204. Victory V’s

Old poster for Victory V’s

During the  year or so that I lived in England in the late 1960s I became something of an expert on English sweets (or candy, if you’re from the U.S.). I always maintain—and this from a person who takes pride in eating all organic—that the English (who have long been featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest per capita candy consumption)  make the best artificial flavors for their sweets. Barratt Sherbet Fountains, sherbet lemons, Trebor Refreshers, Maltesers, Maynard’s Wine Gums, Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles, Crunchie bars, Bassett’s Jelly Babies, I loved them without reservation, and strove—always in vain—to emulate my Auntie Bette, the Queen of Sweets, in her expertise on everything related to confectionery and in the sheer volume she managed to put away.

I’ve written in an earlier story about how I was introduced to English sweets and to television advertising at the same time. Some of the advertising slogans and jingles are burnt into my brain. “Opal Fruits: Made to make your mouth water,” for instance. Victory V’s were old-school: no TV advertising for them. But their slogan was unforgettable:

Victory V: It’s got a kick like a mule

Victory V’s were not very prepossessing in their appearance: flat, rock-hard brick-like lozenges the color of dirty khaki. Their decidedly acquired smell and taste was no better: it was more than mildly medicinal, and seemed to shoot straight up your nose and into your brain. One might well ask why anyone would want to subject herself to such an ordeal, and it might have remained a mystery to me had I not read the ingredients list. That is interesting in itself, since most British food products weren’t required to have an ingredients list until quite recently. But Victory V’s did have one and when I read it I discovered why the product had such a “devoted band of asbestos-mouthed fans”: two of its active ingredients were chloroform and ether!

Yes—you read it right: chloroform—the stuff in which comic-book no-good-niks soak a rag to overpower their victims—and ether—the stuff that anesthetists administer before their patients go under the knife. No wonder so many schoolchildren consumed the nasty-tasting throat lozenges as if they were candy! After you had sucked your way through two or three of those babies, breathing deep all the while, you were guaranteed to feel no pain.

Remembering Victory V’s a little while ago, I wondered if perhaps I had misremembered about the chloroform and ether. If it were true, then surely they would not have sold these things over the counter in sweetshops, and to schoolchildren. Some quick research gave me a bit of a history lesson. Apparently, Victory V Lozenges started out in the mid-1800s as a patent medicine, Victory Chlorodyne Lozenges with the original ingredients of pulverised sugar, linseed, liquorice, chlorodyne (a soothing mix of cannabis and chloroform) and pure acacia gum. They was later renamed Linseed Liquorice V Lozenge Victory and sold as a confection. They acquired their current name, Victory V lozenges, back in 1911, even before the First World War, long before Churchill popularized the V sign in the Second.

My research also confirmed that my memory of the active ingredients had been correct, although it also revealed that the Victory V’s of today no longer contain them, just simulations of their original flavor, and that their sales have plummeted, most likely due to the public’s preference for natural ingredients over synthetic ones.  The new slogan is “Victory V: Forged for Strength”; but it just doesn’t have the kick that the old one did.

Note: Several of my favorite English sweets now have versions with natural favors and colors and, to my surprise, they are delicious. There is such a thing as Progress.

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182. Hot Cross Buns

The Penguin Cookery Book

Mum has two English cookery books which she has carried with her wherever we have moved and has referred to all these years whenever she makes traditional dishes like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, or scones, or cheese straws. The first one dates from the Second World War, when rationing was in effect and essential ingredients like butter and eggs were hard to come by. The second is a battered old edition of The Penguin Cookery Book by Bee Nilson, which was my source when, one Good Friday in my early thirties, I set out to make hot cross buns.

I am a confident cook when working on the stovetop, but baking is a hit-or-miss operation for me, and I always find the prospect of it rather daunting. Still, I copied out the recipe from Mum’s cookery book, gathered all the ingredients together, and found a warm spot in the draughty farm kitchen for the yeast to rise. A few hours later I emerged, covered in flour from head to toe but triumphantly bearing aloft a tray of piping-hot buns, which were almost instantly demolished by my perennially hungry housemates. I promised myself I’d make them again the following year, and that the next time I’d make a double batch while I was going to all that trouble. I can’t remember now whether or not I ever did go to the trouble again, although I like to think that I did.

Soon afterwards we moved to Amherst, where, after a few years, The Henion Bakery opened its doors, featuring—among its many specialities—jam doughnuts beyond compare, which sustained me through the long years of dissertation-writing. One year, as springtime came around, I visited Henion’s to find a large batch of hot cross buns on the counter, fresh from the oven and perfect in every way, and compared to which my painstaking attempts seemed pitiful. Then and there I ordered a batch, and have done so every year since, never looking back.

The eating of the buns must be heralded by the nursery rhyme, which we sing with glee as we pour the tea and prepare to tuck in; and since I have no daughters, my son has come into a goodly number of these doughy delicacies over the years.

