zockastetja (sugar cubes)

(a big thank-you to my mother, Tina Fast, for sorting through her memory and sharing the wealth she found there with me.)

You take your seat at the funeral table, hold up your cup to be filled with coffee.  You reach for a bun and then for a zockastetj.  You dip this hardened constellation of a thousand sugary fragments in your cream-whitened coffee. Only when saturation threatens to disintegrate its togetherness do you lift it to your mouth.  An allotment of sweetness in the bitterness of grief.

Blumenort Kleine Gemeinde Church.  Built by my great uncles
Cornelius R., Henry R. and Peter R. Plett in 1918.

The Blumenort Kleine Gemeinde church of the early twentieth century was architecturally and aesthetically a simple building as far as church buildings go, the walls of white-painted siding interrupted only by the large clear-glass windows through which bright, sunny, prairie air could freely move.  Doors on the south side of the building admitted the church-goers, men through the left, women through the right.  Off of the women’s cloakroom was the cry room; off of the men’s, the prädja stowtje.*  This assortment of small rooms led into the sanctuary, a large, unadorned, rectangular-shaped room in which the congregation gathered on Sunday morning.  Rows of slatted, varnish-shiny benches darkened with stain, a varnished hardwood floor, a varnished pulpit.  White-painted walls, white cotton curtains.

            A utilitarian sacredness characterized this church-before-my-memory.  A sanctuary in the normal course of days intended for worship:  prayers, hymns, a sermon.  But it could easily be transformed from sanctuary to cenacle.  Benches pushed aside, tables assembled, the tops--wide boards joined together with cross-slats--laid solidly on supporting sawhorses.  For a wedding, the bustle of work required to rearrange the room will have had a celebratory flair to it.  But for a funeral, a more sober, determined flurry tempered by loss.

            Men (I’ve no doubt it was men) hauled the miagrope—a fifty gallon cast iron cauldron with a built-in fire box used to heat water for coffee—from the barn behind the church and set it up in the prädja stowtje, transforming this ministerial station into the only kitchen the church ever had.   A few women baked tweebuck the day prior to the funeral, taking care to shape the buns as miniatures of the big, hearty ones they more regularly baked to feed their families.  Someone was asked to buy coffee and zockastetja.

            Immediately following the funeral service, while most of the funeral-goers gathered in the cemetery next to the church, tables had to be set up, coffee made, funeral fare laid out.  In the prädja stowtje, the cauldron-heated water was ladled into milk cans turned coffee urns.  From here the milk cans were carried to the tables and the coffee poured into large aluminum kettles, ready to be served. Funeral faspas were simple meals and only a cup was needed at each place setting.  A bowl of tweebuck, a pitcher of cream, a dish of zockastetja for each table.

            And permeating all this bustle of activity, a simple wooden box palled with black fabric lowered into the ground, shovel upon shovel of dirt returned to the grave, a spirit commended, a sorrow shared.

             

As is customary in a small university seminar class, everyone introduced themselves on the first day.  I immediately recognized her name as Mennonite, as of course she did mine.  But it wasn’t until later in the term that I mentioned that I was from Blumenort.  She knew Blumenort well as she had spent a summer there living with her great aunts.  And she started talking about funerals, coffee and sugar cubes, she even used the Low German word zockastetja.  In that cultural fragment she set adrift with her words, lay more than an old-fashioned custom we both recognized.  It pulled back through my losses, my father, uncles and aunts, some whom I loved, some whom I feared and some whom I hardly knew, my grandparents, a friend’s father, a thirteen-year old school mate, a grandmother I only dimly remembered. It pulled back further through my losses, to a time before my time, through the generations of sorrows that Blumenort has known.  This gesture towards ritual—coffee and sugar cubes—that is so much a part of my history, a reminder of what I have lost, a remembrance of what is mine.

*Ministers’ room.  This was a room reserved for the ministers to collect themselves and their thoughts before they filed through the congregation to take their seats on the dais at the front of the church.

(Photo taken from Royden Loewen. Blumenort: A Mennonite Community in Transition, 1874-1982. Blumenort Mennonite Historical Society, 1983. Used with permission.)

a sweet-complaining grievance: a triptych of sugar

“It’s sweet,” someone recently said of With a Whisk.  It was intended as a compliment to be sure but it unsettled me and a disconcerting self-doubt crept in.  Was my blog nothing more than a collection of entertaining sentiments, a pleasurable dose of nostalgia, a simple reassurance that if things aren’t okay now, at least they used to be?  I don’t do acomplicatedkindness despair to be sure but I’m not all sunshine and roses, am I, I fretted.  Until a Facebook friend posted a thought, “I think the richness of food descriptions made someone jump to a taste-adjective.”  Thanks Veena, I can live with that.  So here’s to the sweet, sugarcoated, the bittersweet, sweet and sour, syrupy commixture that is my life.

I am indebted to The Bard for my title, Two Gentlemen of Verona, III.ii.85.

(If this posting is the middle panel of my sugar-blog triptych, the following posting, "zockastetja," is the right panel. For the left panel, I have in a mind a story about gingersnaps.)

squab, n.

1. A raw, inexperienced person. Obs.
   1640 R. Brome Sparagus Garden II. ii, I warrant you, is he a trim youth? We must make him one Iacke, 'tis such a squab as thou never sawest; such a lumpe, we may make what we will of him.
2.
a. A newly-hatched, unfledged, or very young bird.
   1865 C. Kingsley Hereward v, At the bottom of each [pie] a squab or young cormorant.
b. spec. A young pigeon.
c. A young rabbit. rare.
(from the Oxford English Dictionary, online)

