Food, part 1: Childhood, and the cursed ‘Shake-N-Bake’ porkchops
And getting spoiled by a Jewish grandma
In honor of SF Restaurant Week, I’m embarking on a four-part series about food.
I have a tendency to write too much and try to shove different ideas together in ways that sometimes work and sometimes really don’t. So, instead of writing too much in one place, I’m trying this — breaking up some thoughts that have been percolating about food and separating them into a few different, still-too-long articles.
First up, where it all started: childhood.
Food has shaped my life.
Part of that is a fundamental energy problem. I don’t eat, I get cranky.
Anyone who knows me well has seen what happens when my blood sugar drops. It’s ugly.
My coworker Sam has to remind me to bring energy bars for the end of games. I’ve tried to remind myself to stop talking when I haven’t eaten.
Once I eat, I come back to life like a toddler who just had ice cream.
But aside from the logical, ya know, human need for food, I’ve always had an appreciation for it.
Some of that was unavoidable. I grew up as the oldest on either side of my immediate family, so I was spoiled.
My grandma Gail showed love through food to an extent that was borderline problematic.
When I went down to stay with her and my grandpa David for a week in Maryland, I arrived to a fridge stocked with two pounds each of corned beef, pastrami and turkey, an entire casserole dish worth of macaroni salad, and an amalgam of brownies, apple pie, cookies, vanilla ice cream and a pantry stocked with those mini-cereal boxes.
There were other things, too — like a trip to Krispy Kreme to buy a dozen donuts after watching them come out of the conveyor, or a local crabcake place that made softball-sized crabcakes with the proper ratio of 80-20 crab-to-cake.
But the foundation was always at home. She’d feed you a pastrami sandwich with a side shoveling of macaroni salad, then ask if you were hungry 20 minutes later.
“Are you hungry?”
“Nope, I’m good.”
“Are you sure? I can make you a corned beef sandwich?”
“Grandma, really, I’m good. I just ate.”
“A little macaroni salad?”
“Seriously, I’m full.”
“There’s brownies! Maybe a piece of apple pie?”
Eventually, you’d give in.
You’d have a milkshake even if you couldn’t stomach one, and there was somehow never enough malt in it. To this day, I do not know what malt is. My sisters don’t, either. But grandma Gail was insistent every milkshake was perpetually just shy of the right amount of malt.
I gained 10 pounds in a week down there. I remember because I weighed myself the first day and the last day, knowing I was going to be assaulted with food for a week.
While I grew up with that — and my other grandparents, Mimi and Pa, bringing over donuts and burgers and other cholesterol-heartening goodies — as I got older, it became glaring that I was not living in a cooking household.
This isn’t to say my parents couldn’t cook. They had their specialties. But logistics worked against them.
Both were commuting an hour or two, to either Newark or New York — different places! (to you non-East Coast plebs) — each day. They’d come home, exhausted, change, and have to make dinner, and then usually find that my sister hadn’t done her homework.
My middle sister was in town recently, and as we were sitting at an outrageous winery lunch (more on that later) with my mom and my girlfriend, we both remembered the horrific Shake-N-Bake porkchops we often had for dinner.
As my sister recalled, there was a decent breaded chicken with Italian breadcrumbs in our family’s rotation which looked incredibly similar to the lifeless, dry pork we were rationed.
^Tell me that’s not painful to look at. They chose brown as the background color for the package which highlights dry porkchops, dry potatoes and just, I guess, raw carrots? They know who they’re marketing towards.
You’d sit down at the table, pray to a deity you didn’t believe in, and ignore your instincts that told you it was porkchop night. Until, of course, the knife dug in — and I mean dug — to struggle and tear through a squared, breaded piece of as-dead-as-dead-gets pork that our Jewish ancestors would have shook their heads at.
This wasn’t my parents’ fault. It’s quick, easy sustenance after a long day, and there are three kids to feed.
But the dread I still feel at the thought of eating one of those pork chops — no sauce, no moisture, just the borderline chalky hell of a dry piece of protein — is fresh in my mind, and reminds me that cooking can often be more of an inconvenience than a spark for joy.