I’m not generally a national chauvinist, but I insist on singing the English version of this song. Having lived in the States as long as I have, I’ve become accustomed to the American versions of many songs, even starting to prefer some of them. But to my ear the American version of “Hot Cross Buns” sounds heavy and plodding, while the English one springs up and down like a bouncing ball, full of life and energy in keeping with the season.

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177. The Sugar Snow

photo courtesy of seedbud, leafandtwig.wordpress.com

When I first encountered the term “sugar snow” in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, I had no idea what it meant, but how delicious it sounded! Living in the hot plains of West Bengal, I had never known the kind of snow that blanketed the deep woods of Wisconsin, and I was enchanted by it. Again and again I pored over the story of Grandpa’s maple-sugaring work party and the feast and dance that followed, in which Ma got to wear her dark-green “delaine,” Grandma jigged the socks off Uncle George accompanied by Pa’s tireless fiddle-playing, and the children were given pats of crumbly maple sugar made at just the right moment before the syrup started “graining.”

By the time I had a child of my own, just about the age Laura had been in that story, we were living in Winchendon, a town known for its unspoiled woods and cold, snowy weather. I read Nikhil all the Little House books but his favorite, not surprisingly, was Farmer Boy, the one book in the series in which the protagonist was a boy—Almanzo Wilder, who grew up, not in the American Midwest, but on a farm in upstate New York, and was to marry Laura Ingalls when he became a man. We saw to it that most of the rural pastimes that Almanzo and his siblings enjoyed as children, Nikhil and Eric did too in their respective seasons, from apple cidering, to skating on the frozen pond in winter, to maple sugaring.

maple sugaring, Little House in the Big Woods (illustration, Garth Williams)

Andrew, a walking Foxfire Book and Whole Earth Catalog, took the lead in the process. Having grown up and worked on a New England farm himself, he always seemed to know just about everything there was to know about the rural arts (despite having been born in New York City). When the time was right he identified the best maple trees in a reasonable radius of the farmhouse, taking four-year-old Nikhil with him to test the sweetness of the sap. Since there weren’t quite enough sugar maples on the property to ensure a decent yield of syrup, he tapped a number of red (or swamp) maples as well. Their sap was essentially the same as that in the sugar maples, except it was thinner; to make just one gallon of precious dark amber maple syrup, it would take fully forty gallons of fresh sap from a red maple, as against just twenty gallons from a sugar maple.

Andrew picked up the metal taps from Belletete’s Hardware in Winchendon, but rather than using the wooden pails Grandpa had made in the Little House books or the traditional metal cans seen throughout New England, he created his own buckets by cutting down one-gallon plastic milk jugs. He built a makeshift sugar shack out back, near the entrance to the woods, and he and the boys made daily rounds of all the tapped trees to collect the cartons and stockpile them in the shack, packed in snow, until it was time to build a fire and start syruping. Some of the cartons made their way into the farmhouse kitchen, where we mixed the fresh sap with seltzer water to create a delicate-tasting maple soda—which, in true American entrepreneurian fashion, the guys fantasized about mass-producing and marketing to make their fortunes.

When Nikhil was five, we moved from sixty acres in Winchendon to a less-than-half-acre suburban plot in this New England college town. We were eager to prove to him, and perhaps to ourselves as well, that we could still live the rural homesteaders’ life, so Andrew set about tapping the maple trees on the property and firing up the stainless-steel vat in the kiln house behind my in-laws’ house next door. Funnily enough, a fraction of the number of trees we had tapped in Winchendon yielded almost as much maple syrup, because all these were sugar, rather than swamp maples. Andrew would boil down the sap to a manageable volume out in the kiln house, and then bring it into the kitchen to finish the process in our largest pots. We were able to make enough syrup to meet our own needs, to soak stacks of Sunday pancakes lavishly for a whole year and to give as Christmas presents to the whole family besides.

We haven’t made our own syrup for twenty years now. The kiln house out back is collapsing, and these days all our maple trees produce are mountains of coppery-gold leaves in the fall, enough to use on the compost pile all year round. But I sure know, and from first-hand experience, what a sugar snow is. Every year, when the daytime temperatures begin to rise consistently above freezing while the night-time temperatures still reliably fall below it,  when the sap starts flowing in the long-established stands of maples around town, and the old-timers put in their taps and hang out their buckets again, I feel all warm inside in the knowledge that I too have participated in this quintessentially American ritual; and that my son has actually lived it rather than just reading about it, prancing fawn-like through the late-winter snow, to suck the sap straight from the tree.

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164. Pheasants and Apple Chutney

A Brace of Pheasants (painting by Richard Ansdell, 1868)

Our closest roommate in the Tufnell Park flat that fall of 1973 was Linda, the American who, inevitably, had lived a block away from my parents back in Brookline (see Tell Me Another 3, The Horn Player in the Cupboard). Linda had an independent, entrepreneurial spirit and clear goals: to find ways to make money that didn’t cost money and to get Nigel, an aristocratic young Englishman she’d met at a party, to fall in love with her. One of the things I admired about Linda was that as soon as she had defined a goal, however unattainable it might seem to others, she set out systematically to achieve it. And so it was with these two goals, as you shall see.

