For Eva Geertz, it was a six-minute raw tomato sauce adapted from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, dumped with panache over a pot of still-steaming noodles at the end of a long day. For Alisa Bowens, collard greens, summered with a pork rear (but not this) and spooned with care beside a springy, soft-but-crunchy mess of macaroni and cheese. Jason Sobocinski found joy in the clean burst that came from a home-grown tomato at its cusp of summer ripeness. Brian Slattery preferred that tomato summering in a sauce. And for me it was a hippie-dippy adaptation of Mollie Katzen’s ratatouille from The Moosewood Cookbook, a recipe I can now make in my sleep.
These were the foods that brought us home on WNHH’s first episode of “Kitchen Sync,” a show about cooking and eating in New Haven. You can listen to the episode by clicking on the audio file above or finding it in the iTunes store or any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”
My interest in the meals that bring us home — that remind us what and how we feel, and who we are, through the sensual experiences of taste and smell — began long before I read Jessica Fechtor’s Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home earlier this summer. I have believed in the singular magic of food, and its distinct tie to memory and ritual, for quite a while. But the book, in which Fechtor uses food as the vehicle through which she recovers from a freak brain aneurysm, drove the point home.
When Fechtor writes: “I put peanut butter on a spoon. And cottage cheese on baked potatoes, and milk in tea, and yogurt on top of granola, not the other way around,” I — and I suspect, millions of others around the country and around the world — relate instantly. I eat cheese with the rinds, and advocate fiercely for raw milk everything. My mother puts black olives on her peanut butter sandwiches. My best friend puts Sriracha in his oatmeal. Three-fifths gets jazzed about sweet potato pie and John Ginnetti unwinds with a Negroni. The list goes on.
What a joy, then, to share those tidbits with a few community members. Bowens’ comments left me wanting to do a veg-friendly Soul Food Sunday at my place. Sobocinski, contributing by phone, had us all tomato-jizzing hard in the studio, When the Independent’s own Markeshia Ricks and Paul Bass called in, waxing poetically on roast beef and icebox cake, we deconstructed the logistics of making vegan whipped cream. It was one way of getting that much closer to each other.
What are the meals that bring you home? Weigh in below.
