When I think about my father, he is standing in the kitchen, gazing into space. On the counter are all the ingredients for dinner, chopped and ready in neat piles. A cookbook is propped on its stand. His white hair is combed neatly to the side, and he’s wearing a brown-and-white checkered shirt tucked into a pair of wrinkled beige chinos. He has on ribbed socks and worn blue slippers, because he hasn’t left the house all day. He turns to me and says, “Hey, sweetheart.” His eyes look big and sad, magnified by his round glasses, but he smiles slightly. Then he sighs, sits down, picks up his book, and waits. Soon my mother will be home.
He told me once that he didn’t remember his parents ever talking at the dinner table. He then joked that, actually, he didn’t remember them talking at all. He grew up in nineteen-fifties Hudson, Ohio, and although he spoke longingly of summer trips to Szalay’s Farm for the finest sweet corn, or to Country Maid for its famed butter-pecan ice cream, in his own house there was little ceremony over the nightly meal. His mother would prepare things like sliced beef with boiled vegetables or spaghetti sauce over bread with iceberg lettuce, and they’d eat to the sound of the five-o’clock news. Then, even when it was still light out, his mother would go to bed.
Whenever my grandmother did use a recipe, maybe for a birthday cake or a barbecue, it would be from “The Joy of Cooking.” My dad had his own copy of the hefty thousand-page book, which still sits on the kitchen shelf of my childhood home, in Bath, England, gathering dust between cookbooks by Claudia Roden and Marcella Hazan. The once white cover is now stained and tattered, the word “Joy” standing out in cheerful red letters along the spine.
There are hundreds of pages in my dad’s copy that have never been touched. Recipes and instructions that speak of another age: a chapter on dinner-party etiquette, a fruit salad with mayonnaise, an illustrated two-page spread on how to skin a squirrel or boil a porcupine. But other pages are splattered from decades of use. Recipes for peanut-butter cookies, floating island, the roast ham we always had on Boxing Day. There are his own additions, symbolic of his life in England, where he moved in 1973: notes translating Fahrenheit to Celsius, a folded Guardian clipping of Felicity Cloake’s “How to Make Perfect Pumpkin Pie” from October, 2010. Dishes that gave his British children a taste of their heritage and brought back America when he missed it.
It was probably his first cookbook, but it was not what gave him a love of cooking. This he discovered during his third year at Harvard, after he moved into a twenty-four-person co-op where each member took a turn making dinner for the whole group. The budget was tight, and it was an all-day affair to get everything ready by 6:15 p.m., but he and his classmates found a new kind of eating culture at this communal table, far from the TV dinners and canned soups of their childhoods. Each night, they lingered over long, imaginative meals, the result of every cook trying to outdo the last. It was a setting in which my dad—a social-studies major with a buzzing brain, a weird sense of humor, and a newfound flair in the kitchen—thrived. People had always been drawn to him, and at the Jordan J co-op he became a beacon of cool, introducing his peers to bands, psychedelics, and radical politics. I can picture him standing at the head of a long table in his jeans, work shirt, and steel-rimmed glasses, a red bandanna tied around his wild brown curls. As he serves out the paella he’s spent the day cooking, his friend Jim shares his new theory on the mating call of a chorus frog. My dad invents another one, and the whole table erupts into stoned laughter.
He joined another collective household when he moved to London to do his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. It was made up of four couples, and they all bought a house together. Over the years, the couples swapped around, and the walls of the house began to buckle, quite literally. He met another L.S.E. radical who, like him, longed for a more normal life. Within weeks he proposed; she turned him down, though they were married by the next year. Some time later, my dad got a job teaching sociology at the University of Bath, and they bought a house. Two children quickly followed. With his new family to impress, he became even better in the kitchen. But there were troubles under the surface. Dragged down by Thatcherism and squeezed by domestic life, my dad coped by acting out, with affairs and heavy drinking. Some years in, he picked up a book by an American novelist who’d been at Harvard at the same time he had. He asked around, soon discovering that she was now living with two young children in Oxford, at the tail end of a messy divorce. My father wrote her a letter, first to say how much he’d been enjoying the snarky book reviews she’d been writing for the London Observer, then to inquire whether she’d ever read a book she actually liked. “Moby-Dick,” she lied. My mother had never read it.