Just before Andrew and I had moved in, some new English friends of Linda’s had invited her to spend a weekend in the country with them, sending her home with a bushel of apples and a brace of pheasants. Upon her return she hung the pheasants from a hook up in the attic, and although, thankfully, I never actually saw them suspended there, she gave us regular bulletins on their progress. Apparently pheasants are best dealt with in this way so that the meat starts to go off a bit—to get pleasantly high-tasting without going downright rotten. Connoisseurs describe meat in this desirable condition as “gamey.” We didn’t know; we had never eaten pheasant. In any case, we were both vegetarians at the time (though Andrew was the purist; I was one of those fair-weather vegetarians who would eat meat when it suited me).

While she was waiting for her pheasants to attain just the right degree of putridity—for they were a key component of her master plan—Linda turned to the apples. Here the project seemed to be a relatively straightforward one: to make apple chutney and sell it in jars to local health food shops, which were to be found in abundance in Alternative London of the early Seventies. Setting up shop in our small shared kitchen, she began peeling and cubing the apples with gusto (but scant attention to hygiene) on the cluttered kitchen table. After adding raisins, vinegar, and brown sugar she left the stuff to simmer for hours, using every pot in the house and filing our nostrils with the pungent acidity of vinegar and a slight smell of burnt sugar every so often, when Linda forgot to stir. Meanwhile, she scoured the neighborhood skips (dumpsters) for empty jamjars, which she brought home and washed in the kitchen sink. She spooned the chutney into the jars, screwed the lids on tight, and set about making labels: Linda’s Homemade Apple Chutney.

apple chutney in jamjars

Despite the nuisance of the kitchen takeover most of the rest of us were a little amused by Linda’s slapdash energy, but Andrew was appalled. When the jars started exploding on the shelves at one of the health-food shops, he was vindicated but Linda was unabashed. She simply brought them home, reheated the contents, transferred them into new jars, and returned them to the shop. Later, when Andrew went into canning for home use, as if to compensate for Linda’s travesty of hygiene, he religiously employed a scientific method that never lost a single jar to spoilage (see Tell Me Another 86, Bottled Sunshine).

By now, the kitchen floor was sufficiently sticky underfoot and Linda had determined that her pheasants were sufficiently gamey. Actually, she realized that she’d left them just a little too long, and this gave a little more urgency to the next stage of her master plan: hosting an elegant dinner party and inviting Nigel. Accordingly, invitations went out to a dozen dinner guests (in addition to us long-suffering housemates, for Linda was a generous soul), requesting the pleasure of their company at a pheasant dinner, and it was time to figure out the next step: how to prepare the pheasant. By the time Linda had plucked the birds and cut out the portions that were no longer fit for human consumption (I am grateful that my memory banks seem to have rendered those particular sights and smells permanently irretrievable), the only kind of dish she could conceivably make to feed the soon-to-be-arriving throng was pheasant stew, with salt, onions, root vegetables, and heavy lacings of herbs adding the necessary bulk and masking any excess gamey-ness.

Those of us who still wished Linda well by this time waited apprehensively as the time neared for the guests to arrive. She had asked people to dress for a formal dinner party, and after clearing and setting the kitchen table (the floor was past reclamation as I recall), she disappeared upstairs and eventually emerged, dressed to the nines and determined to win the heart (if not the stomach) of her intended.

Somehow we got through that evening. Again, thankfully, I remember it only vaguely. I can only think of the picture on the sleeve of Goat’s Head Soup, the Rolling Stones album that had come out earlier that year. I can see the formally-dressed dinner guests standing in line as if in a soup kitchen, while Linda, all elegance, served up the stew in large dollops. British politeness, and perhaps her own obtuseness, saved us all, since if the stew was well-nigh inedible, nobody would have dreamt of saying as much, and I think Linda had made a pretty decent apple pie with the remainder of the apples to round off the meal.

The amazing thing is, her plan worked perfectly! For whatever combination of reasons, she won the upper-class Nigel’s heart and, shortly thereafter, moved in with him. Andrew and I visited her in what seemed to us palatial premises in Leicester Square, a flat whose only feature I still remember was the gleaming black-and-white tiled bathroom, with a throne fit for a queen set on an elevated, similarly tiled platform.

We lost touch with Linda after that, but I hope she is happy and well. Whether or not she and Nigel lasted, I feel sure that her irrepressible spirit would have carried her forward to the successful execution of her next master plan.

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155. Saving my Bacon

from redmolotov.com

Nixon, Agnew, better start shakin’
Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon.

So the American youth would chant at the police during demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s when I first came to the United States. Although their anti-war feelings were sincere, the specific threat was mostly bluster; and humorous, if one thinks about it, since so many of the same youth were vegetarians professing a commitment to non-violence. Still, as a new immigrant, I first associated bacon with The Man.

Since the two biggest religions in India eschew pork, it’s no surprise that I didn’t grow up with bacon, except during our infrequent visits to England, where it was an essential element of the massive fry-ups that my uncles and aunts would dish up as if trying to make up for all those years of missed sausage-and-bacon-loaded breakfasts.