So as my teenage appetite expanded at an exponential rate, to the point of threatening those around me, I had to learn how to cook.
It was incredibly basic for many years, starting with balsamic chicken breasts and broccolini. I’d taken a cooking class in middle school and went through a phase of baking bread, but the urgency to sustain myself (and my sisters) didn’t really arrive until high school.
Because I couldn’t drive — New Jersey doesn’t allow provisional licenses until you’re 17, and only with one other person in the car — and we all had after-school activities, we ran through the gamut of “nannies.”
They would hang around for a few hours to drive us to after-school activities and often make dinner. All had their quirks. Many were less than stellar cooks, prompting me to cook more often than in the past.
One, who shall not be named, used an ornamental bottle of olive oil — to be fair, it’s worth asking why we had that next to the regular oil — in the pasta.
(As an aside, there’s no need to put olive oil in your pasta water, just make sure you salt it, in the name of our lord and savior, Strega Nona).
What made her error unforgivable is that my sisters could immediately taste that the pasta was off. That’s the sort of thing a living, breathing human being should (should!) be able to detect pretty easily.
My sisters told her something was wrong with it. She tried it, and in a display that was either gaslighting, stubbornness, or worse — proof that she did not have functioning tastebuds, she denied what they were saying.
My mom came home and immediately confirmed the pasta was way off. Our nanny, to everyone’s memory, continued to deny she made a mistake.
I could say that story was meant purely to indicate that we had some less-than-stellar cooks for our dinners, but the truth is it’s something that I still think about from time to time.
I am haunted by the proposition that there are people out there who live among us and appear otherwise (mostly) normal.
Yet. Yet! They have no ability to identify the difference between unspoiled olive oil and something that’s been sitting out since Bill Clinton ripped the sax on the Arsenio Hall Show.
(Something I also think about and am haunted by, and I shoehorned in here solely to embed):
At a certain point, I just got exhausted with watching them make bad food.
It’s not that hard to make something serviceable. It felt wrong for us to eat terribly, especially having grown up watching my uncle Roy, a professional chef, in the kitchen.
As a kid, I remember him making things for family dinners that weirded out my young palate. But I was always intrigued by what he was doing.
When I was just starting to get into cooking, I got a chance to help him prep a catering lunch for the day. Most of that was lugging those massive, stainless steel catering pans, but I did get to help him make a pepperoni cheese bread that’s become one of his signatures.
I’ve always admired his creativity and the way he can turn random ingredients into a meal, seemingly without having to think too hard.
Flash forward to last summer, when my family spent a week on Martha’s Vineyard, the place we all — my mom and her siblings, and my sisters and cousins — grew up visiting every summer.
Roy and I got to cook together. I made chilaquiles with eggs for everyone one morning and we worked together on a dinner where I made bolognese and he handled just about everything else.
He’s got this understated disposition, but is one of the most hilarious people in the world. At the same time, he is an incredibly thoughtful person who, when not being sarcastic, is deeply sincere.
To be able to cook with him, then watch him taste something I made, and get a, “Jakey, that’s really good,” is a series of moments that are logged in a special place in my memories.
As he’s showed me, and as I’ve learned on my own, cooking is not something you ever really perfect. It’s always a process — tinkering, experimenting, failing.
I massively enjoy picking up new techniques and trying different cuisines and sometimes completely botching it.
But there’s something really soothing about cooking when you’re in the right frame of mind, with good ingredients and enough time on your hands.
If you’re doing it right, it takes you out of whatever mental space you’re stuck in. Throw on some Brazilian Jazz, too, and make something that requires cooking with wine — half for the recipe, half for yourself — and you’re in business.
The experience of providing a thoughtful, well-cooked meal to people I care about is holy to me. Food has the ability to convey feelings, memories, and ease pain.
But it can also be stressful, both financially and logistically. There are countless times when you can’t sit by a stove on a slow simmer, and myriad people who don’t have access to high quality or affordable food.
The one thing my family has taught me, though, is that food allows people to share in the most important moments together — to break up tension, soothe wounds and put you all in a space to laugh and feel satisfied at the end of the night.
This is an effort in appreciation of that potency, and exploring the beauty and perils of cooking and eating.