Salon.com > Heirlooms

Lessons of a reluctant hunter

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Jazmin is 27 years old and beautiful. She has the fierce, dark beauty of a Mexican Indian, but she’s tall, and when you see her move, you think Masai warrior or maybe ninja. And it’s true: She does have ninja skills. When I first met Jazmin, she’d just killed a pheasant. She was sitting on the deck talking with a friend when she spotted the bird at the edge of the yard, 20 feet away. She casually picked up a two-by-four and hurled it. The missile hit the pheasant in the head, a neat kill. Jazmin walked over and picked it up. “Dinner,” she said.

She says she doesn’t particularly like killing animals, but she does kill from time to time, if she has good reason. A deer invaded her garden and she killed it with a machete, and she sometimes nets fish in the surf near her home on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. It’s a skill born from practice and necessity: She grew up rural and poor. Her father abandoned her family when she was 8, and her mother, Esperanza, had to find a way to support seven children. “We ate a lot of natural things,” she says. “Things from the forest. My brother used to kill iguanas. I’ve got a good iguana recipe if you want it. It’s the best meat as far as I’m concerned. There are two types of iguana: green and black. The black is good to eat. The green is too beautiful to kill. Last winter I found a big black one in my house! Can you believe it? The way you kill them is you step lightly on their heads and then pull on the tail.”

When home-grown was apolitical

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:00:00 +0000

In an argyle sweater, girlish gray corduroys and a pink hat embroidered with the phrase “Obey me!”, Carol looks as light as a husk. Despite her 80 years, her brown hair is just frosted with gray and her eyes are sparrow bright. She lives in Phoenix, Ariz., where she is faithful to her church (Catholic) and her party (Republican). Although she was once infamous for her sharp tongue and the rigidity of her beliefs, the past 10 years have mellowed her; her husband’s sudden death and her own health problems have changed her perception of what really matters. She doesn’t blink an eye at choices that once would have alarmed her: a grandson’s shaggy hair, another grandson’s Japanese wife, a gay nephew’s marriage. One thing that hasn’t changed in all these years is her attitude toward food, which remains staunchly old school.

Although she’s recovering from a serious fall, she still bakes. I sample a slice of moist, honey-tinged rye, and she plies me with sugar-crusted oatmeal cookies. As we talk, she peels parsnips at the kitchen sink. She says she doesn’t understand the modern obsession with doing everything fast. She thinks something is lost in the translation.

Bridging the Irish-Italian divide

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:00:00 +0000

You wouldn’t want to tangle with Tom Gannon. When I look at Tom, I end up imagining his ribcage, which must be massive, like the stays in the hull of a galleon. He has a wide chest and meaty arms scrolled with tattoos: on one arm, a full sleeve of roses against a black background; on the other arm, a giant Ganesh winks from a swirl of peacock feathers and smoke. Tom is tall and balding with a neatly shaved head, a red goatee dusted with white, and no-nonsense blue eyes. But in the end, his fortress-like demeanor stems not so much from his appearance as from his attitude.

Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to River Edge, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

The recipe for security

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The house is big and heavy-timbered, with log supports and ceiling beams hewn from trees that once grew nearby. Inside, there is chatter and light and the hiss of boiling grease; outside skeins of cloud settle over a dark winter forest.

Jan stands at the wooden kitchen island. She cuts neat circles from a rectangle of flattened dough. She is thin, with short graying hair and blue eyes that are at once friendly and shrewd. Her three granddaughters run screaming loops through the kitchen, and guests cluster around the bar inspecting the cocktail selection, but Jan seems unflustered by the crowd. She passes a platter of uncooked doughnuts to her son-in-law Lou, who mans a stock pot of bubbling oil.

As a general rule, I do not like doughnuts, but I make an exception once a winter. I’ve been attending the annual Kinney doughnut party since I was a kid. But it’s not just nostalgia that compels me to eat Kinney doughnuts -- the powdered confections are piping hot, with a texture that is at once pillowy and chewy. I wash down a chocolate-filled doughnut hole with a French75, and the winter months ahead seem to promise cozy cheer instead of dreary gloom. As Jan’s granddaughter Opal chases past me, I think of parties in this house when I was little, of eating doughnuts till I was sick, and of the year it actually snowed and a fantastic wooden toboggan materialized. I remember, as I often do, Jan’s son Japhy, who was two months older than me and a hero of my childhood.

The Republican in-laws I’ve come to love

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Apart from passing acquaintances at school and work, I didn’t actually know any real Republicans until I married into a conservative Catholic family. Holiday conversations shifted from the familiar (meditation, magic and global warming), to the unfamiliar (guns, the evil legacy of Jimmy Carter, and the importance of building a better fence along the U.S.-Mexico border).

My parents raised me to see the right wing as an unpredictable and malignant species, entirely separate from my own people. In my family, we talked about Republicans in the same tone of voice your average American reserves for the Taliban. "Christian" was a damning epitaph, to be delivered in a dark and significant whisper. Getting to know my conservative in-laws was something of an education.

Right off the bat, I was shaken by several astonishing discoveries. For instance, some people actually revere Ronald Reagan! But perhaps even more surprising: I actually liked these people. I liked people who watched Fox News and blamed America’s problems on welfare and environmentalists. Not only did I like these people, but somehow I felt at home with them.

The crepes that crossed the Atlantic

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

The blue schoolhouse has begun to slouch with age, to settle into itself. Four tall windows clouded in white lace curtains shine with autumn light. The house has an old smell to it, like parchment, or quilts kept in a trunk, or books, and today the air is tinged with wood smoke and butter, sizzling in a cast-iron frying pan.

Mary Lou Goertzen is making thin pancakes, a tradition in her family that dates back at least to the era of Catherine the Great, when her great-great-grandparents fled Germany.

“Catherine the Great offered my family freedom from religious persecution if they’d settle and farm in the Ukraine,” Mary Lou says, setting the heavy cast-iron pan on the round wooden table. “The Mennonites lived in Russia for over 100 years. This is a recipe from my great-great-grandparents, German Mennonites who settled in the Ukraine.”

One hundred and fifty years later, American descendants of Ukrainian farmers were still using the same crepe recipe. Mary Lou, who was born in Kansas in 1929, remembers crepes as a Sunday tradition. “We called them flinsen. When I grew up, we had these for Sunday supper. You went to church in the morning. When you got home from church you had Sunday roast. That was enough cooking for the day. So Sunday evening we’d have a simple light dinner of flinsen with rhubarb or sour cherry preserves.”