I didn’t grow up eating pie. If we had dessert it was likely Pepperidge Farm cookies, an Entenmann’s cake or, for a very special occasion, Gateau Rolla, an almond meringue and delightfully dense chocolate Christmas dessert recipe. My mother grew up in the Mid-west and fled as soon as she could for the exotic streets and wider promises of 1950’s New York City. After enrolling in the Art Student’s League, she landed a position as the secretary to the president of Doubleday Publishing. With her eye on becoming an author/illustrator herself she successfully parlayed her talents and connections into an eventual career writing children’s books, a cookbook, a lexicon of the fantastical/occult and 4 murder mysteries. Somewhere in there she married into a wealthy family who employed a French chef.
Distancing herself from the hot casseroles and canned meals of her childhood cuisine she learned French cooking and wrote the humorous Eating in Bed Cookbook that won some acclaim, a guest visit on the Julia Child show and a featured role on the TV show “To Tell the Truth.” The Gateau Rolla was an 8 layered meringue and chocolate ganache cake that took 24 hours to set before offering up a crunchy, sweet explosion of dissolving egg white crisps and almost stiff cocoa enriched buttery filling. Growing up in Greenwich Village, the first time I ever saw a pie was in the Bird’s Eye TV commercial which featured a cheerful family enjoying the ready to bake concoction of pastry and sugary apple chunks that promised “a meal with a happy ending.” I envied Mom, Dad, Junior and Sissy smiling at each other with twinkling eyes as they ate; so unlike my silent meals with a now single mother who turned to food and alcohol to medicate the devastation of her divorce.
As I grew up I learned why she had needed to separate from the all-American Texan family she had abandoned and why we didn’t eat macaroni and cheese, or sandwiches, or beans, or French fries, nor pies, hamburgers, pizza or any typical “American” food. It reminded her of her own unhappy childhood meals. And then, just as she had rejected her culinary roots, I also rebelled against hers, pursuing vegetarian and then Mediterranean cuisines.
This past weekend I had the pleasure of staying with people who delight in solid, substantial meals from their childhoods without judgement, guilt or class associations. They had also left their original family homes, yet carried with them a love for the food that had nurtured and sustained them in their youth: pulled pork, chili, cole slaw, chicken noodles, ribs, bagels and cream cheese. And then, there was pie. A home made piece of fruit filled pastry made with some of the 50 kinds of wild berries found in Alaskan parks, bogs, mountainsides and tundra. As it went into the oven I was asked if I eat pie, and answered, “I didn’t grow up with it so, not much.” But when it came out, after a meal shared with laughter and story telling, the glossy, wine colored, lattice covered dessert beckoned. Politely, I served myself a 1/4 cup. This was not the gluey televised Bird’s Eye dessert of my youth. It was a messy but tasty contrast of tart berries, not much sugar and the scaffolding of cookie textured pastry. As we celebrated our connections while enjoying the dessert, I felt fully at home and even had seconds. On our faces I noted the same twinkle of an eye as our meal wrapped with “a happy ending.” How much I have missed by avoiding foods because of someone else’s story.
Introduction to Mindful Eating Authentic Living Support
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