Oranges and Tomatoes

This is the history of a majestic, clingy, succulent scent of spices and sugar, ribboned with bitter orange. It has always been with me. It even existed before I was born, and waited for me until I walked into it, through the crystal curtain, across the seamed and cracked linoleum, in search of the substance that would hold everything together in my simple world. 

I always thought the source of the scent was something I should want, and that is the reason why my still-chubby small hands - still learning to grip a spoon - reached for it. My baby hands couldn’t distinguish between smell and taste, so I tried to lick the air, filled with sugar and spice, from my fingers. I thought I could chew it, swallow it, hold all it meant in my stomach. It was like the Tar Baby stories of Uncle Remus that might have been politically correct, except that the baby in those tales can be traced to Caribbean and indigenous folklore, so please don’t get the wrong idea.

Bubbles gleam in some remote realm of memory, some cranny of this brain, and I hear a voice, or two voices, of women who are warning me to keep back. One of those voices was harsh, coming from beneath unsmiling eyes and the throat of a former Camels smoker. The other voice was gentler, but harried, because it was torn between watching her mother, her daughter, and her boiling pot. The ears that were close to the second voice were also divided between the harsh voice and baby babble. I loved this Mother for her ability to move quickly, speak quickly, and watch out for us so well. All the while, the pot boiled and fretted, and the scalding water with the glass Mason jars plotted a volcano.

I learned that the deep red bubbles were not like Saturday night in the tub and instead were threatening, able to raise blisters on tiny fingers. Murderous tomatoes.

I kept my distance better after hearing that, but the bitter, the sweet orange did not disappear. Not from the first day we met and not now, either. It still finds me, day or night. I do not know if I love or hate oranges, or if they should be in my life. 

The tomatoes. They are generally blood red, but they were invisible in the scent I can still locate somewhere ‘over there’, in the back room of the mind. They are tomatoes swimming in cane sugar, drenched in syrup, the body of the brew, but they were and are barely present in the scent that was cooking atop the stove. That still is cooking inside the part of my memory adapted to the space where the scent survives, decades later.

Surely you are aware that oranges and spices have their own scent, even when doused with tomato blood from unknown veins and fields. Now I love tomatoes more than almost any other food, and could tell you how much I love them with stories of excess tomato-eating that ended in neck rashes. However, that too is part of another story. Here, I just want to make it clear that I feel obligated to point out their invisibility. They were in the cauldron, the aluminum pot, where my tomato conserve was brewing. I was far too short to catch a glimpse of that redness, but you know I knew it was there.

Note to those who require it: 

Tomato conserve is also the term used for the herb, garlic, and onion recipe. That is something totally different. First of all, nobody in my family liked garlic; a head of it would last a year or longer. Second, everybody - except the child with sticky fingers and teeth that easily acquired cavities - loved sugar. Sweetness, symbolic of something at least as old as the Great Depression and probably going back to the Great War. Of something loved and desired, but rationed to the point where it hurt not to have it. Like love itself, which hurts when it is not there.

I see my Grandmother and Mother, how they worked bent forward, over the stove and kitchen table. I noticed how they were always focused on the jam task, lacing that with talk of family, getting lilies for the altar at our Methodist Church, the holiday bazaar, crocheting projects. The Daughter, my Mother, was now taller than her mother and her back as yet was not stooped over as it would be in the final years. Her Mother had the gaunt, angular jawed face of the too-thin. Sunken chest, dark clothing, stockings that were far from sheer. There was nothing about her that did not frighten a tiny girl, even when that girl was her granddaughter. Black shoes like women wore two decades earlier. Black shoes with thick heels, not too high, laced. Straight-laced shoes, like the person who wore them. Hair, still with very little gray, curled close to her head, which was sometimes held even more tightly by a hairnet. Hairnets like they wore before 1900. 

I don’t know if I loved Grandmother or feared her.