          It was mid-afternoon, my second day on the colony of Riva Palacios, one of Bolivia’s most established and prosperous Mennonite colonies. I was spending a few days with the family of Wilhelm and Susanna Martens who lived in the village of Waldheim about an hour’s drive south of the city of Santa Cruz. I had been warmly welcomed by all members of the family, children included and so I gladly accepted thirteen year old Jacob’s invitation to inspect the rabbit operation that he and his older brother had set up. With his three younger sisters in tow along with a bevy of pets, Renshaw and Scuba their dogs, a cat or two, Jacob led me to the hen house which doubled as a rabbit hutch. We made our way through the flutter of squawking chickens and into the mesh wire enclosure that housed the ever expanding herd of rabbits. Jacob was well versed in the habits of rabbits and knew his warren well. He explained that he and his brother had about two dozen breeding does and that this ensured a steady supply of meat for the Santa Cruz market. Every rabbit they sold got them fifteen bolivianos. He spotted which does were his and which belonged to his brother. He knew which rabbits were ready for market and which ones were still too immature to sell. Along the far wall he and his brother had arranged cinder blocks to serve as nesting boxes. As he gently pushed through the fluff and grass that filled one of the boxes, he inspected the litter of squirming, hairless squabs that had been born after his last visit yesterday to tend to the rabbits. From the adjacent box he lifted a doe and pointed to the tufts of hair that she had pulled from her chest and which now lined the nest; a sure sign that she was ready to kindle. Undoubtedly there would be another six or seven kits when next he came to feed and water his herd. But there were a few wrinkles in this fledgling entrepreneurial fraternity; Jacob did the lion’s share of the work but wasn’t rewarded the lion’s share of the profit! But what are you to do when your sixteen year old brother sets the terms of the partnership!
          My knowledge of rabbit husbandry greatly expanded, we eventually left the chicken coop-cum-rabbit pen. Once outside I noticed the many pigeons roosting on the peak of the hen house. I wondered aloud whether Jacob’s entrepreneurial venture extended to these squabs as well. There’s no money in pigeons was Jacob’s quick retort. He went on to point out that there could be a market for pigeons as there were restaurants in Santa Cruz that served it. He also pointed out that somebody was making money on pigeons because these restaurants charged astronomical prices for such dishes. But Jacob was more than skeptical that he would see any of the profit; it was the restaurant that was making all the profit. It was at this juncture that I couldn’t help but recall yesterday’s midday meal preparations. The kitchen was overflowing with members of the Martens family and I was having difficulty finding a place to stand where I wouldn’t be in the way. Sarah, one of the older Martens daughters was cutting up potatoes and deep frying them. Susanna was cutting up lettuce and avocado while simultaneously trying to contain the bedlam her youngest three daughters were creating as they ran in and out and through the kitchen chasing each other and the cats that were in no way allowed in the house. In the midst of this exuberant uproar, Jacob was calmly and attentively helping his sister Tina fry the chicken.  I watched as he placed the chicken pieces in the pan and then comment to his sister on how to fry them. In the two months I had spent on Mennonite colonies in Latin America, I had not before seen a boy cooking. It is not as if Jacob would have had to have been there; his mother and older sisters were more than competent as cooks. But the cuisinier in me presumed that he took his place next to the skillet for the simple reason that he loved to cook. Now standing outside the hen house, gambling that my impertinent thought in yesterday’s kitchen was warranted, I asked, did he know that in the kind of restaurants that served pigeon the cooks were usually men? Did he know this? Yes, of course he did!
          I had my share of remarkable food moments during my visits on Mennonite colonies—the penetrating smoky aroma of a ham hanging overhead; a bowl of chicken noodle soup for night snack; Susanna’s feather light cottage cheese piled on an oven warm bun—but I had never in my wildest imagination expected to encounter a fellow gastronome and discuss the haute cuisine of Santa Cruz. Goes to show what a squab I am.

ever and always a gardener (first drafted july 2009)

Earlier in May when I was in Manitoba for a family wedding my Mother and I took a drive through the countryside. We passed a farmyard and she immediately noticed the manure piled high next to the barn. “I’d like to talk to that farmer about his manure,” she told me. With more than seventy-five years of gardening experience under her belt, my mother knows a treasure when she sees one.

In just a few months my Mother will move into a one bedroom senior’s apartment in the small Mennonite town in southern Manitoba where she lives and where I grew up. She has lived in the same large four-bedroom bungalow for more than forty years but she’ll like not having to worry about mowing the grass, about clearing the driveway of snow, or about keeping her house clean. But she’ll miss her garden. There have been too many windowsill seedlings carefully tended, too many pesky blackbirds eating peas right out of the pods, too many sacks of potatoes lugged into the basement, too many green tomatoes spread out everywhere to ripen, hurriedly picked against a September frost.

My mother doesn’t remember when she started gardening but she remembers being the ten year old girl who weeded the family garden while her mother picked yellow wax beans. Her parents liked a weed-free garden and my mother and her many siblings (eleven in total) were charged with keeping it clean. By age fifteen my mother was taking much of the responsibility for her family’s garden whether it was directing her younger brothers and sisters as they dug up potatoes, hoed, and carried pails of water to moisten tender plants, or whether it was picking raspberries, peas or digging up carrots. My mother also remembers that on the west side of her family’s big garden was a long row of Manitoba maples that she and her siblings walked along every time they went to visit their cousins in the adjacent quarter section. While ideal as shade trees, these maples sucked the moisture right out of the prairie soil and made the west side of the garden less fertile than the rest. Vegetables didn’t grow well there, except for beans. My grandfather took full responsibility for the ten rows of navy beans that he seeded there, tending them until they had fully ripened. Then for sure Tina, Jake, Tom, Esther and the other Plett children turned their attention from weeding to shucking. Honoring the many hours of labor he and his children invested in those bean rows, my grandfather took over the kitchen when it came time to make his favorite soup, riepe schauble Supp. To the pot of bubbling beans my grandfather added a ham bone, a bay leaf, onions and carrots, pepper kernels, parsley and salt.

Then there was the first garden my mother was solely responsible for, her first garden as a married woman. My parents got married on a Sunday in the middle of May and on Monday morning after my father’s aunt had stopped by to drop off a wedding gift, my parents started work in their garden. If they didn’t put the first seeds into the ground on that Monday, they did it on Tuesday because in Manitoba gardens need to be seeded by the middle of May. Their garden was a small corner of a farmer’s field and needed regular hoeing to keep the wild oats at bay. But it was a fertile field that my mother tended; among many other vegetables she remembers harvesting a bumper crop of yellow beans in July, a large enamel washing bowl heaped high.

There have been other gardens wherever my family has lived and so my mother was already a seasoned gardener by the time I, her ninth child, was born. As she tells me every year on my birthday, her labor pains started while she was working in the garden on an exceptionally balmy day in early November, a rarity in the impending winter of a late Manitoba autumn. In that large garden—it was more than 5000 square feet—she grew potatoes, corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, kohlrabi (which she seeded just for her children to eat), beets, carrots, cucumbers, vegetable marrow, cabbage, zucchini, lettuce, peppers, radishes, rhubarb, onions, summer savory, parsley, dill, sorrel. Her garden also included some fruit trees and bushes: currants (that rarely yielded any fruit), gooseberries, raspberries, chokecherries, crabapples, pincherries and every few years she tried, unsuccessfully, to grow Saskatoon bushes. The Saskatoon and currant disappointments notwithstanding, my mother enjoyed her garden and worked hard each summer from May to September in order to grow the vegetables needed to feed her family through the winter.

Gradually over the years her garden has diminished in size. One year my parents put several sod terraces in place to stop the erosion of soil. Then my mother seeded grass along the far side of the garden under the moisture-sucking oak trees. Next the section near the house with its high clay content became lawn. Over the years, grass and flowers have continued to replace vegetables. This summer, now in her 86th year, my mother has only a small vegetable garden, a mere twelve by twelve foot square patch of soil. Next summer she’ll have no garden at all.

Driving down Rosedale Road on that May afternoon I was filled with sadness at losing my childhood home, entangled with anxiety about my mother aging. I could not share her imaginative pleasure at the composting possibilities of the manure pile we passed. In my grief I saw only the absurdity of that barn-high manure pile fertilizing her vestigial bit of garden. But my mother was not focusing on the diminishing of her life as I was but rather on the expanse of it. It was as if she was walking through each and every garden she had tended, collecting all the soildirty hours she had spent in them, and with that nutrient-rich dung heap at her disposal bringing each one again to bloom and then to harvest.

Come late August when her final crop of oxhearts and beefsteaks begins to ripen I’m expecting a phone call from my Mother two thousand kilometers away. She’ll be sitting in her kitchen phone in hand and she’ll say, “Kerry, you know what I’m doing?” And I’ll say, “What, Mom?” And then I’ll hear the words I have heard her say for so many years now, August after August, “I’m eating the most delicious slice of tomato ever with mayonnaise and just a bit of salt.”