English breakfast with bacon © Damon Hart-Davis (gallery.hd.org)

British bacon was substantial and satisfying, thick, greasy, and full of taste and texture. It was to U.S. bacon what chunky British chips are to McDonald’s skinny fries. Same with British sausages, or bangers: if you ate one for breakfast, duly salted and doused with malt vinegar, it would be a long time before you felt the pangs of hunger again. Compare a sizzling, spitting, splitting sausage, fried in its own fat, to a bald, shiny boiled frank. No contest.

sausages and mash (bbcgoodfood.com)

Bacon and sausages are not just a food in Britain, they’re an institution. During our three-month sojourn in England in 1963, my cousin Lesley taught me a game called Sausages and Mash (after the popular national dish). It’s easy to play: just pick up any book and start reading out loud, simply substituting “sausage” for every word that begins with the letter S and “mash” for every word beginning with the letter M. The effects are hilarious.

Not long after we emigrated to the U.S. I followed my boyfriend’s lead and became a vegetarian and a health freak to boot. Despite the prevalence of pork products in the States, I steered clear of bacon and sausages, especially after I learned that they were loaded with cholesterol and noxious nitrites. But I made an exception whenever I returned to England, telling myself that I couldn’t possibly hurt my family’s feelings, and besides, it was my duty to honor my ethnic heritage. In fact, I loved bacon, and lived for those rare occasions when I tucked into a generous rasher on a hunk of fried bread.

On my first return visit to England after we had emigrated, my Auntie Bette sent me back with a pound of Sainsbury’s best pork sausages for “my poor sister over in America where they can’t get a decent sausage for love or money.” I knew they were controlled substances, but I didn’t have the heart (or the chutzpah) to disappoint my aunt. I hoped against hope that U.S. customs would pass me over at Logan Airport, but no such luck. Sure enough, a burly customs agent inspected my bulging carry-on bag, which soon disgorged a plump parcel, wrapped in waxed paper and tied tightly with string. When he opened it and his eyes lit on its glistening contents, they too gleamed in greedy anticipation. “Sorry ma’am, these have to be confiscated,” he crowed, looking anything but sorry. For a moment I seriously considered fighting for my aunt’s most deeply-held beliefs, but then decided to let them go for fear of causing an international incident. Back at home, unpacking my bulging suitcase full of creamline toffees, boxes of Quality Street and Black Magic chocolates, and jars of Marmite (blacker still), I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother what she had lost. I never told my aunt either.

saveloy-and-chips (wifflelevertofull.wordpress.com)

Years later, she had her revenge. For a meat afficionado like Auntie Bette, vegetarians were a personal affront and a challenge. She had always liked Andrew, but in rejecting meat he had gone too far. Her strategy was masterful. She knew perfectly well that he was a vegetarian, but also knew that he made an exception for fish-’n-chips, and that he was shy and polite. So she ordered a large cod-and-chips from her favorite fish shop down on the Caledonian Road, but secretly slipped in a long, pink, grade-A-sized saveloy “as a special treat.” (I had never seen a saveloy before then, and had only heard of them in Food, Glorious Food from Oliver with the ominous lyrics: Pease pudding and saveloys, what next is the question/Rich gentlemen have it boys, In-di-gestion!) Andrew was struck dumb with dismay and could only look down helplessly at the disgusting thing lying heavily on top of his chips, and then over at me imploringly. As soon as my Aunt stepped out of the room I acted swiftly to scoop up the offending item and slip it onto my plate, and then, in short order, into the bin. When Aunty Bette returned a few seconds later she found Andrew’s plate entirely saveloy-free. Either her opinion of my boyfriend rose several notches, or she understood all and decided that he’d suffered enough, for she said not a word.

Funnily enough, Aunty Bette’s husband, my Uncle Bill, had had a similarly embarrassing experience when we’d all gone to an Indian restaurant together in London a few years before, a swanky restaurant in Hampstead where you could take your pick of dozens of delectable dishes. But what did my dear Glaswegian uncle order? Steak. Understandably, it wasn’t a house speciality, although they tried to oblige. They could never have measured up to Uncle Bill’s standards even if they had been the Savoy, because only my Aunt made steak the way he liked it. But dear Uncle Bill was like Andrew in that he hated to give offence. He made a show of welcoming the steak when it was served, but I happened to look over at him at the very moment when he was surreptitiously slipping the whole thing, wrapped in a paper serviette, into his pocket, to be given to the dog later on.

I still feel about saveloys the way Monty Python’s Graham Chapman felt about spam, and can do without sausages as well—at least, most of the time. But bacon is another matter. Every so often, I’ve gotta have it, simple as that. For a long time I was in denial of this basic truth, firm in the belief that crispy-fried, sodium-nitrite-cured strips of pork belly were the devil itself, but I was disabused of my self-righteousness twenty years ago, on a marathon 22-hour Greyhound bus trip to southern Georgia. (See my story Southbound for another account of that trip.) I was a penniless graduate student attending one of my first academic conferences, and couldn’t afford to fly. I had been up writing my paper the whole night before the trip, was kept sleepless the first night on the bus by the heart-rending screams of a infant who sounded as if it was being tortured, and by the second night I was wracked by a splitting headache so bad that I wondered how I was possibly going to deliver my paper the next morning.