My tiny Grandmother was like a capital letter like you see in some styles of calligraphy: slender, angular, with an accidental curve here and there - a shoulder, the top of the head, the toes of the old-fashioned laced shoes. She never seemed to wear any clothing with colors, only black, gray, white. Like those elaborate letters of calligraphy, she was black on the white page and thinning to gray in places. A short while later, the illness would take hold of her and the glower would turn to rage, but that is sad and not relevant to this sweet-smelling memory. I try to push that other memory down, because it isn’t fair to blame a person for what they can’t help.

Just one further note. Grandmother and Mother were only twenty years apart in age. They were, in fact, closer in age than my sister and I, because for reasons that are not pertinent to the topic here, the generations just overlapped in my family. Nobody had planned that, but sometimes a woman gets a second chance at life. That was my Mother, and she deserved it.

In any event, I was like an only child and, although I didn’t know it, it was hard for me to share my Mother with my Grandmother. Was I jealous of their communication, the way they conversed almost by looks alone? I’d hate to think that I was. I prefer to think I loved seeing how they got along, loved seeing now the two women could do that, like they were twins, spending almost every hour of every day together. I wish I could have done that.

But if we are to return to the scent of oranges and tomatoes, we need also to return to the kitchen with the the wainscoting everywhere and a horrid neon light right overhead. You need to see what I see even now:

Little me, sniffing and admiring, fingers clutching the cold metal edge of the table, trying to behave because misbehaving would be bad for fingers. We’ve already established that I was aware of that precipice. 

That’s the image that pops up, over and over. Fingers on white metal with a blue edge, the kitchen table every lower class family had and that was the only one ever allowed to grace the kitchen. Sometimes they spoke to me, but safe manipulation of the viscous, scalding, gelatinous smell was really the priority. I learned to watch at a very early age - maybe too early for baby eyes. I know from personal experience that only children do a lot of watching, and they especially watch adults. It was good to behave and know how to keep my nosy hands away from the gooey scent.

Heat in the kitchen. That is an essential part of the memory and its fragrance. This might not seem important, but it is. You see, there was no heat in the kitchen otherwise. It was a really old house. When first built, a century or so before, the stove had been the only source of heat. We still had a stove like that for a little while, but then it was converted to gas. The day the tomato conserve was canned up was one of the few times the kitchen got hot again, because all four burners would be on and producing scented, bubbling soups waiting to become jam.

I never thought about how cold the kitchen was during the rest of the year, except for pie season and jam-making. It didn’t matter.

Occasionally a drop or splatter of hot sugary syrup would produce an ouch and Mother or Grandmother would go running for cold water or butter. Note that since I was an obedient child and always kept a safe distance, this refers to my Mother or my Grandmother as the wounded person. Because I was paying attention, I could tell that pretty smells were not necessarily pretty to the touch. It was a lesson I haven’t forgotten.

Constant going and coming from stove to table. Quick movement could result in a collision. Be alert. I was not to get underfoot. This description is repetitious, yes, but that is the nature of the smell of tomatoes and spices, of orange peels and sugar. It took a lot of back and forth to make the jam happen. You need to know that if you are ever going to understand.

Cloying but close, we were three generations, from the same maternal line, even though I mostly watched, from my end of that line. I was at the end, because the production of tomatoey globs of sugar would not last forever. It would not last beyond me. Not beyond the time when my hands had to keep away from the burdened spoons and jars that had been sterilized until they cried out in pain from being boiled alive. 

I heard the rattling of the wire rack in the spotted blue enamel pot, and knew it was agonizing for the glass containers. I never understood why they did not rise up and protest their torture. It was common practice in the house, because in addition to the tomato conserve, there were pears, peaches, corn relish, pickled peppers. That kitchen could have fed the world. It certainly kept the three of us women, plus my father, from going without.

That dull red smell.

That allspice but really just clove and cinnamon smell.

That we can see all the tomato seeds in the jam smell.

That those orange rinds inside look like mosquito larva smell.

No, that last description was bad. Strike it. The rinds looked more like little boats with curled-up ends, sailing through a red-stained sea. There were no mosquitoes.

