Under the invisible subway griminess, my hands are caked yellow-green with the thick sweat of tomatoes, whose rangy legs I've been breaking methodically, all day long. The Green Line flashes by, a more predictable, less elusive shade, no dusting in its paint of oily purple-black or pollen-gold. People's eyes dart over my hands, then away. Farm-maintenance days are always dirty, while harvest and market days are cleaner. I am vain about the dirt; I like looking at it on the subway, and like when other people look at it, and pretend not to. On the manicured, docile T, I give in a little to narcissism, and to a bit of glib internal poeticizing of the hard, communal, unheroic work I do.
Tomorrow the youth crews will swing full crates freighted with leaf and seedpod from hand to hand, into the back of out rattletrap red van, which I'll drive to market. As I start the engine a ragged cheer will rise, and in the rearview's jittery glass I'll see two young folk congratulate each other with a many-staged handshake, the sort of manual hip-hop dance they are perpetually inventing, slap-draw back-reverse-jerk-snap. They've created one to accompany an oft-dropped meme: the Pop-Lock-n-Drop-It handshake. Pop: the two fists connect, oriented so that two imaginary clutched batons would point perpendicular to the ground. Lock: knuckles touching, the wrists torque in opposite directions, so batons are horizontal. And Drop It: the fingers open, and phantom batons clatter side by side on the blacktop.
At the market I'll roll a curb, ignoring horns. Pilot the low-rolling vegetable boat though a sluggishly parting sea of tiny Latina children, whose mothers and big sisters herd them aside as they see the van. And ease between the tents, aged Russians more unresponsive to their immanent crushing than the toddlers, their dim but shrewd eyes fixed, myopic, on the spot where beets, dill, garlic and honey will soon appear. I lumber through the breach, the neighbor's hanging flowerpots brushing the hull. Then the human wake closing, and rising to lap and surge against the stand. The market coordinator staving them back, so the doors can open and the desired fruits be piled on the plastic folding tables. Much yelling and gesturing as the hell-bent old women descend on their favored ingredients like a creaking army of bees, their chatter in an acrobatic syllabary we can no more decipher or pronounce than the stinger-waving jive of apiaries. At least we can speak broken Spanish to the stream of Guatemalan and Salvadorian mothers who drift over to our stand from the Latino farmers next door, their bags stuffed with maize leaves for tamales. On a good day, we have a native speaker with us; otherwise we deploy our few words and stitch them together with the broad loops of gesture.
Long after the first rush, we usually see Destiny and her mom, or another favorite customer, Elena. Bleach-blonde and talkative in a front-porch rocking-chair manner, a thinning but still salty Greek accent overlays her fluent English, which gropes only occasionally for an obscure culinary term. She tells the intern stuffing her bag with spinach about making her own fila dough for spanakopita, beckoning periodically to encourage more spinach. She comes as much to talk as shop, and never leaves the stand without a detailed discussion of recipes, her family, and food philosophy.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Bean and cod at last
Oh I come from the city of Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Cabots speak only to Lulls
And the lulls speak only to God.
The doggerel sticks with me from some childhood afternoon when my mother recited it to my uncomprehending but eager ears, which stashed the euphony away, but missed the saltiness of my mother's mockery, the history of her husband's blueblooded Bostonian heritage (long a laughing and occasional crying matter for her). This note surfaced later, and how I am living here where ancestors whose stories (and wealth) have receded in the mists of East Coast Standard Time.
One month here and I am settling a score with my titles. Bean and cod has heretofore eluded me. Not that cooking them will plug me into some hidden vault of ancestral memory--I have slim intent to season according to tradition--but the hours spent reading recipes, talking to locals and stomping around town hunting down ingredients will be an affair of meditation on my strange and common position as a postmodern person afloat amid fractured and remixed heritages, a global sea of taste and story.
So I take the Green to Lechmere and walk west on Cambridge Street. Somewhere in that sector, there's fresh cod for cheap. Or so says the internet.