Americans Bringing Home the Bacon, Doctors on Health Watch (blog.healia.com)

In the middle of the night the bus stopped, as all Greyhound busses do, at a rundown pitstop in a seamy section of a sleepy southern town. We straggled off the bus into the dreary cafeteria and I followed my fellow-passengers to an ancient steamtable with congealed gravies, gray vegetables, slices of pot pie filled with unidentifiable meats—and bacon. The bacon consisted of a few burnt-looking, dried-out strips, but I swear, it spoke to me. I heard the unmistakeable call—Eat me! Wretched with my pounding headache and three nights of sleeplessness, I was helpless to resist. When I reached the top of the line I found myself ordering a cup of tea and a side of bacon. I slid into a flyblown booth with cracked vinyl seat covers, and tackled the bacon as if there was no tomorrow. Then came the miracle: my headache was cured instantaneously and completely, not just for the moment, but for the entire rest of the journey. Those miserable-looking strips of meat had something that I needed; whether I wanted to admit it or not, they literally saved my bacon.

I still steer clear of pork as a rule. But to this day, when all else fails, I resort to bacon (nitrite-free, of course). No matter how politically or nutritionally suspect, it never lets me down.

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145. Just a little is enough

photo by Mr. Kris (from zenhabits.net)

It’s a line of Pete Townshend’s from his 1980 album Empty Glass. He was echoing the point he had already made back in 1971 on Who’s Next with Too Much of Anything. How many times in the 1980s must I have listened to A Little is Enough, whose lyrics made it clear that the author himself couldn’t stop at enough, let alone leave well enough alone? But his message continues to resonate through the decades.

We learned self-restraint as children, when it was a special treat to have two—and only two—pieces of candy from the biscuit tin where our mother kept  it.  The moment we waited for, when she would open the tin and allow us to pick out any two pieces of our choice, we called Reprise Time, after the segment on the weekly talent show Opportunity Knocks, hosted by the delightfully smarmy Hughie Green (whose unabashed sleaziness in the role out-sleazed Monty Python’s Michael Palin). While we must surely have wanted more, I honestly can’t remember even entertaining the thought that it was possible, let alone asking for it. But then, we knew what happened to Oliver Twist when he dared to ask for more.

It doesn’t really count, though, if you have self-restraint imposed upon you. Pete Townshend’s point is that a little can actually be better than a lot, that a person of discernment prefers it, for sheer pleasure as well as for self-preservation.

I’ll always remember Eve, the consummate artist in the kitchen, giving me this advice about cooking with herbs:

A little oregano goes a long way; don’t be heavy-handed with it.
(Thyme, she said, was different; you could never use too much thyme. )

The same principle applies to basil—it should be used sparingly. In an apartment a group of us shared in our twenties, we had a housemate who added basil  (her favorite) by the fistful to everything she made, thereby rendering it inedible for everyone else. With condiments, of course, while a pinch of salt is the stuff of life, too much is an utter disaster. And to my mind, in the case of hing, or asafoetida, even a little can be too much.

It was Bob Marley and the Wailers who made the point most powerfully for me. In the mid-seventies, when the band retired after a long and wholly satisfying set, when the audiences would go wild, calling for more as if they hadn’t already been given plenty, Bob Marley, in a brilliant move, would deliver up an encore of Want More:

Now that you’ve got
What you want
Do you want more? (Want More? echoed the I-Threes).

I was always chastened by this gesture. The band had just given the audience their all; how much more could we demand of them? It was now our turn to carry their positive vibrations back out into the world, and to discover for ourselves, by doing, when enough was as good as a feast.

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143. Waste Not, Want Not

Clean Your Plate, Save the World? (in.reuters.com) Photo: Reuters/Romeo Ranoco/Files

My father has always had a horror of waste. If my sister or I left any food on our plates he would feel compelled to finish it for us. There was no need for him to mention the children starving in India—we saw them all around us every day. Whenever we went to the IIT students’ hostels for special functions, which always included delicious dinners, we saw the children scrambling to polish off any scraps of food left on the plates after the feast.

My mother taught thrift by example. When she cooked, she made everything from scratch. On the rare occasions she made pancakes, always a special treat in 1960s India with food rationing and white flour a precious commodity, she gave us all the perfect ones and ate only the rejects, usually the first and the last. She didn’t talk much about the poverty of her childhood, focusing instead on special treats and times of plenty; but quite recently she mentioned something in passing that spoke volumes. I was washing and chopping mushrooms, perhaps to make a mushroom gravy for a lavish Thanksgiving spread, when she observed that she didn’t see a whole mushroom until she was an adult, since her mother could afford to buy only the stalks. It shames me to think of how much of the mushrooms I waste when I clean and prepare them, sometimes throwing the stalks away entirely.

photo: Tyrone Turner kidsblogs.nationalgeographic.com

Of course, the horror of waste can go too far. Forcing oneself to eat food one doesn’t want or need is neither good for one’s own health nor does it feed starving children. And if one composts organic waste, it is not wasted but returns to enrich the soil. Nevertheless, a culture of waste squanders precious resources, increases food prices, puts increased pressure on farmers, and breeds bad habits that multiply and perpetuate the problem. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the average American throws away 40 pounds of food every month. I know that I buy food and, rather than constructing the week’s meals around what I have in the fridge, forget it until it’s too late. We would do well to recall the thrift of our parents’ generation.

