Breaking Bread

Flying through the door like an enchanted bat out of hell was easy for me. The aromas filled my soul with the soulfulness my mother intended. All year long she would train me on how to cook dishes from around the globe. I was always elated to come home from school. She never left the concrete city she was born and raised in a day in her life but taught herself how to heat, boil, fry, bake, roast, grill, steam and burn baby burn in a Pittsburgh ghetto known for steel, not cuisine. She would go up to the public library and check out every cookbook, manuscript, magazine and brochure she can find using the Dewey Decimal Classification System as her guide. Then the Cooking Channel and YouTube came along and it was game on. I’ve tasted the creamiest Risotto Italy has to offer and a Jerusalem soup that she swears Jesus himself absorbed. Don’t judge her.

My mom had two goals. One was to introduce me to grub that I could cook for myself and not starve from boredom, so if my body never left home, my taste buds did. The second objective was to prepare me to go, to move, to leave, to be in the world and witness its vastness, experience life. She wanted better for me than she had for herself. So, when I arrive in Yulin China one day, I would know exactly what I was eating –or not to. I could even indulge in smooth fountains of cheese fondue in Zurich Switzerland, en route to the Alps. Smoked Gouda and Gruyere are my favorites. Those may have been my mom's intentions, but there was so much more going on.

Our home movies playback me as a toddler and mom saying, “Gursha, gursha, gursha” while shoving warm victuals in my mouth. She would smack my left hand if I grabbed the injera bread to scoop up the beets and corn. In Ethiopia that would be bad etiquette. Only use your right hand to eat and never let your fingers touch your mouth. I still love the thick orange, pineapple, avocado, strawberry, and papaya shakes, layered like grown-up party shots. They are healthy too with many vitamins and minerals.

I could tell time before any other Kindergartner thanks to tracking the time as the chocolate chip cookies baked. We did not have a timer, so I had to become one, a human clock watcher. My eyes went from the clock to the cookies to the clock to the cookies and until, “Ding, mom the cookies are ready.” This transformed into a math whiz. If you want to make a big serving of anything for a” gathering, you have to multiply. We did not have a lot of family, but there were plenty of friends who like to eat. Now and then a recipe might present cooking temperatures in Celsius, but the dial on the range read Fahrenheit. There are mathematical formulas used to convert, one would just have to know. We were not well-to-do for me to be burning down the house or torching a dinner meant to feed us over several days from leftovers. Patience and precision kept us fed. When you learn pie charts, cup measurements, ounces, and pounds in your own home, what does a teacher at school has left to teach? I got straight A’s and would be the first one done in Geometry.

You can calculate science into the practice too. Did you know you can create volcanoes with baking soda and vinegar? Once they erupt, the mixture is great for cleaning up all that cooking mess. And who doesn’t know that oil and water don’t mix? That is science.

The most essential rewards were history lessons. Naan flatbread is cooked in these huge stone ovens in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Our Kenmore oven was not the same and my mom heavy-handed on the garlic, but yummy does it taste good.

During the summer we would barbeque kabobs on spears like Persians with heirloom recipes but since neither of us liked the heat, many days were cold cuts of deli meat that the Polish call Chipped Ham on wheat bread or the Italians toss Prosciutto with pasta. A chill would pierce the air; the autumn leaves turned rich colors of orange and red and dropped to their death, let us know fall arrived. Many would favor hooded sweats buried deep in the depths of their closet. We may have lived on the East Coast in the States, but our souls entered New Orleans’s French Quarter along the Mississippi River. Feasting on gumbo with or without tomatoes. I don’t like okra but can do a rich dark roux, not without the “holy trinity” of bell pepper, celery, and onion, sautéed and thrown in the pot with seafood like shrimp and crabmeat. I love the spice that andouille sausage adds to it. We dance around the kitchen listening to street music from Barney Bigard and Louis Armstrong with Satchmo's half of a Dixie band. I heard slide trombones and pianos play. We would have a good ole time until Billie Holiday’s Farewell to Storyville put us to rest, by then our bellies bursting and we spread out on the couch. Who is going to remember to put the cornbread away for Sheppard’s pie? We would make that work for the next day.

Christmas we used techniques explicitly deep from the south when American plantation owners gave their scraps to the enslaved that took care of them. For hundreds of years, the captive and laborers would take those odds and ends and turn them into mighty comforts during the harshest of mean times, fixings that my mom made a tradition every year. We might not have had the eighteenth-century tools they used, but we had the ingredients. If the master of the big house back then did not eat ham hocks, they ended up braised and in the washed-up collard greens for supper in the shacks, with the right amount of seasoning and a touch of apple cider vinegar. This produced a flavor bomb better than anything on the big house plates. I liked the candied yams with roasted marshmallows and baked macaroni and cheese myself, but my mom never let me get fat off of them. She would say, “All things in moderation.” My Aunt Kera had a heart attack last year. That was a wake-up call to keep things healthy, but she was a mean ole somebody so she may have suffered from a bad personality instead of bad arteries.

