Good Reading, Family-Style

by

Paul Clark

Most family histories include stories about food. This is probably because the times the whole family gets together usually includes a meal—a regular dinner or a birthday party or a picnic. Family memories are forged over a roast, a favorite salad, a failed attempt at something new, or simply take-out Chinese.

The average Tuesday night dinner may not create a lasting memory; mealtime memories are built up over a long period of time. I grew up at the tail end of a big family and until my siblings started going away to college there were 11 of us at dinner most nights. Although I couldn’t tell you too many stories about particular meals, I could tell lots of stories about what it was like sharing a table with ten other people.

“Cacophonous” and “delicious” are two words the come to mind. There was always conversation at the table, maybe started by my dad, but including contributions from almost anyone who could get a word in edgewise. My oldest brother and sister were (and are) dominant personalities at table, but we all learned our individual table styles. Mine was simple—get a reaction in ten words or less, because that’s probably all the time I had before someone else had the floor.

My mom did all the cooking and she had a variety of roasts and stews and the occasional surprise dish that no one else had ever tried. I was well into my adulthood before I met more than one other person who was comfortable around an artichoke. They were a late winter/early spring staple on my mom’s dinner table from the time I knew how to chew.

I thought of these family dinners as I re-read Laurie Colwin’s 1988 collection of essays, Home Cooking. Colwin was a writer of delightful short stories and novels, such as Happy All the Time. For several years in the 1980s she contributed a monthly column to Gourmet magazine. The columns were published about the same time the foodie explosion of specialty food shops and mainstream organics and bread machines and home cappuccino makers and the Food Network was beginning to take hold in the U.S.

She mentions how difficult it was finding anything organic—nowadays, the local Jewel or Safeway has organics sharing shelf space with decades’ old store brands.

She writes, “When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them.” How true. Although my current nuclear family is less than half the size of the one I grew up with, and the conversation at the table is often not much more than adolescent grunts in response to tired adult questions, what goes on in my kitchen is closely related to what I remember from childhood meals.

For instance, growing up my parents always celebrated St. Nicholas Day. On the evening before December 6, we would all put our shoes at the foot of our beds. In the morning, they would be filled with coins and chocolates. When I became a parent, I continued the tradition, adding a new feature—a savory St. Nicholas cookie made with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice and nutmeg. I cut out several of them and, for years, painstakingly added features such as eyes, nose and beard, all made out of dough, and decorated with red cinnamon buttons down the front.

This year, with three “cool” and disbelieving teenagers in the house and a shortage of time, I just made the dough and cut out the shapes, without adding any decorations. My kids not only noticed, they complained and said they just weren’t the same without the eyes and beard.

Colwin’s columns were about such simple but memorable food events. How to entertain in an apartment so small you cooked on a hot plate and washed dishes in the sink. How to make potato salad. How to fry chicken. How to deal with fussy eaters.

And always, always, about relationships. Meals with boyfriends. Meals with family. Meals to impress. Meals to comfort. Every essay includes one or more recipes at the end Before the essays were collected in a book I subscribed to Gourmet just to read Colwin’s column. (Almost everything else in the magazine was beyond my cooking skills or restaurant and travel budget.)  One particular column and recipe created an indelible food memory in my family.

When my oldest daughter was a toddler in 1989, my wife and I hosted the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. For years, Christmas dining was a three-meal trifecta for my mom—something simple for Christmas Eve, beef tenderloin for Christmas breakfast, and an elaborate feast for Christmas dinner. As we kids got married and started our own holiday traditions, the Christmas Eve dinner floated among different households. The year we hosted it we expected around 20 people—siblings and nieces and nephews and aunts and a couple of friends.

We decided to make “Black Cake,” the last recipe in Home Cooking. Black Cake is a festive West Indian fruitcake that Colwin learned from one of her daughter’s babysitters. Its preparation starts weeks before the meal, when four pounds of dried fruit are covered with the contents of a bottle of white wine and a bottle of rum. The ingredients for the cake itself are pretty standard—butter, brown sugar, vanilla, spices, a dozen eggs, some flour. The final ingredient—a pound of burnt sugar or four ounces of burnt sugar essence.

The year we made it specialty grocery stores were still rare. Colwin’s guidance in the column was simple: you can pick up burnt sugar essence at a West Indian grocery store, Several phone calls throughout the city were for naught, so we were left with Colwin’s Plan B—burn a pound of brown sugar in a skillet until it became “slightly bitter, black, and definitely burnt.” Which is what we did.

The cake batter and sodden fruit were mixed together and baked in a cake pan. The idea was that we would turn these out on a platter, ice it, and have a festive dessert. But after some concerned poking at the pans in the oven and extending the baking time by 30 minutes, what we turned out on a platter was not a black cake but a black pudding, something that slowly oozed over the sides of the platter and onto the counter.

With an apartment full of guests imminently arriving and many more things to cook, I poured the contents of the platter into a mixing bowl and hoped that something . . . different would happen.

I don’t remember anything else that we served at that meal. I only remember reluctantly turning the contents of the bowl back onto the platter at dessert time; it wasn’t a cake, but at least now it had a form. When one of my brothers heard how much alcohol was in it, he added a last touch. He placed the quivering mass on the platter in the middle of the dining room table, added a small amount of brandy, and lit it. The effect was enough to make me forget the failed recipe. And with a hard sauce and after dinner drinks it was a fine ending to a memorable meal.

Colwin was only 48 when she died suddenly in 1992. I miss her voice, and especially the observations she may have made over the past 15 years when food in America became a televised obsession. Her essays, as well as her stories and novels, had a rare feature in the 70s and 80s—an optimistic voice. But optimism in American writing is grist for a different essay.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it