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121. The Taste of Home

Living as we do outside both the countries where we and our parents were born and which most of our extended family still call home, we miss out on most of the rites of passage that punctuate and solemnize the important stages of life, especially births, marriages, anniversaries, and deaths. In all the forty-plus years that we have lived in the United States, I have been able to attend only two family weddings in England and one in India. Particularly in India, these are the occasions that bring the entire family together, even those who don’t see each from one year to the next.  Of course we have celebrated joyous occasions right here in the States, notably my son’s name ceremony, my sister’s wedding, and my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. I was never much for ritual anyway, having got married in a registry office, in the tradition of my parents before me. But when a close family member dies thousands of miles across the world, we feel the loss all the more keenly because we cannot participate with the family in the rites that mark the dear one’s passing.

Each in his or her own way, my parents had to learn to live with that separation from their families. Both of them received the news of the deaths of parents and siblings in a distant country, after they were already gone. In large part it was the pain of this separation that spurred me to make regular travel to India and England a priority in my adult life. This is much more of a possibility for me than it was for my parents before international travel was easy or affordable for the middle classes. With inexpensive calling plans, e-mail, and social media like Facebook, I can also keep in touch on a daily basis in a way that was impossible for them in earlier years. But still, when death strikes and we are oceans and continents away, there is a feeling of desolation that cannot be reached by virtual communication. At such times, I find, words do not help. Only coming together in person can possibly offer any comfort.

courtesy of Jyotsna Shahane at thecookscottage.com

It is here that besan laddus come in, those golden, golf-ball-sized, melt-in-your-mouth Indian sweets, made of toasted chickpea flour, confectioner’s sugar, shredded coconut, and pure butter. My father has never been a fan of sweets, but besan laddus are different: they are the taste of home. Some years ago, after we had received the news of a death in his family,  I found myself making a batch and taking it over to my parents’ house. I offered them silently, with a hug, and we sat with them over a cup of tea and reminisced about the dear departed one.  Since then I have started making them about once a year at Christmas, and on sad occasions when nothing else will suffice.

A few days ago I received the terrible news of the death of my cousin Raja. Raja-dada was my eldest cousin on my father’s side, the first-born son of my father’s eldest sister, Tai-atya. Like all his siblings, he was born in our recently-sold family home in Ratnagiri, his mother traveling home to be with her own mother for the birth. At that time my father’s youngest sister Manda was only ten years old, so Raja, at ten years older than me, was a kind of bridge between the generations. His daughter Pooja—now a mother herself—was born in the same year as Nikhil.

My father has always held a very soft spot in his heart for his sister, Raja’s mother, who also passed away too soon, and for all four of her children. I knew that the news would be very sad for him, and dreaded having to be the one to break it to him. So I made a batch of besan laddus and took it over to my parents’ house, where we sat quietly over tea and remembered dear Raja-dada. I showed my father the photographs from our most recent visit with Raja-dada in 2008 and gave him the blessed news of Pooja’s first-born son. And as I pushed the heavy stainless-steel container toward him, my heart leapt as he opened it and said, “besan laddus—my favorite.”

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115. An Immigrant’s Reflections on Independence Day

Since I immigrated to the United States with my family back in 1970, forty Fourths of July have come and gone, and the forty-first is almost upon us, with its attendant parades, barbecues, watermelons, and fireworks. We are making the usual preparations for a family get-together, and as I think back on other Fourths I wonder if I will ever be able to muster up the requisite emotions. Now that I am finally a U.S. citizen—and it was 39 years before I took the leap—perhaps feelings of patriotism will arise spontaneously, but I will have to keep you posted on that.

As someone who was already almost an adult by the time I arrived in this country, I had already celebrated national independence many times—Indian Independence. India finally won its freedom from British colonial rule on August 15^th, 1947, and so the anniversary had been marked only six times by the time I was born. To be honest, I don’t remember much about Independence Day celebrations in India in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but I do remember feeling pride in our country and genuine respect for the achievements of our freedom fighters. August 15th was a national holiday, of course, and we must have marked it with the hoisting of the flag and the singing of the national anthem. There was probably a program at IIT, perhaps at one of the student hostels, with lots of garland-giving and speeches before the meal and entertainment started. As the umpteenth speaker took the podium to lavish sycophantic praise on the guest of honor, invariably prefacing his remarks with platitudes such as, “Far be it from me to waste your time with long introductions” or “The Honorable so-and-so needs no introduction,” Dad would mutter loudly that in that case he should shut up and sit down. The entertainment was also predictable, consisting of a classical vocalist, a folk dance or bharatanatyam performance, a comedy sketch (if we were lucky), and, since we were in West Bengal, the mandatory intonement of numerous Rabindra sangeet (during which it was my mother’s turn to express her impatience). For me the high point was always the feast, which consisted of the most delicious chicken curry (at a time when chicken was still an expensive delicacy in India), followed by super-sweet, spongy rosogullas.

