(no subject)

I was thinking about my Proust foods.

salmon loaf -- my father made this. I remember crunching the bones, and the dark little kitchen in El Sobrante. My father did a great deal of the daily cooking, and he also baked bread.

pomegranates and pine nuts -- the glory foods of winter. We would get these little cylindrical packages of pine nuts in the shell and crack them with our teeth in front of the Christmas tree. Pomegranates were just always miraculous.

matzoh ball soup -- Aunt Bati's Pesach dinner. All her inlaws dressed up in suits and ties and making jokes I didn't get, a whole world of strangeness, but that matzoh ball soup was wonderful. And so was the Haggadah ("the telling") -- in the fifties-sixties, it was full of internationalist justice-seeking progressive goodness. (by the way, if you see the "Santa Cruz Haggadah" in a catalog somewhere, don't think "oh, that must be cool," because it isn't. It seems to think that the right to ride on the Big Dipper roller coaster at the Boardwalk is somehow significant. It's dumber as a rock) The old men reading out loud from Hebrew text, rocking as they go, racing each other, it seemed like. There's rented tables set right through the house and thirty? forty? of these imposing people, affinal cousins I don't know. In the study, which is at one end of the long room where the tables are, there's a picture of my Grandpa Aaron, who died when my mother was seven. I've heard about him so much that I feel like I've known him (though I know very little about him).

wax beans, especially canned -- Aunt Margie's Thanksgiving table. There's a divided cut-glass dish, with wax beans on one side and green beans on the other. There's another cut-glass dish with celery sticks, carrot sticks, black olives and radishes. The table is long, deeply polished, and the cloth is white and starched. There's another smaller table in the bay window which is cluttered with souvenirs sent by her brothers from all the exotic places where they did their oil prospecting and business -- a Chinese dish on a stand, a pair of delft clogs (oh dog! That's why when I was in Amsterdam I kept being drawn to the delft kitsch against my will), a maté gourd and a maté cup with a lid? and a special silver spoon that was also a straw -- many more things I'll probably remember piecemeal over the next few weeks. A candle snuffer and some kind of candlestick. I was always a little afraid of Aunt Margie but she was really amazing and her stuff even more so.

candied citrus peel, or that candy that's chocolate on the outside and a kind of stiff citrus jelly on the inside: and lemon drops: and almost any kind of jelly, as long as it's really good and reminds me of "paradise jelly" made with quinces and other fruit -- My Grandma Emma's house. She was really my great-grandmother, just as Aunt Margie was really my great-aunt. Grandma Emma had read an interview with Jack London, in which he said that he blamed his alcoholism on not getting enough candy as a child, so she always had some candy in her house (there was almost never any candy at my house). Her house was an ell built on to the back end of Aunt Margie's adobe, so that the whole house was shaped like the letter C around a patio with a grape arbor, bearing grapes I have never seen anywhere else. They were called "lady finger" grapes and they were very large and long and had a mild but pleasing taste and large seeds. It was important that it was an adobe with thick thick walls and a shady grape arbor, because it was Sacramento and it gets way hot in Sacramento in the summer.

cracked crab -- another winter delicacy. There used to be these crab shacks that would mushroom up along the mudflats by the Bay in crab season, and you'd go there and they'd crack and clean a crab for each person for some unbelievably cheap price. These are the Dungeness crabs: I really don't know much about any other kind of crab. Sometimes dinner would be these crabs and French bread (sourdough,usually bought in a round loaf -- like a boule), and maybe artichokes, and more mayonnaise than I like to admit. My brother was the only one of us who didn't like crab. Later on he discovered the hard way that he is very very allergic to arthropods when he encounters them as food. My mother still liked to go to Fisherman's Wharf and get a couple of crabs when she was living in San Francisco. I remember a terrible scene when she decided to go down there drunk and dressed in a raincoat thrown over a nightgown and the clutch on her car decided to burn out right as we were coming home. We did get home -- I forget exactly how, maybe the tow guy took us there on the way to the garage -- and my mother fell asleep over her diet 7-up and white wine before she ate anything.

orange cake -- my mother made an orange cake with orange frosting and colored sprinkles for one of my birthdays. It was the best birthday possible. My two best friends -- who didn't much like each other, but they got along great that day -- and my mother and I went to San Francisco and we listened to the band play program music in the concourse, and we had that orange cake and fried chicken, and we went to the deYoung Museum with the paintings by El Greco and the replica rooms and the iridescent Egyptian glass and the Rodin vase and the Aquarium and the Planetarium and all the halls of this science and that science and we watched the Foucault pendulum and we rode on the merry-go-round and climbed on the climbers. I think we may even have hit the Conservatory and the Shakespeare Garden, but I may be conflating things. The alligators were a definite highlight of the Aquarium, as were the axolotls. I bought a sample of a cinnabar rose for my rock collection, which included very few boughten samples -- almost all of them were right from my own neighborhood, though the obsidian was from Napa. Valerie and I were Junior Geologists (a thing I made up) and Louisey and I did psychodramas.

There are more, of course, but this is long enough.