(riepe schauble Supp - ripened bean soup)

chicken barbeque



photo:  viola fast - spring 1968

Several times a summer, usually on a Sunday, my family would have a chicken barbeque in the back by the stones. My excitement at the prospect of such a meal was already palpable on the short drive home from church. Once we got home my father wasted no time getting the fire going. He cut kindling, chopped wood and lit the fire. I may have run off to play while the fire was burning, perhaps to the swing, perhaps back into the house to see how my mother and my older sisters were faring with cutting up the chicken and mixing the potato salad but I would return to the fire regularly. When the time came, I wanted to watch as my father laid the chicken onto the barbeque rack. He fitted each piece in its place like a master jigsaw puzzler, nestling drumstick to wing, breast to thigh, right to the edge of the rack. If perchance I had been off swinging when my father spread out the chicken, I’d be sure to be present when my father, just as the chicken was beginning to brown, dipped each piece into the barbeque sauce which my mother had prepared; a blend of vinegar, eggs, oil, salt and poultry seasoning. This dipping was an artful process indeed. My father had little maneuverability on the chicken-laden grill and each piece had to be returned to the exact spot he had lifted it from. Shortly before the chicken was done, my father dipped all the pieces once again. I doubt that I strayed far from the barbeque once my father started dipping, my anticipation too great by now for my attention to be easily diverted unless it was to run inside and urge my mother or sisters to hurry the process of carrying the salad, cups and plates, cutlery out to the back. I discovered many years later that the recipe for our barbeque sauce originated with the Manitoba poultry producers and got passed around among Blumenort families by the farm wife who first discovered it. But as a child I claimed it as our own; a sauce that separated our barbequed chicken out from the ordinariness of everybody else’s.

When the chicken was a succulent brown, my father pulled out his pocket knife and cut a small piece off one of the breasts. With the tip of his knife, he held the bit of morselled meat to my mouth; a crusty crispness of salt and oil, a vinegary nibble of rosemary and sage. “How is it?” he asked. My declaration always: “perfect.” This luscious tease to the taste buds notwithstanding, my favorite pieces were the drumstick and the neck, which I only knew as the Gorjel. I now know that the neck was nobody's favorite so I was welcome to the piece, but as a young child it was a delicacy, a single mouthful of stringy meat sucked from the crook of the neck. The drumstick followed and undoubtedly some potato salad. When I was satiated, all that was left to do was throw the bones to our dogs, listen to the crunch of their feast and wait for the next barbeque.

photo:  douglas fast, august 2010

Now out behind what was our garden all that’s left of our familial henge are six, seven stones that lie scattered about, overgrown with grass and scrub bush. One has toppled from its base, others are tilted and skewed as they have sunk into the soil with time. They used to sit solidly in a circle, a cluster placed there by design. With hours of hard work and the help of a block and tackle, my father and older siblings rearranged a pile of boulders that had been deposited there by the bulldozer that excavated our basement. My father completed this outdoor dining room by bricking up a barbeque.



I remember an upright white limestone boulder in that circle, too tall for a child to clamber onto, pock marked in an ancient era by the insistent battering of eroding water. Equally intriguing to me as a child was a flatter stone and hence easier to climb onto, a granite rock formed in an even earlier pre-Cambrian epoch but now set up against a cluster of trees. Adults could rest their backs against the oaks, but the small lip that rose up from the back of the rock, only a hand span in height, and the shallow indentation in front of it was a seat perfectly formed for a child; a coveted seige on which to relish a Gorjel and anticipate a drumstick.


("chicken barbeque" is the first of a series of blog postings in which I explore the food culture I was raised in following "thank you St. Martha.")

thank you st. martha

I would never have known that Martha of Bethany was a dragon slayer. Such hagiographic details were not featured in my Mennonite Sunday school curriculum! That she’s the patron saint of cooks doesn’t surprise me (after all, I did learn that she fed and housed Jesus) but a dragon slayer? It never crossed my mind; not until I came across the original 1931 edition of Joy of Cooking, the front cover of which features a stylized cut out of this redoubtable saint subduing the dragon Tarasconus.

When I first saw the black, blue and green image with its trinity of purse, mop and dinner plate, I asked myself, “dragons in the culinary world? Who needs the aid of a dragon slayer when you’ve got a kitchen?” But further investigation revealed that Irma S. Rombauer faced formidable dragons as she compiled and wrote Joy. Only a year before Rombauer began working on her cookbook her husband committed suicide. Navigating her way through such grief and in doing so producing one of the most influential English cookbooks in the world is definitely dragon slaying activity.

But what of my dragons? As I cast about through the decades of my cooking, I could find none. My culinary life has advanced apace from when I first made unbaked cookies from the Five Roses Cookbook at age eight to now. I’ve had a few bumps, like adding rice to those cookies instead of coconut, some setbacks—I’ve never been able to make Chelsea buns to my satisfaction—but I could find nothing that approximated a dragon. But as my mind wandered back to St. Martha, I wondered what else she had kept at bay in that wood along the River Rhone between Arles and Avignon. Might there not have been other ophidian terrors a-slither that she repelled with her centenary of daily prayers. Perhaps, I thought, Martha has not so much slain my culinary dragons as warded them off before they reached me. What if, I asked myself, I had come from a family that cared little about food; that couldn’t, or worse, didn’t care to differentiate between kraft dinner and the homemade Bothwell cheese sauce that slathered the macaroni we ate? What if food—stories of food, preparation of food, production of food, consumption of food—hadn’t been an enduringly ubiquitous presence in my family, an ethos that continually enveloped me? The culture of food in which I was formed is without a doubt the bedrock on which I have cultivated my cookery. A life without it is a thought too dragonesque to contemplate!

Thank you St. Martha.





(A word on images. The first image is "Christ in the House of Mary and Martha" by Vincenzo Campi. The bottom two? I don't know their provenance other than the internet.)

with visions of ... olives (my apologies to john wesley)

I’ve studied religion long enough to know that grocery stores are not the usual places for out-of-body experiences. But then Nasr Foods was not an ordinary grocery store. The array of olive offerings in the store alone could have induced rapture. Add to that the racks of pita, the stuffed eggplants, the bins of pistachios and dates, the mounds of parsley, mint and dill, the flats of olive oil and could you not say that this was heaven?

A few years before moving to Toronto I visited the Middle East and there were many memorable food moments I won’t forget: freshly picked figs bought from a roadside stand; baklava, namoura and syrup sticky fingers; picnicking in the long windy grasses of the ruined 5th century martyrolium of St. Simeon the Stylite; arak—never again; sitting down to a simple but oddly elegant breakfast of pita, salty cheese, pommelo jam, olives and a pot of tea; feeding a cerebral palsied girl in Cairo’s Garbage City, wiping clean her guava-ed lips, sharing a smile. The memory of all this combined with the culinary prospects awaiting me left me more than a little heady on my first visit to Nasr Foods. And in this astonishing bafflement of possibility a pervasive, long ago childhood memory of belonging strangely and unexpectedly warmed my heart. I was being pulled back to a moment in my childhood, a six, seven year old girl sitting near the very front of the long, narrow building that was the Mennonite church I grew up in. I had lived in Toronto for a few months, feeling wretchedly alone with no visible prospects of this changing but in that heart-warmed moment—the stunning assortment of olives completely forgotten—I knew with an unshakable certainty that the big, overwhelming city of Toronto could—and would—one day be home.

