Food and Things

[copied from dland]

Okay: What the hell is chorizo? Is it some kind of sausage? Why do so many recipes call for chorizo? You know, it would never in a million years occur to me to put sausage into a recipe; I would eat sausage for breakfast at IHOP or McDonald's or someplace, and I do at this moment have veggie breakfast sausage in the house. But sausage for dinner is completely off my radar.

I learned long ago that as adults, we tend to eat -- and cook -- the way we were brought up to. I learned this lesson via Phantom, my college boyfriend, whom I wrote about not too long ago, here, and the extreme rural-ness of his background.

My second year in the dorm -- his last, he was a senior -- we had decided to screw the meal plan and cook our own food. A terrible idea in retrospect, but I digress. I made scrambled eggs once, or an omelet or some kind of eggs, and the first thing I did was drop a chunk of butter in the pan and let it melt.

"Ew!" he said. "Why would you cook eggs in butter?"

This was like asking why you would put milk on cereal.

"Wha...? What else would you cook eggs in?" I finally asked.

With an air of authority and of-courseness, he said "Bacon grease."

"What if you're not making bacon with your eggs?"

Now his air turned to how-stupid-can-you-be, and he told me that at home, they saved the bacon drippings and had a can of it on the kitchen counter near the stove. Now it was my turn.

"Ew! You keep bacon grease?"

Certainly they did; why didn't we? I thought about it for a minute, and knew why.

I learned to make eggs from my mother, who learned it from hers, and so on, and so on, and so on. Now, even my grandmother's mother did not keep a kosher home. But she certainly didn't cook bacon in her kitchen in her Little House on the Shtetl. It's just not in the cultural background of Jewish people to cook with pork products, even if you're not kosher and even if you eat pork products yourself (which I do, as did my mother, and even my grandmother, once she moved to New York and was first exposed to it.) There are many Jewish people who do not keep kosher but who are grossed out by the thought of anything that mixes meat and dairy, like, say, chicken parmesan, or even drinking milk along with a meat sandwich. They'll eat the ham sandwich, but drink a glass of milk with it? Ew.

There's no value judgment here, certainly, just an observation, and it works both ways. I can't think of a great many non-Jewish people who chow down on gefilte fish, but if you were raised with it, it's a comfort food.

Oh, here's another one, one that I didn't figure out until I was grown up. Do you eat strawberries and cream? If you do, I bet it's sweet cream you pour over your berries. Over here, it's sour cream. In Jewish cuisine, anything served "with cream" means sour cream: blintzes (crepes with cheese or fruit filling), strawberries, bananas, borscht (cold beet soup), latkes (potato pancakes). When I was a kid and one of my grandmothers was giving me lunch when my mother was out, or when I was with them, it was bananas and sour cream. Literally, with sugar on top. Talk about your comfort food, man. What's more comforting than what your grandmother fed you?

.
.
.

One of the things I wrote about last night was the classic movies that are on -- it's Oscars weekend -- and how I couldn't watch Lawrence of Arabia if you paid me; the Hubs was certainly watching it for the zillionth time. So now, My Fair Lady is on, and you can bet that I'm watching this one, although he isn't. I know I watched it not that long ago; did I ever mention how I first saw this movie, in a fancy theater in New York at night? OldFriend's parents got tickets, just like getting tickets to a Broadway show, and took us both and bought us programs and everything. We got all dressed up and it was very cool. We were 11, I guess, based on the date of the movie. An unusual experience, I would think.

Speaking of musicals, the musical director at school has conceded that he may do a Rogers and Hammerstein musical once before I retire because he knows I love them and I've been trying to convince him to do one for years. He doesn't like them because a) they're not dark enough for him, and b) there are no opportunities to dress girls in scanty costumes and/or dress them like hookers. (He leans towards Chicago and Sweet Charity and the like. And he likes to sell tickets.) So he's considering Carousel, which has no naked girls, but is pretty dark, and about death and morality and all that. Not my favorite -- that's probably The Sound of Music, just because it was the first musical I really knew -- but I'll take it. I wish he would just do The Music Man, which is actually by Meredith Wilson, but it's so much fun. And it's about a librarian, too.

I'm going to feed the cat, who's eating now but her schedule is all off, and then peruse the crockpot recipe magazine I just picked up at the supermarket. Oscars tonight!


WATCHING MY FAIR LADY :: ENTRY #1385