by Caroline M. Grant
I hated it when Dad tossed a burlap bag in the trunk of the car; it meant he expected to drive past some good foraging spot. I would slink down in the passenger seat, dying of embarrassment and hoping none of my friends would bicycle past, whenever he pulled over to clamber down an embankment or bushwhack under a tree, stooping to gather elderberries or day lily tubers.
My parents were not exactly hippies. They married in a church and started their family in the city before moving to the suburbs; they led committees at work and drove carpool. But they’d both grown up in families who prided themselves on self-sufficiency. Grandpop hunted mushrooms and Granddaddy knew a spot to gather blueberries; both of them grew vegetables and preserved them for the winter. Granddaddy, to my city-bred Grandma’s dismay, was regularly compensated with live chickens.
So inspired by Thoreau and his 1960s and 70s counterparts, Frances Moore Lappé (author of Diet for a Small Planet) and Euell Gibbons (Stalking the Wild Asparagus), energized by the contemporary back-to-the-landers, and motivated by the need to feed four kids on the cheap, Dad started foraging and Mom started putting up food.
Dad made wine and jam out of the roadside elderberries and passed those day lily tubers along to Mom, who steamed them for our lunch. I eyed the dish skeptically, the pale brown things lying limp on the plate. Mom didn’t drizzle them with melted butter or olive oil; she didn’t salt them or give them a squeeze of lemon, let alone offer a dollop of mayo or hollandaise (fancy!) to help them go down. If we were eating tubers, I guess she wanted us to really eat them, to register the fresh spring rootedness of them. I nibbled a bite, took an exaggerated gulp of water to wash it down, and pushed my plate away.
Mom sewed dresses and nightgowns, trimmed in rickrack, for me and my Sasha doll. She bought jugs of poisonous lye and cooked it up with tallow into batches of soap, which I found weird and frankly a bit scary. And finally, maybe as a reasonable response to a flood of red ants that poured one morning out of the Buc Wheats box, she baked granola.
She wrote up her recipe for the church’s Food for Thought cookbook after she had gone back to work and the tone reflects this, reading more like directions from a supervisor than guidance from a friendly home cook. She asterisks half the ingredients, adds a long paragraph note beginning, “*Starred items are essential,” and goes on to list some other possible nut and seed combinations. The recipe also includes an oil/honey syrup about which she offers the simultaneously vague and bossy direction, “bring to a boil, but do not allow a full boil” (emphasis hers). Despite my feelings about her commentary, it’s a good cereal, a nice combination of oats, nuts, and seeds, with some dried milk powder for extra protein and calcium. But Mom never thought of selling it or her soap or her sewing; she wasn’t interested in monetizing her talents, just in saving money raising the four of us.
She economized in her shopping, too, frequenting the Pepperidge Farm Thrift Shop for pastries discounted for being a day past their sell-by date or with typos on the packaging; buying seltzer in bulk; and even, for a time, joining a meat exchange. Today, CSAs of all kinds—fruit, vegetables, grains—proliferate: eat local! meet the farmer! visit the orchard! But in 1970s suburban New York, this was an anomaly. Mom drove to another town to collect our share of meat parts, neatly wrapped in butcher paper, from a big chest freezer which hulked in a garage behind bikes and sports equipment and boxes of Christmas decorations—normal family flotsam and jetsam. She stacked the packages in the laundry basket like so many folded towels, and conveyed them home in the trunk of the car. On the one hand, the grocery store meat aisle, with its cold cases of Styrofoam and plastic, was familiar; on the other, Grandpop’s childhood stories normalized hunting. But this garage occupied some disturbing middle ground I wanted no part of. At least my friends couldn’t see it; unlike when Dad foraged, I sat up straight in the passenger seat on the drive home from meat pickup: nothing to see here!
No one else’s parents made so much food from scratch, stacked their linen closets with homemade bars of creamy soap, or stocked their basement shelves with glass jars of jam, jugs of fruit wine, or bottles of root beer that occasionally exploded. It wasn’t too hard to keep the soap and the provisions hidden from my friends.
But then Dad wanted a vegetable garden.
Noting that the backyard didn’t get much sun, he solicited our input on digging up a section of the manicured front lawn. My big sister wrote happily from school, “More peas for the pea-ple!” but she didn’t have to face the judgment of her middle school classmates. Dad planted his garden; Mom, in a concession to suburban mores, planted a hedge of beach roses to conceal it. The roses were pretty, but the gesture was undermined by the fact that Dad then harvested their rosehips for jam. He tended the garden barefoot, shirtless, and in cut-off jean shorts—occasionally startling kids playing on the street when he stood up to toss back a ball they’d lost over the hedge.
The interplay of suburban and rural, conventional and hippie, continued down the driveway to the backyard, where we had a basketball hoop but also a patch of blackberries; a swing set but also a stinky compost heap that Dad turned every few weeks with his pitchfork.
I didn’t understand then that what felt like embarrassing eccentricity was actually a kind of care—my parents working to feed us well on limited resources. So I was relieved that inside, at least, we were starting to acquire the kitchen tools of suburban life: the small television on the counter; the microwave; and finally, the food processor.
Mom’s Cuisinart came with a cookbook full of classic ‘70s recipes—soufflés; quiches; cream soups—not the kind of food she made for us. Instead, she hauled the machine to my grandparents’ house to speed the labor of slicing all the vegetables she, my aunts, and Grandma turned into pickles and chutney every summer. She used it to cut butter into flour for pie crust. She used it, that is, to double-down on our homemade, “granola” (but actually muesli) kind of life.
Because once Mom had the food processor, she could downshift from baking granola to the simpler, no-bake muesli, dumping all the ingredients into the food processor and whirring them into a coarse meal. The Swiss, who invented the cereal, usually eat it soaked overnight in cream, but nothing so rich was happening in our house. I tried it a couple times, chewing deliberately like a horse with its feed, before giving it up. Only Dad ate the stuff, moistened with a splash of water or orange juice.
If my friends had ever discovered the big plastic tub of muesli in our fridge, it would have really cemented our reputation as a granola family, but I kept it hidden. Sometimes being out of step with my peers felt cool, and I could claim homemade breakfast cereal as a weird badge of honor, but more often it just widened the moat between me and my Cap’n Crunch and Froot Loops friends.
But muesli made sense for a busy working mother. It required only a measuring scoop and the food processor, which Mom didn’t even bother to wash afterwards. She just knocked out the seedy dust and put the pieces away, ready for the next batch. Soon enough, she realized she could delegate its production, so she wrote out the ingredients and measurements on a sheet of paper—with no additional direction, asterisks, or commentary—and stuck it with a magnet to the fridge. I made it for Dad till I went to college, and then he took it over himself.
I didn’t think much about the Cuisinart after I left home. But years later, I realized the real food processor in the family was not the machine which sat on the countertop–suburban, aspirational, but not used for a whole lot. The real food processors were my parents: Dad, turning his foraged and gardened summer vegetables into the frozen building blocks of future dinners, and Mom, turning them into our meals. The pair of them, together, sustaining us with their efforts.
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photo credit: Anshu A., Unsplash
Caroline M. Grant is author of the forthcoming essay collection, Make Yourself Useful: remembering a life in kitchen essentials (She Writes Press, 2027) and coeditor of two anthologies, The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat (Roost Books, 2013) and Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Her work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and other outlets. She serves on the board of the San Francisco arts incubator Root Division; co-directs, with her husband, Sustainable Arts Foundation; and was the longtime editor-in-chief of Literary Mama. She lives in San Francisco with her family. You can learn more by visiting her website, http://carolinemgrant.com