I came to the childhood memory of belonging through an unlikely route that afternoon in Nasr Foods. On one of my trips to the Middle East I had the rare opportunity to visit a large Damascan mosque. On that Friday morning the women of the group I was with were escorted by the Imam’s daughter-in-law up two flights of stairs to the area reserved for female worshippers. We entered a room filled with thousands of hijabed women and as we made our way to the front I felt myself effortlessly melting into the surrounding sea of black, embraced by an overwhelming sense of belonging. I knew this space; I had been formed in such a space. I no longer knew whether I was seeing women veiled in black hijabs or whether I was seeing the black kerchiefed, darkly dressed women of my childhood church, my grandmothers and women of their generation, who filled the benches immediately behind where I, the six year old girl was sitting, surrounding me, watching over me as only matriarchs can.

I began my life in that Mennonite church in my mother’s arms, I presume, but I have no memory of that. In my earliest recollection I am sitting with my father on the men’s side (my mother being in the nursery caring for my younger brother). I remember nuzzling up to my father, rubbing my hand across his rough, bristly cheek. I remember counting the ceiling tiles, so far above that I quickly lost my bearings in the maze of stained white squares, I remember pulling his arm towards me to look at his watch, waiting for him to point out the minutes remaining. But it wasn’t many years before I left my father’s side and joined my older sister across the aisle. We sat at the very front, which is where young girls sat, safely lodged between the watchful eyes of the ministers looking out over the congregation and the rows of older women behind us who kept one ear cocked for any untoward rustlings while they listened to the droning sermon with the other. Behind my grandmothers sat women my mother’s age, some in black kerchiefs, others, like my mother, donning a more modern hat. Behind my mother and her peers sat a younger generation of married women, and at the very back, the teenage girls. Across the aisle this structured pattern of place was repeated among the boys and men. Sitting up at the front I had no reason to doubt that in a few years I would move to the back of the church and begin the inevitable move forward, through the life roles offered women in that community. What I was and what I would become were known, I had a place, I belonged.

It might have been the hijabed women who were filling their carts, it might have been the Arabic being spoken all around me, it might have been the memory of figs and guavas, maybe it was the olives. But whatever it was that afternoon in Nasr Foods that pulled me back into those segregated spaces of black clad women, my heart warming vision enticed me with its promise of belonging. I had never before been as lonely as I was during my first months in Toronto and I welcomed the proffered reassurance. After a decade of living in Toronto this big city has become home just as I foresaw but I am still lonely, sometimes as intensely as when I first discovered Nasr Foods. Other times my friendships, commitments, activities crowd out the loneliness. But the loneliness always returns.

In my grimmest moments Nasr Foods has been one of my truest companions. I have returned again and again to its aisles, hauled more bags of groceries from that store than imaginable, cooked yet another new recipe until Middle Eastern cooking has taken pride of place in my culinary pursuits: eggplants stuffed with garlic cloves, tomatoes and parsley in the legendary dish Imam Bayildi; Circassian chicken in paprika-laced walnut sauce; a dazzle of green olives, walnuts, scallions, pomegranate seeds mixed in a salad; the pureed simplicity of fava beans, olive oil, lemon and dill—there was no end to what was possible when the well-stocked shelves of Nasr Foods were at my disposal. But my Nasr Foods-inspired cooking has not only been a matter of filling lonely hours, though it has done that. The culinary possibilities it encouraged often lured me away from my loneliness, inviting me to expand and foster, and then to share my creativity. As my creativity deepened and broadened, so did I, grounding me in the knowledge that I belong because of all that I am and not only because there are belonging structures that hold me cocooned between ministers and grandmothers. It was after all as a teenager that I boldly and defiantly went to sit on the boy’s side no longer willing to be defined by those structures.

From time to time in my loneliness I return to my childhood memory. I wonder at times whether the memory keeps me tethered to an impossible belonging, to a yearning for a world that no longer exists or even whether the familiarity of my loneliness cocoons me now as securely as my grandmothers once did. Other times, however, I know my childhood memory sustains me, drawing me back into the core of my being, reminding me that belonging matters, that to be lonely is to be diminished. If this knowledge is a gift--as I hope it is--it is a tender and vexingly fragile promise that the gods have given me.

The last time I saw Nasr Foods it had closed, gone bankrupt, its windows papered over. Driving down Lawrence Avenue more recently I noticed that another Middle Eastern grocery store has opened up at that location but I have no desire to go there. I do miss the olives though, terribly, especially the Syrian ones, their flesh hard and bitter, pungent with the flavour of thyme.

(I have wanted to write about my experience in Nasr Foods for many years but it was not until March when I read Lonely: Learning to Live With Solitude by Emily White that I found the words--and courage--to write this posting.)

Breakfast on Sabinal IV: papaya and hot chocolate

I never actually had papaya and hot chocolate for breakfast on Sabinal. I had it at Restaurant Constantino at the corner of Calle Minerva and Avenida Benito Juarez in the grid of dusty grey streets that makes up the Chihuahuan desert city of Nuevo Casas Grandes. Constantino is not a restaurant I'd highly recommend; a little bit dumpy, tables and chairs sprawled messily throughout the room. Nor would I vouch for the food except for the lime-soured papaya and the frothy hot chocolate.

Sabinal is a small isolated Mennonite colony in northern Mexico connected to Nuevo Casas Grandes by an abandoned railroad bed-turned-shale covered road which lurches and bumps through endless miles of scrub bushes; creosote and mesquite, prickly pear and yucca lost in the barren beautiful desert of sky and mountains. Sabinal Mennonites resist modernization and its easing amenities including electricity and vehicles as they persist in the harshness of desert farming. Facing astronomical odds, a few prosper, most tenaciously hang on, and others abandon another failed cotton, onion or chili crop for a house trailer and a steady, albeit cash-under-the-table job in Texas.

I spent the cold, shivering month of February 2009 on Sabinal conducting ethnographic research and while there was generously hosted by the Klassen, Hiebert, Braun, Harder and Wall families. I joined them around their tables, I awkwardly climbed in and out of their buggies, I sat stiffly upright on a wooden church bench listening to the singing of a hundred Old Colony Mennonites worrying that my skirt was too short. I laughed with three-year-old Henry as I pushed him around and around his grandmother’s yard on a scooter. I accompanied Anna Braun to the pasture to bring the dairy herd home in the evening as she explained the eccentricity of a cow who insisted on sucking her own teets. I listened as Maria Harder sang Elvis Presley and Wilf Carter, songs she remembered from her youth in British Columbia. I heard stories of neighborly tensions, dogs poisoned, cows trampling gardens. I was invigorated and exhausted and marveled at my own tenuous and inadequate understanding of it all.