View Larger Map
On the train, musing: the America of the future, as I imagine it at home in Vermont, seems, at least on this section of the T, a plausible, dawning reality. A nation of jalepeno and fried plantain as much as of bean and cod, of curry and Pho as much as of burgers (from Hamburg) and fries (French). (New York pizza is just as much pizza as Sicilian, a maker of rigorously Italian pizzas once told me, to his credit. ) This America is on the train, looking like the world: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a few pale northerners curious for their primary coloring: blue eyes, yellow hair, red blush and sunburn. Speaking dozens of languages, having forgotten hundreds. Like the Italian my grandfather un-forgot, in the last years of his life, sitting across a folding wood-grain laminate table from a woman named Rosa, in Cardinal Hills retirement home, his wife gone, his house sold, but the grammar, the whole crystalline structure of the language, still somehow intact. Cooking for me, and for many of us, is an act of remembering things we never learned. Especially for Euro-Americans who have forgotten that we come from somewhere, that our skin has a shade, is not simply blank, that our names trace us back to a position on the globe. But while remembering the old countries, one should know that traditions never stop forming, and everyone makes them, even people who have forgotten their ethnicity, like proper Bostonians, the bean and cod eaters. So my "traditional" Boston meal is just another way of tapping other people's memories, or dipping back into the salty ocean of my ancestry and scooping something forgotten back into my identity in the clamorous present.
...
The fishmarket is smaller than I expected. Somehow the enthusing of dozens of Chowhounds and Yelpers enlarges a place. Smell of fish, arresting but not rank. Neat, unadorned coolers, single deli counter. I ask after the fabled codfish. 13.99, and I ask if there are any scraps from the cutting. "Frozen, we have some. Cut up the fish yesterday. We keep it around for fishcakes, but you're welcome to it." Showing me to the freezer, and tied-off plastic bag. I tell him I'm going down the street to comparison shop, but will probably be back and thanks for his understanding. New Deal doesn't have enough scraps, but they do an small but very well-curated selection of nori paper, seasoned bread crumbs in house-packaged bags, each labelled with price by weight. Baskets of citrus fruit. And a small shelf of olive oil and Modenan vinegar, all selected with hand-written, laminated tasting notes tacked to the painted wood of the shelf. Selected for seafood pairings, all of them. Nothing irrelevant, a full price range, and nothing that is not honestly described in the careful handwriting. Maybe 10 feet of shelf, in all. I buy the breadcrumbs, after wandering around dazed, fingering and reading things. And walk back east, to where the Courthouse guy chastises me lightly with his tone for believing there might be any competition. I smile. Buy the fish.
...
And as the Lechmere's "brick barn" (as a passing local directed me) rises to view again, I spot Francisco's wife among the much-taller Salvadorian black corn. She recognizes me. We chat briefly about the maize, the tomatoes. We don't exchange names. I never see them again.
...
When the T spits me out at Kenmore, I duck below the street again to visit the Wine Gallery for beer pairing advice. I get that (Hoegaarden to compliment the light herbal and citrus flavors in the cod cakes and white bean salad), and I report back on yesterday's cod buying advice. The proprietors and I have established a chatting friendship over my persistent beer questions. "My parents were fishermen," the proprietress told me before my fish-buying trip. "I grew up around boats and fish. Fourth of July... well, we'd always make fish cakes. Cod. Cod cakes were the tradition." The best fish market burned down some years back, she tells me, but directs me up to New Deal and Courthouse, though these were closed on the actual Fourth. So after balking at Trader Joe's Alaskan frozen cod, I out the meal off for a day and get the fish from nearer waters.
...
The meal turns out rather well. Tarragon, cilantro and dill are chopped go from fat bunches to piles of confetti. The canellinis come out of cold soak into boiling water, are drained and doused in olive oil. Not as ripely apt as those in New Deal's curated case, but servicable. Everything is light, lemony, intensely herbal, and perfect with the Hoegaarden's loose, flowery sheaves of wheat, orange peel, and coriander. Consumed on the roof beneath the flashing Citgo sign, and in the park by the Charles, the history of the dish was eclipsed by the bracing ephermerality of these flavors. Within days, almost all the ingredients will wilt, rot, fade into blandness or rank.
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Cabots speak only to Lulls
And the lulls speak only to God.
The doggerel sticks with me from some childhood afternoon when my mother recited it to my uncomprehending but eager ears, which stashed the euphony away, but missed the saltiness of my mother's mockery, the history of her husband's blueblooded Bostonian heritage (long a laughing and occasional crying matter for her). This note surfaced later, and how I am living here where ancestors whose stories (and wealth) have receded in the mists of East Coast Standard Time.
One month here and I am settling a score with my titles. Bean and cod has heretofore eluded me. Not that cooking them will plug me into some hidden vault of ancestral memory--I have slim intent to season according to tradition--but the hours spent reading recipes, talking to locals and stomping around town hunting down ingredients will be an affair of meditation on my strange and common position as a postmodern person afloat amid fractured and remixed heritages, a global sea of taste and story.
