It's a philosophy with deep roots that intertwine to connect every area of a life. And it's a fitting creed for celebrating the Fourth of July.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published July 2, 2003
[Times photo: James Borchuck]
The family recipe for barbecue sauce doubles as a marinade for veal slow-cooked in the oven. Homemade coleslaw tops it on the bun.
A Chinese philosopher for the Fourth of July?
Well, why not.
Lin Yutang, born in the Fukien Province in 1895, was a scholar and writer whose opus, The Importance of Living, was published in the United States in 1937. It's an eccentric romp, the main premise being that the well-lived life is one in which we embrace temporal pleasures and learn to relax, to slow down. A corollary theme is that the quality of our journey through life is largely determined by the food we eat.
The book is flush with aphorisms such as my favorite: "What is patriotism but love of good things we ate in our childhood?"
Which brings me back to the Fourth of July.
People define patriotism in lots of ways. Me, I'm with Lin. This thesis of creative loafing as a respectable - indeed as the highest - calling may not be a practical way for most of us to live our lives, but it sounds the perfect note for a holiday. Even more, though, many of Lin's ideas speak to a sense of place, of knowing where we come from, of valuing the events and people who shaped our early lives.
That place for me was St. Petersburg in the 1950s. It was a small town, and it certainly had its problems, as our family of five did, but it was, in important ways, a lovely place to grow up. Without question, I was raised with privilege and entitlement that used to make me feel guilty but now invokes only gratitude.
By the time I was born, both grandfathers had died, but my grandmothers lived on for many decades. Eleanor Lummus Canton and Frances Mann Bussey, my namesakes, were Southern belles who never learned to drive or cook. My maternal grandmother did not live here full time, but my paternal grandmother, Mema, did, and though she didn't cook, she loved to entertain.
Her big blowout was Christmas, when she had a seated and served dinner for all the aunts, uncles, cousins and extended family. A devout Methodist, she never served wine or spirits, though once, several of us children discovered a bottle of Creme de Menthe in a hatbox. My father told me that she kept it "for medicinal purposes" and hid it in her closet because she was afraid that her minister would find it during an impromptu call. (Because Mema rarely entered the kitchen except to give instructions, I can't imagine why she thought her minister would do so to rifle through cabinets, but there you are.)
Like a lot of other affluent people who lived in Florida, Mema vacated the scene during the summer months, spending them in the cooler airs of Chautauqua, N.Y. For many years, St. Petersburg was more or less dead socially from late June through August. Most restaurants and stores, even department stores, shut down.
My father, a lawyer, didn't have the luxury of leaving for three months, nor did many of his contemporaries, so our mothers made a patchwork summer of briefer trips bisected by at least two weeks at a summer camp, which I loathed. Mostly, we kids were left alone to roam our neighborhood, going from house to house with our friends, never having to check in with our mothers, so sure were they in the belief that ours was a safe, secure little world.
A lot of us had swimming pools, so we'd stay in our bathing suits all day, moving to a new pool when we got bored with the one we were at, sort of like the main character in John Cheever's The Swimmer, without the metaphor or nervous breakdown.
Or we'd lug big inner tubes to Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty's house, which sat on Little Bayou. Directly across was a large island of sand, later filled and developed as Coquina Key; we'd float or swim over to it, sometimes balancing a watermelon we'd split open on a piece of driftwood and eat with our hands.
My parents conformed to conventions of the time, which meant that he was the breadwinner and she was the homemaker. She had a lot of domestic help, but unlike her mother, my mother was a fabulous cook. Her only flaw as I saw it was her propensity for weird dishes. While my friends chowed down on macaroni and cheese, we got curry. She loved obscure ingredients. For a dish she'd read about called Shrimp in Black Bean Sauce, she had to go to Chinatown during a visit to New York for the key component, fermented black beans. Once when we were visiting relatives in Minneapolis, she offered to cook dinner for a group of faculty members from the university where my uncle was a professor. Her ceviche was so exotic and suspect that members of the biology and chemistry departments had to be consulted to determine if it was safe to eat. (They decided it was.)
Mother, being an experimental cook who hated to measure things and rarely made a dish the same way twice, was not a gifted baker and didn't care much for desserts. She relied on others to provide them, and some of the best came from her good friend Helen Fowler.