Near the end of my stay on Sabinal, I joined Susanna, Sarah and Margaret Klassen on a late night ride across the colony to village #7 to deliver a band saw blade that needed sharpening for the upcoming Klassen pig butchering. In spite of the glistening infinity of a galaxy of stars overhead and the orange haze of Ciudad Juárez’ million lights glowing in the distant northeastern sky, the night was blindingly black. The busyness of daily life had quieted on Sabinal, houses were darkened and most families were asleep. Reins in hand, Sarah deftly guided the horse through the darkness as she quizzed me about a train that could take me clear across a city all the while underground. I, on the other hand, was distracted, overwhelmed by the beauty of the black stillness, relieved to be miles away from the noise and lights of Toronto. In the lulling and languishing of our conversation, I knew this sky to be big enough to hold the intimacies of connection and the mutual misunderstandings of our different worlds, an expanse vast enough to embrace the happiness and courage, the discontentment, the sorrows, the exclusions, the grasping, the satisfactions and the worry, the predictability and the bewildering that I had witnessed as life on Sabinal.



Constitucion Oriente

During my month on Sabinal I periodically returned to Nuevo Casas Grandes to catch my breath. On those mornings when I disembarked from the bus that had brought me from Sabinal to Nuevo Casas Grandes, I stepped into a dreadedwelcomed solitude so different from the bustle of colony life. I was relieved to be away from the curious gaze of colony Mennonites and even more relieved to shed the obligation of my own ethnographic curiosity. I anticipated sorting through my Sabinal-intense thoughts but I shrank from the trepidating loneliness of having no one to share those thoughts with. Arriving early enough for a second breakfast I usually headed up Constitución Poniente, away from the cluster of Sabinal Mennonites who had traveled with me, walked as far as Minerva and then inevitably turned in to Restaurant Constantino.

A breakfast of papaya and hot chocolate does not register as one of Mexico’s culinary wonders. The dry brown winterness of Nuevo Casas Grandes is a long, long way from Mexico’s culinary capital, Oaxaca, where chefs of Pilar Cabrera fame pestle a thousand richnesses—mulatos, pasillas, anchos, walnuts, sesame seeds, pine nuts, pepitas, all spice, cinnamon, plantain, raisins, pears, prunes, tomatillos, garlic, chocolate, panela—into the thick sticky moles that make that state famous. Nothing Nuevo Casas Grandes has on offer even begins to approach the seven-hued splendors of Oaxaca’s moles. I enjoyed the bacon-wrapped, cheese-stuffed jalapeños at a seafood joint downtown, the creamed chili burritos from a stand crowded into the corner of a supermarket and tortilla soup in the restaurant of Villa Colonial hotel but Nuevo Casas Grandes is no culinary mecca. Its fare is what you would expect in a dusty northern town, simple flavors that make only modest demands on the palate. Yet there is a time and place for everything, even the unpretentious, ordinary, sometimes mediocre food of Nuevo Casas Grandes. On those cold February mornings when I stepped off the bus I had a sky full of complexities to contemplate so what in heaven’s name would I have done with a dish of mole negro oaxaqueño or mancha manteles de cerdo? No, I needed a palated quietude for breakfast. I was content with papaya and hot chocolate, a plate of effortless simplicity set down in front of me, a mug of warming smoothness to grasp in my hands.


mancha manteles de cerdo - pork table cloth stainer

Breakfast on Sabinal III: milking sunrise

Breakfast on Sabinal II: watch what you say

I should not have said “oatmeal.” I should have been evasive, I should have hemmed and hawed, "oh, different things, sometimes this, sometimes that." But I didn't. I said I usually ate oatmeal for breakfast. I've never liked oatmeal that much but I started eating it regularly about two years ago; healthier than boxed cereal and more substantial than toast. I've learned to cook it in such a way that I can enjoy it. I use small granular Scottish oats—rather than rolled—mixed with Red River Cereal to lessen the sliminess, cooked in milk rather than water for a more full-bodied flavor. This is the only way I can enjoy oatmeal. So I should have known better than to say “oatmeal.” Inevitably, the next morning while everyone else ate cookies and bread, I was served oatmeal, large undercooked flakes of rolled oats in a thin watery goo. But I filled my bowl, added some milk, a spoon of sugar and ate the porridge. I expressed my thanks to my host and sighed with relief as I got up from the table.

The next morning I crawled out of bed before the sun rose as I had to catch the bus back to Nuevo Casas Grandes. Apart from my host who was going to take me to the bus, the entire household was still asleep. After I had completed my morning ablutions and packed my bag, I sat down at the table laid out for me. By now the sky was beginning to glow with the morning light, but the room where I sat was still dark. I could just make out the pot I had seen yesterday so I knew I was being served oatmeal again. I lifted a spoonful to my mouth and did so with a certain lightness. I could manage another bowl of oatmeal on this my last morning on Sabinal. I slid the porridge into my mouth; cold, solid, leftover from yesterday! All I could do was wash each spoonful down with a gulp of coffee and hope that the darkness covered my dismayed grimace. I emptied the bowl, expressed my thanks and climbed into the buggy with relief.

breakfast on Sabinal I: can there be breakfast on Sabinal without coffee?

On those frigid February mornings as a cold stillness dawns, what else is one to do but greedily slurp up gulping mouthfuls of coffee filling every inch of the body?

Many mornings I stood in the cold of a desert winter watching the Klassens, the Hieberts, the Harders milk their cows, feed their calves, release their squawking chickens for the day. It wasn't until the cows had been let out to pasture, the milk cans wheeled to the street to be picked up by the milk wagon later that morning and everyone washed and cleaned of barn smells that breakfast was served. A prayer was silently shared and then breakfast began, cookies, big flat cookies with marshmallow and chocolate topping, soft white buns--Tweeback, a pat of butter, no make that two pats and, of course, coffee. Cups were filled with boiling water, instant coffee spooned in followed by some creamer and then cold water added to cool it off. When everyone was satiated another silent prayer was shared and the busyness of the day could begin.

Most Mennonites on Sabinal are dairy farmers and have been for generations, ever since their fore-parents left Saskatchewan for Durango with their dairy herds in tow nearly a century ago. Every family I visited had a herd of cows. A fortunate few could afford milking machines but most families milked their cows by hand twice daily. Herds were regularly rotated on the fragile pastures that have been claimed from the Chihuahuan desert and which had to be carefully irrigated to be sustained. This intensity of never-ending dairy labor supplies the colony's two cheese factories with all the milk needed to produce the sought-after Mexican specialty, queso menonita. Sabinal cheese is particularly coveted because Sabinal is the only Mennonite colony in the Nuevo Casas Grandes area that does not use additives in its cheese.

Queso menonita is not the only dairy delight that Sabinal Mennonites know how produce and which they savor. Slices of soft unripened cheese pressed in the early hours of the morning, Brocke—pieces of Tweeback dunked in coat-your-lips-creamy curds, feather-light cottage cheese mounded onto Tweeback; lavish clottings of whipped cream atop cream pie. These are just the beginnings of the possibilities that can enhance a breakfast if you own a dairy herd. Without a doubt, Sabinal Mennonites have dairy in their bones. And so every morning as I spooned instant creamer into my instant coffee I marveled that a colony full of people who revel in consuming dairy in its many extravagances and for whom caressing a swollen udder is next to godliness, if not godliness itself, has collectively forgotten the pleasure of pouring thick sweet cream into its coffee and has resorted to syrupy-sweet, oily powder as a substitute. Surely with more than a thousand Holsteins within the fifty square kilometers that make up Sabinal there must at least one family that still drinks its coffee with cream, but I never had the good fortune to share a breakfast with that elusive family.