So I take the Green to Lechmere and walk west on Cambridge Street. Somewhere in that sector, there's fresh cod for cheap. Or so says the internet.
View Larger Map
On the train, musing: the America of the future, as I imagine it at home in Vermont, seems, at least on this section of the T, a plausible, dawning reality. A nation of jalepeno and fried plantain as much as of bean and cod, of curry and Pho as much as of burgers (from Hamburg) and fries (French). (New York pizza is just as much pizza as Sicilian, a maker of rigorously Italian pizzas once told me, to his credit. ) This America is on the train, looking like the world: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a few pale northerners curious for their primary coloring: blue eyes, yellow hair, red blush and sunburn. Speaking dozens of languages, having forgotten hundreds. Like the Italian my grandfather un-forgot, in the last years of his life, sitting across a folding wood-grain laminate table from a woman named Rosa, in Cardinal Hills retirement home, his wife gone, his house sold, but the grammar, the whole crystalline structure of the language, still somehow intact. Cooking for me, and for many of us, is an act of remembering things we never learned. Especially for Euro-Americans who have forgotten that we come from somewhere, that our skin has a shade, is not simply blank, that our names trace us back to a position on the globe. But while remembering the old countries, one should know that traditions never stop forming, and everyone makes them, even people who have forgotten their ethnicity, like proper Bostonians, the bean and cod eaters. So my "traditional" Boston meal is just another way of tapping other people's memories, or dipping back into the salty ocean of my ancestry and scooping something forgotten back into my identity in the clamorous present.
...
The fishmarket is smaller than I expected. Somehow the enthusing of dozens of Chowhounds and Yelpers enlarges a place. Smell of fish, arresting but not rank. Neat, unadorned coolers, single deli counter. I ask after the fabled codfish. 13.99, and I ask if there are any scraps from the cutting. "Frozen, we have some. Cut up the fish yesterday. We keep it around for fishcakes, but you're welcome to it." Showing me to the freezer, and tied-off plastic bag. I tell him I'm going down the street to comparison shop, but will probably be back and thanks for his understanding. New Deal doesn't have enough scraps, but they do an small but very well-curated selection of nori paper, seasoned bread crumbs in house-packaged bags, each labelled with price by weight. Baskets of citrus fruit. And a small shelf of olive oil and Modenan vinegar, all selected with hand-written, laminated tasting notes tacked to the painted wood of the shelf. Selected for seafood pairings, all of them. Nothing irrelevant, a full price range, and nothing that is not honestly described in the careful handwriting. Maybe 10 feet of shelf, in all. I buy the breadcrumbs, after wandering around dazed, fingering and reading things. And walk back east, to where the Courthouse guy chastises me lightly with his tone for believing there might be any competition. I smile. Buy the fish.
...
And as the Lechmere's "brick barn" (as a passing local directed me) rises to view again, I spot Francisco's wife among the much-taller Salvadorian black corn. She recognizes me. We chat briefly about the maize, the tomatoes. We don't exchange names. I never see them again.
...
When the T spits me out at Kenmore, I duck below the street again to visit the Wine Gallery for beer pairing advice. I get that (Hoegaarden to compliment the light herbal and citrus flavors in the cod cakes and white bean salad), and I report back on yesterday's cod buying advice. The proprietors and I have established a chatting friendship over my persistent beer questions. "My parents were fishermen," the proprietress told me before my fish-buying trip. "I grew up around boats and fish. Fourth of July... well, we'd always make fish cakes. Cod. Cod cakes were the tradition." The best fish market burned down some years back, she tells me, but directs me up to New Deal and Courthouse, though these were closed on the actual Fourth. So after balking at Trader Joe's Alaskan frozen cod, I out the meal off for a day and get the fish from nearer waters.
...
The meal turns out rather well. Tarragon, cilantro and dill are chopped go from fat bunches to piles of confetti. The canellinis come out of cold soak into boiling water, are drained and doused in olive oil. Not as ripely apt as those in New Deal's curated case, but servicable. Everything is light, lemony, intensely herbal, and perfect with the Hoegaarden's loose, flowery sheaves of wheat, orange peel, and coriander. Consumed on the roof beneath the flashing Citgo sign, and in the park by the Charles, the history of the dish was eclipsed by the bracing ephermerality of these flavors. Within days, almost all the ingredients will wilt, rot, fade into blandness or rank.
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