My father doesn’t cook, he mixes. While my mother braises, butchers and broils, my father fetches the white wine from the basement and pours it into glasses filled with a few ice cubes. He can grill, fry and scramble, but he can’t set a table properly. He does the dishes and takes out the trash, but when it comes to daily family meals, he does the prep work and the clean up, but tends to back away from the actual execution.
When my mother used to go out of town for business meetings, the task of feeding my sister and me fell on my dad. This meant one of three things: take-out from Kings Wok, the sketchy chinese place that uses oil as a sauce, baked zitti from the nearby Sbarro, smothered in cheese and breadcrumbs, crispy on the top from sitting under the heat-lamps all afternoon, or he would try and scrounge something together.
My father has a repertoire of things he ‘dabbles’ in in the kitchen. He can grill—that’s his thing. Kebobs, grilled corn, smoked salmon, he’s got that down. And he can make some mean eggs. He never breaks a yoke that isn’t meant to be broken. But those are his only real comfort zones. When it comes to cooking for me and my sister, he had several go-tos. Simple spaghetti, noodles stuck together because they were overcooked, Jack’s Original frozen pizza with extra shredded cheddar sprinkled on top, and—it makes me cringe now to think of them—those horrible ‘Kid Cuisines,’ the pre-portioned frozen meals that came in the fun blue trays and always had a fun, colorful desert in one of the quadrants.
Our favorite mom-is-out-of-town-so-now-we-can-eat-what-we-want meal was my dad’s veal parmigiana. And by my dad’s, I mean he put it together. They came in a kit that had the breaded veal cutlets, a plastic-wrapped package of sauce, a few slices of mozzarella and partially-cooked linguini. All my dad had to do was stack the ingredients on top of each other and bake them for
several minutes. My sister and I would gobble those down like nobody’s business, getting sauce stuck on the corners of our mouths.
One evening, my overly-curious six-year-old sister asked my father what ‘veal’ meant. I kept chewing on the chunk in my mouth while my father kept washing a spatula over the sink. My nine-year-old self had never thought about what veal was, I guess I just figured it was chicken. My mom had ordered chicken parmigiana at restaurants before, and I assumed veal was the kid version or something.
My father turned around from the sink with the sponge still in his hand, suds dripping down his wrists. My sister slurped a noodle up off of her fork.
“Veal is cow, girls,” he said.
“Why don’t they call in cow parmigiana then, daddy?” Mara asked.
“Well, because it’s a special kind of cow sweetie.”
“What kind of cow?”
“Baby cow.”
My sister instantly started to cry. I didn’t really get it. The veal didn’t taste like a baby. It tasted like meat. Baby meat must taste different.
“Why’d they make us eat the babies, dad?” my sister sobbed.
“Because it tastes better, Mara. Don’t you like it?” dad said.
“Not anymore!”
I remembered my favorite scene in one of my favorite movies, the live-action Madeline, where the girls realize they’ve eaten their beloved chicken, Helen. They girls decide to be ‘vegetablearians’ and chant chicken noises at the top of their lungs before Miss Clavel calms them down.
After dinner, my sister and I kept calling ourselves vegetablearians and waited eagerly for my mother to come home so we could tell her the news. Needless to say, our new stance against meat infuriated my mother and put my father straight into the dog-house.
My memories of my father’s cooking exploits tend to involve microwaves, lots of carbs, cheese and a lot of laughter. Leftover smรถrgรฅsbords and kraft mac and cheese in front of the television followed by tickle fights. But its not the food that I find myself missing now that I’m far from home, its those spray-milk-of-your-nose moments that we always seemed to have.
Now that I can cook for myself, I rarely eat my father’s meals when I’m home on breaks. The only food we make together is on ramdom, lazy, sun-soaked sunday mornings when we both find ourselves with time we didn’t know we had. I sit at the kitchen counter in my pajamas, my legs dangling off the edge of the stool while my father gathers the ingredients: Manischewitz Everything Matzo, a few eggs, a bowl filled about half-way with luke-warm water and some salt and pepper.
Now, matzo brei is definitely an acquired taste. My mother and sister can’t stand it. Most people I’ve met don’t like to eat matzo brei. They have to eat it over Passover, a Jewish holy day, when their options are limited. Once you’ve had or heard of matzo brei, you understand why its not something most people drool over.
The dish consists of soggy matzo crackers scrambled with eggs. That’s it. I’ve heard that some people doctor it up, but really, simple matzo brei is best. My dad would let me break and soak the matzo, letting the cracker fragments bob up and down in the bowl of water, getting murky from all the salt salt. My dad whisks the eggs up with a fork, a skill that I always admired as a kid. I could never get my wrist to move that fast, and whenever I tried I would always spill the yolky mixture on the counter.
Once the matzo is almost-mushy and the eggs are sufficiently scrambled, they both would go into a heated pan on the stove with a distinct sizzle sound as they his the scalding metal. I’ve tried to make the traditional Jewish dish on my own, but I can never scramble it just right. My dad has just the right amount of patience to get it golden and just a little crisp on the edges.
When the brei is finished, we sit together at the counter and eat. It tastes like bland, over-salted scrambled eggs, the most distinct flavor coming from the garlic and poppy on the everything matzo. Its not as good as my mother's brioche french toast or even my own breakfast concoctions. But there's something about sitting with my father at the kitchen table, just the two of us, eating the food his mother made him as a child.