And then one morning it all made sense. Eating breakfast with the Klassen family, I watched first Jacob, and then his sister Susanna take a cookie from the bowl, one of those big marshmallow chocolate orbs, reach over to pull the butter dish closer and then slice a thick, creamy slab of golden goodness from the pat. I watched as they cut into the butter once again and then as they slid the butter-cum-cheese from their knives onto their cookies. In an instant I understood. This is no insipid, super-market-bland anemic paste that passes as butter where I come from. This is butter in all its dairy splendor, potent with the sharpness of soured cream, a sumptuous mouthful that lingers on the taste of pasture. This is the raison d'etre that sustains the ongoing grind of milking, day upon day, morning and evening, in the frosty winter or the blistering forty degree heat of a desert summer. This is an entire week's carefully hoarded accumulation of cream and I would dare to ask for some cream for my coffee?

of ice rinks and orange crush

in my deaconship with respect to the other, I think more than I can grasp.

The skating shack in Blumenort was a rough structure, two rooms with plywood walls in the middle of which banged a noisome furnace meant to warm us when the cold bit through our socks and skates. Many the time have I laboriously tied up my skates in the girl's change room or cried tears of frozen pain in the bumble of knotted lacing, shivering as close to the furnace as I dared, kept back by the aura of older girls crowding the warmest spots.

In February, when the feeble warmth of the sun began to crack the stronghold of winter, Blumenort held its annual Family Day. Who cared about the games, skating, hockey, broomball, coke drinking contests which took place on that day. I was too young to participate in most of those activities anyway. For me those rough plywood rooms evoke only one memory of that day worth recalling: being handed a sweetly glazed doughnut along with a bottle of orange crush. There were big flat cardboard boxes filled with doughnuts from Don's Bakery and cases of orange crush stacked on the floor, but I, in my five-year-old world knew only the wonder of the doughnut and orange crush that was my very own.

I'd like to think that it was this near iconic doughnut and orange crush moment that inspired the game we played called Buddul, Buddul, Buddul (hold a bottle of orange crush upside down and listen to it buddul) but more probably it was the collective imagination of a group of cousins. Most of the players in the game took the role of orange crush bottle but one child was designated the farmer and another the thief. The farmer started off the game by filling all his bottles with orange crush and then tightly capping them. At the top of the lawn, we, the now full orange crush bottles stood. The whistling farmer walked away around the corner of the house in pursuit of a much deserved coffee break (might he have been getting himself a doughnut?) as the nefarious thief crept up to the bottles from around the other corner. Furtively he snapped the lids off all the bottles with his bottle opener then rudely pushed them over. Gleefully, we, the bottles, rolled down the gently sloping front lawn, buddul, buddul, buddul-ing out the orange crush as the farmer frantically dashed back to save whatever he could of his fast emptying bottles turned giggling, hold-your-stomach-laughing children.

Empty pop bottles, orange crush or otherwise, were a treasured find. We'd amble along the streets of Blumenort--all five of them--looking for discarded pop bottles. At the far end of Blumenort near the #12 highway was where we'd often find them, lying in the long grass of the ditches. We knew they were here, away from the nestle of houses where my family lived, because this is where strangers would dare to throw bottles out of their car windows as they drove by. For every bottle we found we got two cents at the store and for two cents you could buy one bazooka bubble gum. When we'd collected enough bottles, two, three if we were lucky, we'd walk to the store and trade in our glass for gum. Then we'd share the gum around, laugh at the comics and teach each other how to blow big, pink bubbles.

But to return to the skating shack from my ramble through orange crushed memories. The skating shack holds more than the child-wonder pleasure of a doughnut and orange crush. One Sunday afternoon as I skated back and forth and around the rink I watched a gray-haired, ashen-faced man stumbling, clinging to the side boards as he worked to learn to skate. After making it painstakingly a quarter of the way around the rink he abandoned his efforts and returned to the warmth of the shack. I was ashamed for him, I pitied him, I marveled that a grown man could not skate. Circling on the ice that winter day in my childhood I recognized him as the father of one of my classmates and felt a prick of dis-ease as I watched him, vaguely aware that his was a world that my warmth-filled, doughnut-happy one couldn't grasp. Part of my inability to understand was of course because I was a child and two decades later when I heard that he had died on a park bench in Toronto I understood better what mental illness and single parenting might have meant for this man and I now recognize that my ten-year-old self noticed something of this dislocation in his skating attempt even while I passed judgment.

I now live in Toronto, rarely drink orange crush, and futilely wish that Tim Hortons would make doughnuts like Don's Bakery used to. The skating shack and rink are often no more than dim memories for me, but they are memories I honour. They pull me into warmth and security yet they simultaneously conjure up disorientation and dislocation. It is not the simplicity of a child's world that I reach back to, for my memories remind me that it wasn't simple--how possibly can a jumble of frozen tears, happy games, uneasy judgment, excited wonder and shameful pity be labled "simple?" I reach back because I recognize a continuity between that jumble and what my life has now become. Without doubt older, most times wiser, but still unable to grasp the perplexing ambiguities of wonder and joy, shame and pity, friendship and alienation that have come my way.

(the opening quotation is from Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 151)

a pot of borscht

In January, 2005 my sister Frances died of multiple myeloma. The two years of her illness were often emotionally grueling for me; I watched her fight for her life with a rawness that can only come from dying, something almost too difficult to endure. Caring for her physically left me equally exhausted. But the relief that her death brought was only in exchange for losing her completely. My grief was slow, sullen and brooding. Then in November my brother Harold died unexpectedly. The gray winter of Toronto wore on as I wandered through my grief. Truth be told, I had no enthusiasm to sort out the pain of my losses. My pervasive loneliness only intensified as a sad dullness crept in for which I had no antidote.

That winter and spring as I remembered the anniversary of my sister's death and still couldn't comprehend my brother's, I found solace in an unlikely place, a palliative care hospice where once a week I prepared meals for its residents.

At the hospice Death was imminently present. Every Saturday morning as I stepped into the front door I saw another candle burning in memory of a resident who had died in the previous twenty four hours. Nor was my own grief absent; I was reminded of Frances and Harold on every visit. But to my surprise, my grief rarely overwhelmed me. When it was present with me in the kitchen, as it so often was, it became just one grief among the many that filled the house. I stood behind the kitchen cabinet and saw tenderness in the eyes of Stuart as he described the prayer he said at the death bed of his fellow resident. I sat at the table and recognized long lost nostalgia about logging in northern Ontario in Albert's voice as he ate the pancakes I had fried. I cut up an orange for Glenda as she described her chemo. I handed Violet a cup of milk as I listened with sadness to her rambling medication-induced fear of abandonment.