The first time Aunt Kera and my mom met was when my Uncle G brought Aunty over for an introduction. She was eight months pregnant with their first child, my cousin. My mom was so excited for me to have the possibility of growing up with another family member. This was a chance to build out our tree. However, Kera’s vibes had my mom fully alert. My mom is strong and confident so any person that enters a conversation with her, she speaks to them as if they are the same. Kera was not. She was defensive when there was no offense. She was tit for tat like policy. When mom mentioned our family, she mentioned hers as the one and only. I could see my mom exhausted after the few evenings around Kera. Each time she would pull out balm for her lips to soften and moisture their dryness. She would pour several glasses of fresh lemonade to quench the thirst. Finally, mom said it when Kera was not around, “G, I cannot stand Kera. You picked the worse person to have a child with.” Uncle G’s eyes got big and he did not miss a beat in reply, “I know I do not love that woman and I have told her.” Uncle G felt free. His spirit had been released from prison being able to tell his sister how he felt about Kera. The door had been opened for the honesty to flourish, “We do not have a relationship; I have not touched her in months.” My mom shook her head in disagreement with the whole thing, “You gonna have to be really clear on how you treat her, she can make it very difficult for you and the relationship with your child.” His rebuttal came swift, “Then she won’t get any child support.” In one loud clap, my mom ferociously imitated the sound of thunder. I guess that was to snap him out of the nonsense. “You managed to avoid becoming a statistic and stereotype your whole dam life and you want to start now? How is that good for your child? Be a father and be there, even if that means figuring out how to deal with the sociopathic momma.”

Now Uncle G wasn’t somebody you could say anything to. He was a know-it-all, a master of all trades and a jack of none by self-proclamation. He thought and spoke with an assurance on things that he had no reference to. Mom was confident, Uncle G was certain, that made their conversations two snaps, it’s a wrap, cause it could go left real quick. Maybe Uncle G was shocked at my mom not rubbing it in that he got this part of his life wrong when he swears to have gotten everything else right. Yes, his six-figure income working in the money markets is more than anyone we know. Yes, he has never been to jail or even a single parking ticket. However, he never had a baby momma before either.

Aunt Kera went into labor and delivered a beautiful baby boy. We saw the pictures on Facebook. The family looked so blissful. When my mom text Kera to ask when would be a good time for us to stop by to welcome baby boy, Aunt Kera did not reply. Mom said she knew what it was like to have a newborn baby after exhausting labor and the bombardment with calls and visits. Still, we got dressed to go. That was my cousin and her nephew. That was family.

When we arrived at the hospital, we stopped at the gift shop to purchase a bouquet of balloons. Mom let the nurses know who we were there to see, in turn, they asked for us to have a seat in the waiting room. The security in maternity wards over the years had increased to prevent babies from being stolen. It had happened more than once so there we were waiting to be accepted into the ward. After what felt like forever a nurse came up to us and stated that the family is sleeping, and we would have to come back another time. I witnessed my mom’s reaction, it was skeptical, “Nobody is awake, my brother too?” The nurse just shrugged her shoulders as there was nothing she could do.

As we were leaving the building another family was coming in, they had a little boy around two or three years old, “Balloons balloons” he exclaimed with excitement. My mom knelt down and handed them over to his delight, ‘They are yours now.” The little boy smiled and with the perfect adolescent tone, “Thank you.” The boy’s dad shook my mom’s hand as a gesture of appreciation as well.

I never met my dad. He was killed before I could walk. The case is unsolved, and I don’t even know how he died. My mom won’t speak about it. I’ve got two pictures of him holding me as a little one, he looks proud. Mom learned how to make perogies so I would have some orientation to my Polish side. I think the Chipped Ham is only a Pittsburgh Polish thing, not authentically from Poland. I still struggle trying to create the perogies from scratch, so the frozen store-bought kind is a good substitute. The only other thing I know about Poland is that once upon a time a woman was king.

At home when I asked my mom, “What should we make for dinner?” Her mind was somewhere else, “I don’t really feel like cooking tonight, let’s order something instead.” That was alright by me; sometimes we need to taste someone else’s food. Everybody cooks differently.

I thought my mom was calling to order our food to be delivered for dinner. Instead, she called Uncle G, “I saw the pictures on Facebook, he looks handsome and has your big head.” He said that he had just stepped out of the hospital to run errands and to install the car seat, that it was a good idea to call Kera. She hung up the phone with him and decided to order our Chinese shrimp fried rice and orange chicken. It didn’t take long at all for the food to arrive being that it was a small order for mom and me. My fortune cookie read, “You will see many places.” I showed mom and she agreed, “That’s right.”

Mom with a full belly, relaxed on the couch and called Aunt Kera, “When would be a good time for us to stop by to welcome baby boy?” Now I saw my mom’s reaction. It was smooth as butter, a moment of accepted content when Kera said, “Never.” Mom had to let the nephew who she would never meet, go. Nephew, cousin or not, that was his momma to say who and who not was going to be in his life. The last words from my mom to Aunt Kera were a bee sting minus the honey, “Keep your legs closed to men who don’t love you.”