It didn’t take long for them to fall in love. My mother had grown up in Istanbul, where her Brooklyn-born father taught physics. Neither of my parents could quite understand how they had ended up where they were. In the end, my dad left his wife and family and moved into the cottage my mom was renting in Oxford. He said that he didn’t want any more children. My mom believed that more children would bring their broken families together. I was born a year later. Before I turned one, she was pregnant with my sister Pandora, and we were living midway up one of Bath’s seven hills in a big, dilapidated stone house owned by two Eastern European cousins who may have been furniture smugglers. My mother was writing novels and picking up whatever newspaper work she could—but never quite enough to cover the bills.
Meanwhile, my dad took charge of the kitchen, flying us around the world with his recipes. He made dishes from the Middle East, Mexico, and Italy, the last to the soundtrack of UB40’s “Red Red Wine.” As the drink took over, there were crazed feasts that seemed to come from another planet, like the time he cooked us all spicy clam stew, followed by a pumpkin pie in a pumpkin. My mother and siblings and I grew accustomed to the unexpected. For by now my dad was spinning out. Whatever darkness had been growing inside him through his thirties had sprouted wings. Manic, relentless highs. Crushing suicidal lows. He started drinking beer at breakfast, staying up all night listening to “Harvest Moon” on a loop. There were days spent in bed, when he was unable to go to work. When I was five, he drove into a country field, attached a tube to the exhaust pipe, and tried to kill himself. My mom and his family helped get him into rehab. It did him some good, but, as soon as he got out, the university placed him on early medical retirement, and the furniture smugglers kicked us out. In a stroke of grace, my father found a cottage being sold for cheap by a debt-ridden crystal thrower escaping to Wales with her pet pig. This cottage was at the foot of Solsbury Hill, made famous by the Peter Gabriel song. Here my parents tried again to build a home.
For the next fifteen years, it was mainly my parents, Pandora, and me in a fixer-upper that never quite got fixed. My mother got a job teaching writing at a university eighty miles away, and during the academic year was away for half the week. My father was the one at home, braiding our hair, taking us to school, and cooking us around the world. My older siblings came and went, for weekends, long visits, or to the rescue of Pandora and me, becoming more like the parents that we wished ours could be. Sometimes, my dad slunk around the house like a ghost, saying only hello and good night. Other times, he couldn’t sleep or sit down, and made best friends with whoever happened to knock on the door or pass by the house.
In a letter, the poet Robert Lowell describes coming down from one of his manic episodes: “Gracelessly,” he writes. “Like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon. I am part of my family again.” My dad’s own ladder from the moon led back down to the kitchen table. However glumly he peeled the potatoes or manically he banged the pots, it was his way to redeem himself, to bring order to what he felt inside.
I don’t think that he could have ever imagined, during those joyous meals at his Harvard co-op, how important cooking would become for him. That instead of lectures or academic papers, his life would be held together by shopping lists, school pickups, and mealtimes. That making dinner for his family would be what got him through the day.
In spite of his inner chaos, or perhaps because of it, my dad was a man of strict routine. Each morning he woke up at five. He shaved, showered, made a pot of tea. He laid out two small bowls for my sister and me before starting on our packed lunches, methodically assembling the ham, lettuce, and mayonnaise between two slices of sweet white bread. Then he’d sit down to read a mystery novel, and, when the paper came, he’d read it through. At seven-thirty he turned on the news and oven, put in two chocolate muffins, and called upstairs.
“Wake up, girls!” he’d yell, his hoarse American voice piercing our sleep. The older my sister and I got, the longer we would ignore him. But always, when the muffins were almost ready, he’d poke his head around our bedroom door.
“Girls,” he would say, this time gently. “Time to get up.”
When we finally emerged, puffy-faced, our eyes still stuck together, the muffins were on plates by the bowls, and a glass milk bottle was on the counter ready for our cereal.
On a Saturday morning, he’d start thinking about his shopping list. The only time in my childhood I ever saw him using a computer was to print out that list. It was a two-page Word document, the first page laid out in three columns, in the order of the supermarket’s aisles, and the second with a chart running from Saturday to Friday, on which he planned the weekly meals.
My dad would get out his cookbooks and check the cupboard and the fridge, ticking and crossing off ingredients. Saturdays and Sundays were for trying out new recipes. A Claudia Roden tagine. A stew from the River Café cookbook. Or old favorites: steak with thin, crispy rosemary potatoes and a red wine sauce; Cumberland sausages with winey mushrooms and cheesy mashed potatoes. Sundays were for slow-cooked stews or some kind of ragù. Mondays were simple meals. Pasta with peas and ham, or roast-beef hash. From Tuesday to Thursday, my mother was usually away teaching, and so he cooked something that would last us until she returned.