But grief is not gloom. In The House's bright, airy kitchen I cooked pots of soup, layered dishes of casseroles and tossed up salads. But not without frustration. Budgetary constraints ensured that the kitchen at the hospice was never well stocked so I had to be creative with what little there was. When I arrived on Saturday morning and opened the fridge to see what my options were for the day, I did so with some hesitation. I developed a little mantra that assisted me in opening the fridge with anticipation rather than dread: "will it be carrots, potatoes and onions, or will it be potatoes, carrots and onions? Oh joy, it's onions, carrots and potatoes." One Saturday I arrived to find a large cabbage in the fridge. Borscht was my first and only thought. But quickly my mind turned to all the ingredients that would not be available. Beets--I'd never yet seen beets at The House. Beef for stock--if I were lucky I'd find a cut of reduced-to-sell-freezer-burned meat. Fresh herbs--not likely. Green pepper--well, I could forgo that without compromising the borscht too much. I feebly pulled out my mantra--carrots sigh potatoes sigh onions--to rekindle my enthusiasm when Naomi stepped into the kitchen. She asked, as she usually did, "what you making?" To my pessimistic, "borscht, if I can find the ingredients," her whole body responded with anticipation, "I love borscht, Kerry." She immediately announced that she would buy sour cream for the borscht on her walk that morning. My enthusiasm now rekindled, I added parsley to her shopping list.

Now with the welcome obligation of having to please at least one person, I began scrounging through the cupboards, the freezer and the storage area for whatever I could find. The cupboard yielded a tin of tomatoes, I picked off every feather of dill from the herb pot on the deck, my forage through the freezer turned up a package of beef, freezer burned to be sure, and to my amazement I found beets in the storage room which another volunteer had donated from his garden.

As I was shredding the cabbage and cooking the beef, Roman arrived in the kitchen. Well enough to have an appetite, he frequently came to inspect what I was cooking for lunch. He wanted to know exactly how I was going to make the borscht. Ukrainian by birth, Roman had a decided opinion about borscht, as he had about most things, and he explained the variations between Polish, Hungarian--Hungarian borscht, I was told, is a thin broth of pureed vegetables--and Ukrainian borschts. Mennonite borscht, however, stumped him. When I described my borscht variation he responded by assuring me that it wouldn't be as good as his mother's. The upshot of our vigorous discussion was my concession that undoubtedly I would not be able to make borscht as good as his mother had but that I would make it every bit as good as my mother had made it.

Several residents felt well enough to eat lunch that day and some staff joined us as well. The table was full; six or seven people animated by a pot of soup. Naomi generously shared her sour cream; Roman continued on in his role of self-proclaimed borscht expert. Just a pot of borscht--onions, carrots and potatoes cooked up with a few other ingredients--but somehow, gently, it held my grief.

will that be Cadillac bread or a Ford LTD loaf?

I grew up in a household where my mother baked bread every Saturday. As a teenager I was eager to learn the technique of kneading a yeast dough and with my mother's skilled experience on the one hand and a drawerful of recipe books on the other-Fleischman's Yeast being a favorite-I soon learned the art of bread making. Unlike my mother who had the responsibility of feeding a large family, my bread baking has nearly always been recreational. But one summer I, together with three other women, ambitiously decided to fill a table with our baking at the local Thursday farmer's market. We worked hard. Hilda baked dozens of the softest white buns imaginable, wild rice bread and granola. Phyllis boiled up several batches of bagels in addition to baking herbed bread. Frances made scones, French bread and also contributed cut flowers from her perennial garden. I baked rye bread, whole wheat bread and cinnamon bread along with apple and peach pies. I also sold bundles of dill, parsley, summer savory and sorrel. Several times that summer I heaved and hauled home heavy 20 kilo sacks of organic flour from Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company in Winnipeg. The coarse stone-ground texture and freshness of their milled-daily, prairie-grown, hard spring cadillac wheat flour resulted in loaves of bread where each crunch-filled bite had an intense aromatic flavor. (That's why I stubbornly carry back with me to Toronto Tall Grass Prairie's flour; the bread I have baked using organic flour from several mills in Ontario has never yet been as good as the loaves I made for the farmer's market that summer.)

I don't know how the other women organized their baking, but I worked out a routine that filled every minute of my Thursday. My work actually began earlier in the week on Monday or Tuesday when I made pies and then froze them. Wednesday evening I mixed the whole wheat dough and the rye dough and set them in the fridge to rise overnight. Too early Thursday morning I removed all the pies from the freezer and the doughs from the fridge. I then kneaded the dough for the cinnamon bread by which time the whole wheat and rye doughs were ready to be shaped and put on the pans. They baked while the cinnamon bread continued proofing. When the whole wheat and rye loaves were baked and cooling on the rack, the cinnamon breads went into the oven. Next into the oven were the pies. All my baking had to be completed by 2 p.m. as I still had an hour's commute to my herb garden where the herbs had to be cut, cleaned and bundled and then onto the farmer's market. Here the table had to be set up and all the baking arranged, last minute bagging and pricing to attend to. At 4 o'clock, exhausted by the many hours of work behind me, I sat down to wait for the customers. They always came. What satisfaction I derived from the man who returned a second week to buy another peach pie even though he was the only family member who liked peach pie. I even enjoyed the woman who haggled for a 50 cent discount on her bread. In spite of the frazzled worry of coordinating rising doughs with limited oven space and the headache and tired shoulders that a Thursday inevitably brought on, I enjoyed that summer of baking and selling. I have to admit though that my first batch of rye bread was a complete failure. The loaves were hard and dry, flat as a pancake. I consoled myself with the fact that rye flour, in particular stone ground rye flour, is difficult to work with. Fortunately I learned quickly and by the second week I placed my anise rye loaves with their orange butter glaze proudly alongside my other breads.

For three months that summer we were part of a parking lot of vendors: an apiarist with that creamy-smooth sweet clover honey that only Manitoba bees can produce, several vegetable farmers, some craft tables, a Winnipeg bakery sold its bread and rolls, one family filled a table with home canning. The farmer's market was small and had only been in operation a few years when we joined. It had less than twenty vendors if I remember correctly but it was the beginning of a burgeoning farmer's market that has now grown to more than forty vendors selling strawberries, raspberries and corn in season, free-range chickens, home made egg noodles, sausages, vegetables, baked goods, where-else-than-in-Manitoba Icelandic baking and much more. Our table of baked goods is undoubtedly long forgotten in the collective memory of the community (if it was ever there to begin with) but I am pleased that I could contribute in some way to the ongoing vitality of that local farmer's market.

But I have not yet mentioned the LTD Ford station wagon-the dark blue one-have I? It pulled onto the pavement about the same time I did. Like my vehicle, it too was loaded with bread. That is where the similarity ended! Unloading the back of their station wagon the vendors began stuffing their many-tiered metal rack with dozens and dozens of loaves of bread, a seemingly endless supply of straight-from-the-freezer, uprightly uniform, square bread machine loaves, many of them burned on top. My jaw dropped the first time I saw the rack of burned bread. I was outraged when the station wagon returned the second week. I sputtered in disbelief the third week the vendors set up their rack. By the fourth week I was speechless. They sold cheap and fast (no wonder our 50 cent cheapskate expected a discount!) and in spite of all my inward rantings and ravings they were always the first to sell out. With their rack emptied of the last loaf they packed up and headed home, supposedly to begin their fill-the-freezer regime for next week's market.