Mrs. Fowler was Martha Stewart before Martha Stewart and without the attitude. She could do anything domestically, and if something required a new skill, she learned it. She introduced me to carrot cake, so different from the standard yellow with chocolate frosting that I was used to. This was before food processors, so the time she took to make it, risking her knuckles as she grated carrots on a handheld box grater, was a gift. For years, hers was the only version I knew, with a broiled nuts and coconut topping, and I still prefer its crunch to the bland gloppiness of sweetened cream cheese common today.
Interrupting our gentle laissez-faire summer rhythms was the Fourth of July, which required a concerted family effort. My mother never messed with this holiday as a culinary event, keeping it resolutely, traditionally, American. My father would be called on to grill steak and barbecue chicken and ribs. Mother and I made baked beans, potato salad and coleslaw. My brothers were assigned the crank of the ice cream maker (always fresh peach ice cream), a detested job mitigated only by their getting first dibs on licking the paddle.
My father was never much of a cook, though I believe that but for some unspoken taboo banishing men from the kitchen back then, he might have become a good one. He was very proud of his vinaigrette, one I still make, and his barbecue sauce. He'd put on an apron, chop the onions, then stand over the stove stirring it while the ribs and chicken got their prebaking in the oven. Dad was a stickler for eating at the table, but he usually relented for this meal and let us eat it on our laps by the pool, licking our fingers and jumping in when we got messy. After dark, we'd dash around with sparklers while Dad and my older brother set off contraband fireworks purchased during a drive home from North Carolina or Tennessee.
In later years, despite and because of us, everything changed. We grew up and away. My parents divorced and married other people. My stepmother was a kind, elegant woman, raised in wealth, who had little interest in cooking. But it was she who introduced me to the pleasure, on a summer day, of a thin slice of salty prosciutto wrapped around a sweet sliver of melon, and of roasted vegetables long before they became fashionable. She and my father moved away, so holidays were often spent at the vacation house my mother and stepfather built in Dunnellon on the Rainbow River; everyone called it Blue Run.
We still grilled steaks for the Fourth of July and set off fireworks, but we also ate raw oysters on the dock, and when we couldn't stand ourselves any more, we'd jump into the spring-fed river instead of a pool, the water so cold it took our breath away. In one of her rare failures, Mother got this idea, in honor of the French participation in the War for Independence, to use the snails that attached themselves to the cypress knees growing out of the river for a local version of Coquilles St. Jacques. These snails were vile-tasting creatures that no amount of garlic and butter could make edible. They ended up back in the river.
In the woods were blackberry thickets. We'd put on layers of clothes, even in the intense heat, and fill buckets with oozing fruit. Despite the protective garments, we'd be covered in scratches from the bushes' thorns. Our reward was blackberry cobbler, which had replaced peach ice cream as the holiday dessert.
My parents died some time ago, and many of their friends who were like surrogate parents to me are gone, too. I tend not to get nostalgic because I understand so many darker stories that lurked beneath those sunlit, thoughtless years, and the danger and falsity of romanticizing one's past. But I still believe in its essential goodness, and in the grounding my parents provided no matter what personal storms were uprooting their lives.
And so, now, when I celebrate the Fourth of July, I wrap it in the flag of patriotism and in the warm mantle of memories. I never try to replicate them. But sometimes I cook something from those past times and think about how right Lin Yutang was about food, the pleasure and comfort it can give, and the efficacy of it in bringing people together, even temporarily, and always worth remembering.
* * *
These recipes from family and friends are mostly as they were written down.
My father's barbecue sauce is thin, and because I prefer dry-rubbed ribs and chicken, I don't use it as he did. By July, I find the weather too hot for tending a fire, so I use the sauce as a marinade for a roast. I like veal shoulder, but pork works fine, too. I bake everything together until the meat shreds and the sauce is a gloppy, viscous coating that melds with the meat. It takes hours and lacks the smoky flavor of the grill, but you'll have the day to do as you please while it burbles away.
The coleslaw is the most basic possible because its purpose is as a textured condiment sandwiched with the pork between rolls.
The potato salad is a hybrid of French and American versions, the potatoes rescued from blandness by their douse of white wine while still hot, and a little lighter with a dressing of olive oil, a dollop of mayonnaise stirred in before serving to give it a nice creaminess.