Minestrone was what he made when my mother wasn’t there, and so for my sister and me, his lows were defined by it. We hated, hated, minestrone. Not that it tasted bad. Carrots, celery, macaroni pasta, in a beany broth. Parmesan grated on top. My mom hardly ever got a chance to have it, so it was one of her favorites. What was not to like? But, for Pandora and me, it was everything depressing about our life without her. It was dinners when my dad didn’t speak and the two of us bickered at the table. It was how he always cooked enough to last the week in case by Thursday he couldn’t get out of bed at all. We had a silent agreement never to invite friends over for dinner in the middle of the week.
If he’d been drinking, minestrone was his sour, stale smell and pale, glassy eyes. It was me and my sister trying to eat it as quickly as we could, the broth and boiled vegetables burning our tongues, him slurring as he ate, the oily soup glistening around the edges of his mouth. Often, we came home from school to find a whole pot of it on the stove, the kitchen clean and two bowls for us ready on the counter, dust motes catching the last of the sun through the skylight, him already drunk in bed.
I remember coming home from school one time to find a pot of minestrone still warm on the burner. I took the lid off to study the tiny cubes of carrots and celery, a week’s worth of food—every part of which he had ticked off on his list, gone to the supermarket to buy, and so carefully chopped. I could already taste it in my mouth, like the memory of old vomit. I lifted the pot and slopped the whole thing into the trash. Then my sister and I packed our bags and got back on the bus together, before parting ways to stay with different friends. My mother did what she could from afar, but it always disturbed me, how long those days without her felt, how quickly she could forgive him.
But the day would come when I opened the front door to the scent of slow-cooked onions or something roasting, a mellow jazz CD playing in the background, Bill Evans or Sarah Vaughan. My parents would be sitting at the kitchen table, talking through the day. By seven-thirty, the kitchen would be spotless, with dinner ready on the table. And somewhere through one of these delicious meals, I’d forget that I was angry.
Often, my dad’s moods would align with the seasons. After a long, glum winter of batch soups and stews, the first warm day of spring sent him reeling. He’d start stomping around, pointing and barking orders with glee. When summer came to Ohio, he said, you could smell the smoke and char of hamburger meat and frankfurters up and down the street. Perhaps that was a manic exaggeration, but, even so, on the first bright, warm day of the year, my dad would wheel out our grill and begin to rifle through his huge barbecue cookbook, reacquainting himself with the pages most browned and sticky with grease.
We spent most summers in Istanbul, where my mom’s family still lived. Here we had long, balmy meals outside, with lamb kebabs, couscous salads, and all kinds of dips presented in blue Turkish bowls. As the guests arrived—journalists, diplomats, historians, earthquake specialists, friends of my mother’s, or people my grandparents had picked up on the way—my dad would be standing at the grill, a nonalcoholic beer in one hand and in the other a Super Soaker water pistol that he’d fire at stray cats.
He organized a barbecue in Bath for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. It was meant to be a surprise party, but he’d bought the food early, and she’d noticed the mountains of burger buns spilling out of the kitchen cabinet. He’d invited a random group of neighbors, former colleagues, and friends of friends—people my mother said should never be in the same room together. We were in the middle of a heat wave. He told everyone that lunch would be served at one o’clock and then spent the morning pacing around, gardening, and cleaning out cupboards. At twelve-thirty, nothing was ready. And then at one, when everyone was arriving, my dad decided that he needed to mow the grass. He took off his shirt and started pushing around our ancient mower while the guests tried to talk above the roar, their faces pricked with sweat. Pandora, seizing the moment, went inside to start cooking. After she’d prepared everything but the meat, he emerged from the grass, his body steaming with sweat, his hair stuck up in white spikes. “This is delicious,” someone complimented him, when lunch was finally served. A potato salad with celery and mustard. A big Greek salad—all reds, greens, and purples, with chunks of feta on top. Kebabs with blackened peppers, onions, and eggplant. My dad was beaming. Pandora piled herself a big plate of food and ate without a word.
Of all the meals my dad made, the one that we loved the most, the one that helped us forgive him the fastest, was sausage pasta. A spicy, creamy ragù, with tomatoes, rosemary, wine, and Cumberland sausages. He had adapted it from a River Café recipe, but now it was his. First, he sautéed onions on low heat. While the onions cooked, he measured the herbs with teaspoons and laid them in a line on a wooden chopping board: a mound of red chili flakes; a bigger mound of fresh, chopped rosemary from the garden; a tiny pile of flaked salt; and three whole bay leaves. When the onions were ready, he crumbled in the sausages and added the wine and herbs, turning up the heat just enough to brown them slightly. Then he emptied in four cans of chopped tomatoes and cooked the sauce down for a few hours. Before serving, he melted in Parmesan and double cream.
