done eating, you could enter into the formulaic dismissal:
Child: May I be excused, please?
Mother: Yes, you may.
Child: Thank you, mommy, for a lovely dinner.
Then you would clear your place and be gone.
Those BLTs were the best I have ever eaten. They were also the most expensive. If I could go back in time, I would unchain my mother from the stove. She would insist that she was happy making them for me because she, like us, was bound by the age in which she lived. Don’t be fooled; if she had the money to hire someone to take her place she would have.
I can make a BLT. They are not as good as the ones I remember, in part because I won’t buy crappy white bread that seems to be part of the magic, but my BLTs are fine. I often ask my son if he would like me to make one for him. He seldom says, “yes”. Stupid kid.
How I wish that my mother could have had the freedom to ask that question they way I do.
Others in This Series
- Why the best meals are the ones that you ate before 15 (6/8/2016)
- Toast (6/9/2016)
- Childhood Sweets: Fluff & Dusty Millers (6/19/2016)
- Tortoni (1/6/18)