I had been baking bread for many years by that summer and eventually a sense of calmed reason tempered my outrage. Had my hands not learned to enjoy the perfect smoothness of a soft white dough, could they not manage a delicately sticky rye dough? Were they not able to recognize when the tired ache of kneading had paid off and it was time to proof the dough? Had they not gently indented countless doughs testing for springiness and then knocked them back for further rising? Were they not able to lift a dough out of its kneading bowl to pinch, press or roll into a loaf? Was there not an organic symbiosis between my hands and the doughs I had kneaded, a bread intuition that reached back through my mother and my grandmother that no amount of "measure the flour-flick a switch-sit back and wait" bread machine bread could rival? With hands like mine, why fret? Why not just sit back, watch the flurry of activity across the parking lot and smugly, knowingly smile?

I say tomato

Many years ago in my undergraduate days I took a course in Children's Lit. I remember little from this course except that it was the most unpleasant class I have ever been a part of. Although I have long forgotten the details of the mistrust, I do remember that the students were unanimously antagonistic towards the professor. It started in the first hour and culminated in the final class when the professor expected us to disregard the university generated course evaluation forms normally distributed and write out our assessment on a piece of paper. We all submitted a comment, but most of the students I'm sure wrote a bland "good course" on their review. I was naive enough to believe the professor's promise that whatever was written would not affect our grade. This was the closest I have ever come to failing a course! Apart from the barbs of antagonism that flew back and forth across the classroom that year, I also remember an apply poem, regrettably the title and poet long forgotten. It consisted entirely and only of varieties of apples. It took only a minute to read the poem, but I was mesmerized as variety after variety of apple skipped and tumbled from the professor's lips. Not in possession of the greatest interpersonal skills to be sure, but that professor knew how to read poetry!

This summer a friend introduced me to The Seed Savers Exchange and Amy Goldman's Heirloom Tomatoes. I spent hours examining pictures of heirloom tomato varieties, read about them, studied their properties. Ever interested in the history of food, I questioned my mother and aunt about my grandparents' gardens. I researched the varieties of tomatoes my grandparents might have grown in the 30's and 40's with the help of my sister who uncovered seed catalogues in the archival collections of MacFayden and McKenzie Seed Companies. As my tomato-variety knowledge increased, my memory retrieved that long ago poem and I couldn't help but try my hand at variety poeming.

Red Velvet, White Beauty
Ruffled Yellow, First Lady

Lemon Boy, Ida Gold
Bonny Best, Juliet

Red Fig, Yellow Currant
Brown Berry, Black Plum

Old Brook, Long Tom
Moon Glow, Nebraska Wedding

Cream Sausage, Amish Cherry
Elberta Girl, Redfield Beauty

Gold Nugget, Gold Rush
Mule Team, Farthest North

My poetic skills are fledgling at best, but in my culinary fantastic world I create a tomato-y splendor inspired by each couplet. Picture them with me.

• A bowl of thrice-strained gazpacho topped with rosemary twists and marscapone gelati, elegant and sophisticated like a ballroom lady.

• Silken rose vodka sauce spooned over a bed of nutmeg parmesan garganelli like a gigolo effortlessly, smoothly gliding from woman to woman.

• A pot of tomato chutney cooked up with ginger, garlic, raisins and almonds, sweet, sticky, like jam.

• Eggs, sausages and tomatoes in a butter greasy cast iron griddle in this happier version of Brokeback Mountain.

• A tureen of hearty tomato beef and barley soup, a loaf of bread, a pat of butter.

• Another fry-up, but I'll add a mug of bitter, disappointing camp coffee to the picture; the first gleam of gold almost forgotten in this cold, cold Yukon.

Now all I need are friends to help me cook and a food photographer to document our creations. What a food essay that would be!

How can I possibly explain waudikjs puddul?

You might recognize puddul as a cognate of the English word "puddle"; waudikj means "whey." Prosaically translated these Low German words mean "puddle of whey." Now let me tell you what they really mean!

I grew up on the edge of the small Mennonite village of Blumenort in rural Manitoba. Across the street from our house was an alfalfa field and on the far side of the field was a creek. A gentle slope rose from the creek and at the top of that ever so slight undulation was a hatchery. Before the hatchery was built, much before my time, the Mennonite farmers of the area operated a dairy co-operative at that location where they produced cheese and butter. The families in the co-operative, including my mother's family, delivered their milk to the factory in eight-gallon milk cans and returned home with them full of whey; nutrient-rich feed for their pigs to mix with their hash. But even after all the co-op farmers had collected their share of the whey, the cheese factory still did not know how to dispose of all the excess whey so it was left to drain out the back, down the little hill where it collected in small pools and eventually ran into the creek, the cloudy dribble of whey merging with the shallow flowing water of the creek. In the winter the whey froze long before it reached the creek, building up for a smelly, mucky spring when the swollen waters carried all the mess away. That was the 1940s, the Blumenort waudikjs puddul in all its putrid murky milkiness.

The cheese factory closed in the fifties in the wake of milk quotas, centralized milk processing dairies and modernization more generally. Yet the cheese factory in Blumenort is not entirely forgotten. Last summer, together with my aunt and mother, I sat looking out the front window of my mother's house watching the construction of a new housing development across the street. Mostly we commented on the ugliness of it all: the mess, the mud-packed street, the construction garbage, the loss of an expansive view. The alfalfa field had become a row of partially-constructed, generic-looking stuccoed houses. Sitting with my aunt and mother, nostalgia for the beauty of blooming alfalfa, the plank bridge I crossed on my way to and from school, the smell of poplar mulch in the copse at the edge of the field left me disgruntled and resentful towards the small-minded, money-hungry developers who cared little for the natural habitat of the birds, bugs, rabbits and mice that lived in that field and even less for my nostalgia. To add insult to the injury of suburbia invading my memories, the developers had hired a bulldozer to damn the creek in order to create a small pond backing the development. The creek as I had known it with its bullrushes and grass-covered banks where meadow larks sang Fritz, Fraunz, kjielkje supp [Fritz, Frank, noodle soup] and red winged black birds chirped and warbled had been transformed into a landscaped pond designed to add some suburban sophistication to the rather hickish little prairie town I grew up in. Eventually the pond will fill up with bullrushes, another generation of red winged black birds will build their nests, it's possible frogs will again croak long into the night. The generic row of houses will become a tree-lined street with people calling "home" the stucco houses fronted by meticulously mown grass and brightly colored flowers. Oakdale Drive will look much like the other pretty streets of Blumenort. But I? I would rather have an alfalfa field and a creek.

Like me, my aunt could see little beauty in the mucked up field across the street, pond included. Unlike me, however, my aunt is not prone to nostalgia, or perhaps it presents itself in her wry sense of humor. Her first objection to the pond: the standing water would only serve as a breeding ground for mosquitoes and heaven knows Manitoba does not need more mosquitoes! But more damning, my aunt remembers. Before the bulldozers dug the basements, dump trucks brought in back fill and building crews left their pink insulation wrappings to blow in the wind, even before I ran through the blooming alfalfa kite string in hand, there was a cheese factory! In her mind's eye, my aunt saw the dribble of collected whey, inhaled the smell of the melting mush of the spring's thaw. Matter-of-factly, wearing an almost straight face, slightly sarcastic, definitely sardonic, she pronounced her judgement on the pond: waudikjs puddul!


(photo credits: Douglas Fast)