from tribuneindia.com

At school I remember practicing for a march past, when we would march in formation round the playing field and halt in front of the invited VIP, swiveling our heads toward him and saluting in unison. Being left-handed, or perhaps just clumsy, as our PE teacher drilled us for the big day (with his sergeant-major barks of “Forward, March! A-Lech, a-Right, a-Lecha-Right-a-Lecha; About Turn! A-Lech, a-Right, a-Lecha-Right-a-Lecha,” and so on, ad nauseum), I always managed to fall out of step.

photo by Ganesh Davuluri (bostoneventphotographer.blogspot.com)

After arriving in the U.S., it used to gall me that August 15^th would come and go without mention in the news. I must have felt strongly about this because I remember being out camping in Canada with Andrew on one August 15^th, and plastering the side of our milk truck with a Happy Independence Day sign decorated in the colors of the Indian flag.  That must have bemused the Canadians. Back in Boston, I attended Independence Day functions organized by the Indian Association of Greater Boston (IAGB) at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, with their programs almost identical to those back in India, long-winded introductions and all. Despite sharing the impatience and boredom that my parents had felt back at these functions back in India, I still made a point of attending them year after year, as boredom gave way to a certain nostalgia, and, perhaps, the pleasure of simply being around a large group of Indians, with the mothers all dressed up in their best silk saris, the babies crying throughout the performances, and the older children looking uncomfortable in their Indian outfits, stiff from lack of use and creased from long months mothballed in a drawer or trunk.

from city-data.com

For the 50^th anniversary of Independence in 1997 we went down to New York City to attend the annual India Day Parade, and cheered for the Indian film stars, U.S. politicians, and exuberant youth marching in it, as well as for members of the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA), who were denied the right to participate for many years and held placards on the sidelines.

But back to July 4^th: I remember standing on the sidelines of the Fourth of July parade in Winchendon, Massachusetts when Nikhil was about five and covering his ears as deafening bombers performed a low flyover. As the drum-and-bugle corps and baton twirlers marched past, I felt myself automatically tearing up as I invariably do when I hear martial music at patriotic events or at weddings, no matter what my intellectual response is. But little Hannah, who must have been no more than four years old, stepped out to the very edge of the sidewalk all on her own and in her small, clear voice resisted the military drumbeat with the Shaker hymn, ’Tis the Gift to be Simple.

from wwyerkes.net

We have always celebrated July 4^th because it is my parents’ wedding anniversary. Marrying in London, they knew nothing of  its significance as America’s Independence Day. During our earliest years in the U.S., my sister Sally and I would cook a meal for Mum and Dad and watch television as the Boston Pops performed their Independence Day concert at the Hatch Shell, with Arthur Fiedler conducting. We’d sing along to their patriotic medley (I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, It’s a Grand Old Flag, America the Beautiful) before their performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, culminating in the Boston fireworks display.  As Sally grew older, she and her friends would take the T down to the banks of the Charles River and brave the crowds in person. Then she had the bright idea of marrying the two celebrations with an annual cookout where she would make a large American flag cake decorated with white icing, blueberries for the stars and strawberries for the stripes. With cake and gulab jamuns, hamburgers and pakodas, conversation with our closest family friends and (American) football on the beach, we fashioned a July 4^th that holds meaning and memories for our family. My parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in this country, and on that golden anniversary friends and family, including their daughters, sons-in-law, grandsons, and several Indian American family members, gathered in Amherst to salute them, with email greetings read aloud to the cheering throng from family members in England and India who couldn’t be there in person.

Amherst, MA Fourth of July parade (pedalpeople.com)

As yet another Fourth of July approaches, everybody seems to have plans. People are wrapping up their shopping and I feel the hush as they busy themselves at home, preparing to host or travel to a family gathering. The paper has no events listed for this weekend except for the annual Fourth celebrations and, sitting alone and quiet out on the front porch last night, I heard the usual stray firecrackers going off early, as excited teenagers couldn’t contain their anticipation. I don’t expect I’ll ever feel an unalloyed patriotism on this day, but it does hold meaning for me, meaning imparted to it by my intertwined national, personal, and family histories.