That pure sugar smell. The teeth-destroying particles that lodged in nostrils as well as the mouth. Perils of childhood or just fear of the sweet?

Tomato conserve. Sugar and spice and everything nice, plus tomatoes and orange peels. I’ve tried to find the recipe, and know it’s here in my house somewhere, but I can’t bear to look for it. Too many miles, too many years, too many spices. However, I am convinced that the real thing is written down in my Grandmother’s nineteenth century handwriting and that eventually I will find it again.

Meanwhile, instead of the actual Spicer family recipe, I have opted to use one from the internet. It is the closest I could come:

You need four cups of tomatoes, peeled (not fun, but it is possible to peel them without ripping off the flesh); four cups of sugar (awful white stuff, really not good for you); half an orange, with rind (a whole orange is better, or even two); cinnamon stick, cloves (be careful not to use too many). Combine everything in a pot and simmer for 25 minutes. Strain the tomatoes, reserving the juice. Return juice to the pan and simmer 10-15 more minutes to reduce. Combine tomatoes and the juice and allow to cool.

Maybe the recipe is off the mark, but to me that sticky smell gurgled away for hours, not just minutes. I could also have sworn there was some ginger in the mix, but I could be mistaken, because I really like ginger. I’m also convinced the Spicer recipe called for, at a minimum, a whole orange. I say that because the little rind boats, curled up on both ends like the totora rafts of Lake Titicaca, were jumbled together in high concentration once the glass jars were filled.

Now pretty much the scent I cannot and will not erase is only provoked mentally, not from the jam itself. Maybe it’s conjured up because I’ve read the label on a special jam made by a Maine company like Stonewall Kitchen. Or maybe it’s one made by one of the vendors at the farmers’ market. That’s all I need to send me reeling back all the years to the steamy, orange-y kitchen. The scent is real enough; a word or a glance awakens it every time. I am, it seems, haunted.

I say haunted because, you see, that scent no longer exists. Those two women, Mother and Daughter or Grandmother and Mother, no longer exist. That kitchen is gone, its pitifully yellow walls, its white + blue metal table with pull-out leaves, gone. The antique tin plates with scrolls that covered the ceiling, are probably gone too. The scent might emerge once more were I to twist or pry the lids off similar-looking jams, or rather, conserves. 

However I can’t do that, because it’s really the cooking of the jam that works the magic, it’s the sickening, weighty wafting of boiled sugar, that makes my teeth ache. It’s not from the touch of clove and cinnamon that might emerge from a commercially labeled jar. It is better to read a label or look at the reddish bliss inside a glass jar if I want to evoke the memory.

Or maybe I could sneak into the root cellar. I have the sneaking suspicion that there are still a few jars down there. Maybe the lids have been pried off by persistent, muscular mice and the paraffin seal chewed through to the good place inside. Maybe nobody has been down there to look after the Grandmother made the last batch.

Sometimes I say to myself: All you have left is the memory of that exact smell that sticks to you like the tomato conserve did when you tried to make yourself a sandwich. You were five. Knife and bread would not behave; butter would not submit to manipulation by still-small fingers. Everything stuck to you then. It still sticks to you.

Probably nobody you know makes real, honest-to-goodness tomato conserve any more. That’s the hard truth. It hurts to think about it. To make matters worse, you only know the ingredients, not the degree of heat required, not the utensils, nada. You know the name of the hot jam, the danger it posed, and you were the good girl who never got burned but could have. You know the mass of warm currents that swarmed the three bodies, wanting to meld them into one, and was partially successful in doing so.

A lot of people’s best memories are from the ages of three to nine, I’ve heard. I’ll tell you one from age 6 in another story. For now, just know that when I was asked about a significant smell in my life, this is the one I chose. Immediately. It may be the first smell I remember. It is dark and far too sweet to be what an adult recalls. It’s one a child knows.

Tomato conserve. 

It reminds me that parts of my brain have never grown up.