food memories

It’s Val’s 45th birthday today.

A friend told me she celebrates her late nephew’s birthday each year with his favorite foods: pizza and beer; and sometimes cupcakes. She asked: What were Val’s favorites? Which made me happy to think about. So here are some.

Val loved to eat kale and tempeh; halibut fish and chips; tuna fish salad (with chopped-up carrots and plenty of pickle juice in it). When someone had a cold she’d make them the most delicious miso soup with tahini and broccoli. In the summer she’d bring home a big fresh Hermiston watermelon, and eat it (with a fork) sliced in one huge circular slab, slip-sliding around on the plate.

For birthday cake Val liked German chocolate best, or carrot cake. For an evening snack she and her mama shared a tradition of popcorn. Betty always made great big aluminum mixing-bowls full and passed them around to everybody in the evening as the family watched football and gossiped, and I watched out the big windows with binoculars for the elk. Val converted her mom to salting the popcorn up with nutritional yeast (“Tina, where’s that yellow stuff you put on the popcorn?”).

Val loved her coffee. I’m not a morning person, but Val was, and sometimes in the early morning, as I snoozed under the quilts trying to persuade my dreams to linger, she would open her eyes and exult to the ceiling: “You know what’s great?? Now we get to have coffee!”, sit bolt upright, and hop out of bed to go percolate things.

Val loved boiled beets, roasted brussels sprouts, and spinach salad. She liked to go out for yellow Thai curry and halibut tacos (“Let’s go get a pish taco!”). For a quick dinner she’d heat black beans from the can, mashed up with salsa and scooped into tortillas.

For special get-togethers her family often has homemade tortillas and beans, a tradition adopted from the Mexican laborers on the sugar beet farm where her mom grew up. And they all eat peanut butter on their French toast.

On the year-long van trip, when Val was still totally vegetarian, we’d drive out of our way to find cities where they might sell vegetarian fake deli meat for our sandwiches. There is no convenient name for this grocery item so in our lexicon (and scribbled on our grocery lists) it was known as “circle food.”

And even when she was super-duper vegetarian, when we visited the ranch Val wouldn’t say no to her mom’s wilted lettuce salad. Which is wilted from all the hot bacon. Mmm. Val made exceptions for her mom.

Her folks did lots of home canning and Val loved best the huckleberry jam and the succulent canned raspberries. Huckleberries carried all the flavor of summer days spent high up in wild places, and they were a precious, sparse-growing commodity, hand-picked on weekend outings up in the bearish mountains. The raspberries Val’s grandma grew in rows and rows in her vast garden, and although Val could easily conjure up exasperated kid-memories of the endless pricker-y boredom of raspberry-picking, she (and the rest of the family) consider/ed spoonfuls of soft canned raspberries a consummate winter treat.

Anything from the home garden and cooked in her parents’ kitchen was a favorite. We used to plan our summer jaunt to the ranch to coincide with the county fair and the garden harvest. On the 11-hour drive up we’d already be drooling over pattypan squash from the garden, lightly battered with egg and cornmeal and fried in the electric skillet by her Army-cook dad.

She liked black licorice. And she had a thing for gum. She left a trail of balled-up silver gum wrappers like a stuffed bunny leaking polystyrene pellets. When I come across her coats and things in the closets I still find gum wrappers in their pockets.

Sometimes Val would come home with a bag of fresh, shelled English peas, and instead of eating them we’d spend an irresponsible evening throwing little green-pea grounders for the dog to scramble after.

Seems like food carries memories the way scent does. I’m glad of that.