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114. Food for People, Not for Profit

artwork by Jim Turner

After the turbulent decade of the 1960’s in the United States, political activism moved from the streets into the kitchens of the generation then entering their twenties and thirties. In the 1970s consumer food cooperatives sprouted up in communities all across America, both weekly pre-order co-ops, where foods bought in bulk were broken down and picked up in different members’ homes in turn, and storefront co-ops, where members who worked in the store a certain number of hours received their food at cheaper prices than did people who walked in off the street.

from brownstoner.com

Not everyone joined a food co-op for the same reasons. The lowest common denominator was the lower cost to the consumer achieved by cutting out the middleman. As long as people were willing or able to contribute a few hours of labor every so often they could receive high-quality foods for wholesale prices. For many, the most important reason for participation was the access to high-quality organic, or at least, minimally processed foods at affordable prices. The 1970’s saw a heightened awareness of the replacement of small, local farms by giant agribusinesses and the mass production of processed foods stuffed with artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. The 70’s were the era of vegan and macrobiotic diets, soy proteins, and Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. Instead of the anti-war slogans of the 60’s, young people were plastering their car bumpers with stickers asking archly, Have You Washed Your Tofu Today?

Many people were becoming vegetarians and eating lower on the food chain, not only for health reasons but because they were aware that people in the U.S. were consuming many times more than their fair share of the world’s resources while others went hungry. They joined food cooperatives in order to live the change they wanted to bring about in the world. The popular food co-op slogan, “Food for People, Not for Profit,” expressed their values. They wanted to develop models of cooperation, not competition: collectively owned worker-controlled businesses and consumer food, energy, housing cooperatives. They were aware that many of yesterday’s activists had become today’s health food fanatics, and were concerned the cooperative movement would soon lose its political edge. One poster that expressed this concern with humor read, “While you’re eating your organic raisins, remember: you still have to smash the state.” Food Not Bombs, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980, rejected yuppie complacency, delivering free food to people who couldn’t afford to buy it no matter how cheap it was.

I participated in my first food cooperative in 1975 as a member of a co-op house in college, where we saved considerable amounts of money on rent in the university-owned house by contributing our labor to house-cleaning and home improvements and on board by doing our own cooking and joining a food cooperative as a group. I didn’t participate in picking up the co-op’s food because I soon learned that if I volunteered to cook dinner for forty once a week,  I would never have to do the more unpleasant chores like cleaning the bathrooms. But life in that co-op house requires a story of its own.

from okhorizon.com

My first experience as an active member of a pre-order food co-op was in the West Concord Food and Friendship Co-op. Every week we picked up our orders of whole grains, nuts, oils, dried fruits, seeds, tofu, yogurt, cheese, and peanut butter, bringing our own re-used quart and gallon jars and plastic containers. When it was our turn to place and break down the order we collated all the previous week’s orders, placed the order with NEFCO, the New England Federation of Cooperatives, and then divided up the bulk goods into boxes for each member. The food was first rate: gallon jars of organic yogurt with the cream on top, vats of tofu in pound blocks bought directly from Boston’s Chinatown, and 10-pound blocks of sharp cheddar cheese from the Cabot diary cooperative in Vermont—for we purchased from producer cooperatives whenever possible.

WCF&F Co-op lived up to its name: we looked forward to meeting our fellow co-opers at the pick-ups as much as we did to taking the food home with us. One member, a recently widowed mother of three small children, baked bread every week and brought the loaves to the pick-up, fresh from the oven and often still warm. We shared recipes, announced events, found new housemates, and made lasting friendships, turning the weekly chore of food shopping into a pleasurable activity that fostered community.

I have been audited by the Internal Revenue Service only once in my life, and curiously, it was during the period of my life when I was making less money than I had ever made before or have since. When it came time for my appointment I dutifully hauled all my year’s receipts into the office and went over them with the auditor for more than an hour. What amazed him the most were how little we lived on. He asked suspiciously how our utility and food bills could be so low. I replied (smugly, I must admit) that we cooked and heated with wood which we split ourselves and that we bought our food wholesale from a pre-order food co-op. It was gratifying to see how impressed and chastened he was. In the end, he apologized to me for having audited me in error.

When we moved into the Boston area we first joined the Boston Food Co-op store and then a pre-order food co-op in Somerville. We became even more involved in co-ops when Andrew and his brother Dan started driving a truck for NEFCO and I was hired to edit and produce Food for Thought, the federation’s monthly newsletter. Editing FfT was itself a cooperative undertaking through which I came to rely on a team of friends and family to write, illustrate and lay out each issue, came to know more about all the member cooperatives in the New England region, both pre-orders and storefront, and learned the basic principles on which all cooperatives are founded.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s my Bangladeshi friend Hayat was a member of the Cambridge Food Cooperative in Central Square. As a young mother, Hayat made a large, batch of labor-intensive samosas every week, those mouth-watering deep-fried cones of wheat-flour pastry filled with spicy potatoes and peas, and sold them at the co-op. They were highly popular and went like hot cakes, though the other co-op members regularly confused them with the family whose hereditary dictatorship had just been overthrown by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Over the years, food co-op membership has been eroded by large natural food chains like Whole Foods that replaced low prices with convenience and replaced community-building with mere shopping. Nevertheless, storefront co-ops continue to thrive across the country, and pre-order co-ops may be making a comeback along with organic farming and community-supported agriculture, as energy costs skyrocket yet again and a new generation of green activists seeks to take back control from the food industry.

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