An Acquired Taste

Carol Daly isn’t domestic. And she’s proud of it.
My grandmother, affectionately referred to as Grams, is not your typical grandma. She is a feminist, an art-lover, Brooklyn-bred, ethnically-Jewish-now-agnostic-who-likes-to-talk-about-string-theory and she is loud. You know Grams has arrived before you see her. Now that all three of her sons are grown, she frequently brings up her lack of maternal nature and how she never got the whole mothering-thing.
Grams will be the first to tell you she can’t cook. She can microwave. And she can put together appetizer trays, pineapple and strawberry fruit bowls, cheese and crackers, potato knishes, shrimp and plenty of toothpicks. When my father and his two younger brothers were growing up, she would make them liver and onions, boxed mashed potatoes and white bread. My father’s idea of fancy was a SaraLee All-Butter Frozen Pound Cake. The only thing Grams prides herself on in the kitchen is a handful of traditional Jewish foods we eat for Christmukkah every year. She can make a pretty mean Kugel, a kind of sweet, baked noodle casserole, brisket with mushrooms and onions, and potato latkes. But now that you can buy those at Crossroads Deli, she usually does that instead.
When I was ten, she took me to New York City to “see where I come from.” We went to the Museum of Natural History, played checkers on a Circle Line Cruise, saw the World Trade Center a few months before it collapsed, and spit off the top of the Empire State Building, aiming for the brown specks below us.
But I mostly remember those events through pictures. What I really remember is Katz’s Deli.
Grams had trouble finding food we could both enjoy in New York. She had already accidentally revealed to me that there are anchovies in caesar salad and scolded me when I smooshed my leftovers into ‘polyjuice potion’ at a restaurant close to our hotel. Katz’s Deli was her final attempt at finding a place we could both enjoy.
I ordered the half-pound cheeseburger, not realizing that it would be twice the size of my head, and got some coleslaw that I refused to touch due to my distain for anything with mayo. Grams bought us some New York style cheesecake to share and mumbled something with the word sandwich at the end. We sat down with our trays at a booth in the back. I got through about a third of my burger and couldn’t finish. But I did have some room for cheesecake, of course.
I reached my fork out towards the fluffly, cream-colored wedge. But just before I dug in, Grams grabbed my arm.
“Nuh, uh. Not until you try mine.”
“Your sandwich? What is it?”
It was really pink. Not pink like ham, but more red, like raw beef. It was on a giant slice of white bread with nothing else, just a whole-lotta meat.
“It’s a special kind of beef, Han. Now, don’t freak out . . . but this sandwich is made from cow tongue.”
I think I dropped my fork. I hope I did. I had never heard of a tongue sandwich. It looked like normal deli meats, it couldn’t be that bad. And I really wanted some cake.
Grams cut a small corner off and handed it to me. I took a small bite.
It tasted like beef, only more muscle-y and salty. I didn’t mind it. But then I started thinking about it. I was chewing on something that had chewed on something else. My tongue was tasting another tongue. I started picturing a bunch of cows out in a field chewing on human tongues, mooing in pleasure. I wasn’t hungry for cheesecake anymore.

* * *

My father takes after Grams. He 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 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 King’s Wok, the sketchy Chinese place that uses oil as a sauce, baked ziti 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 from scratch.
Like Grams, 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 those 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.
My memories of my father’s cooking exploits tend to involve microwaves, lots of carbs, cheese and a lot of laughter. Leftover smörgåsbords and kraft mac and cheese in front of the television followed by tickle fights. But it’s not the food that I find myself missing now that I’m far from home, it’s those spray-milk-out-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 random, 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 that Grams always had in her cupboard: 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 set of Jewish holy days, when options are limited. Once you’ve had or heard of matzo brei, you understand why it’s 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 hit 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.