Sausage pasta was for Sundays or birthdays. It was for after a relapse, when he wanted to win us back. Or for when any of my brothers and sisters came to stay. It was a meal to say well done, or don’t worry. Welcome back, or so long. Sorry, or I love you. He always made double, and we always ate it all. I would be shocked at the amount my older siblings could consume. Three, four, five extra helpings. We finished the last of it from the pot with our fingers, hands batting against one another to get that last rich crumb of sausage, and my dad watching, so pleased.
However frustrating or depressed he had been that day, we were always happy over a bowl of sausage pasta. My own friends would invite themselves for dinner if they knew he was making it. It was the one thing that you could rely on, his biggest achievement. If his ladder back from the moon led to the kitchen table, it was made from sausage pasta.
It was also the last meal he made me, the night before I left for a year in California to study history and literature at U.C. Santa Cruz. It had been my twenty-first-birthday party the night before. I was hungover, sad, and scared about the future, so I hadn’t packed yet. My dad was making goodbye sausage pasta, but it was also sorry, and I-love-you sausage pasta. A few days before my birthday, he’d relapsed. He’d pulled himself together just in time for my party, and now I was leaving for a year. My sister was going back to university soon, and my mother back to work. He would be completely alone in the house, and already his hold was slipping.
My parents and Pandora and I sat around the table together and tried to savor the meal. It felt like an important moment, like one of us would say something meaningful that we all needed to hear, and he would realize what he was living for, and it would change everything. But I was tired and had a headache. We hardly spoke, shovelling pasta into our mouths instead. The tears, when they came, started streaming down my face, and my dad looked over at me, like he knew what I was thinking, and said, “Sweetheart, why are you crying?”
Not long after that, my dad stopped being able to pull himself together. It scared him, my mom said. He was losing his grip on the things that had kept him afloat most of his life.
Just after I left for California, my mother and Pandora had to go to Istanbul; my grandmother had a bad fall and was in a coma. My dad drank the whole time they were away. Then, the day they were scheduled to return, he called my mother and told her that he had cleaned himself up, that he was sorry, that he was making sausage pasta.
When they came back, the house was silent and dark. There was a bag of pasta on the counter, a chopping board with all the spices lined up, the pot on the stove, the sauce half cooked. Cold, pale onions and crumbled sausages, still half raw, in the tomato sauce. He must have got to the part where you add the wine and drunk it instead. And then he must have turned off the flame, taken the cooking wine with him, and gone upstairs to hide.
Things were never the same after that. My sister went back to her university, and my dad started drinking more, even when my mother was around. On Halloween, she came home to find another half-finished pot of sausage-pasta sauce on the stove, and an untouched bowl of Halloween candy for trick-or-treaters by the door. For the next week, he hid in his study, pretending not to drink.
When Barack Obama won the election, my dad stumbled down to the kitchen at five in the morning and turned on the radio. He was wearing only boxers, his sallow face covered in stubble, his white hair stuck down around his head. My mother was on her way out the door, off to Istanbul again for ten days, because her mother was failing. “I hope to hell you pull yourself together now,” she said, “because you’re on your own.”
It was the last thing she ever said to him. When she came back, she found the final unfinished pasta, and him collapsed, with soaked boxers and a bad head injury, and empty bottles strewn across the floor. She called an ambulance. At the hospital, they told her that he’d had a catastrophic stroke. Two days later, he died.
Inever learned how to make any of my father’s recipes. If I ever tried to cook, he would stand over me and tell me that I was doing it wrong, start putting things I was still using away, or just start making the dish himself.
“For fuck’s sake, Dad,” I’d say, “Let me do it.”
“But you’re doing it wrong!” he’d bark.
Usually it would end with me storming out of the kitchen.
But my sister was patient. She stood by in silence while he taught her to make the classics.
Now, when I go home, the fridge is full of fancy prepared meals and moldy vegetables. The counters look sticky, crumbs and tea stains dotting the wood. There is a faint smell of cat food, even though the cat went missing years ago. My mother never makes a shopping list, or checks the fridge before she goes to the store. It’s her little rebellion. There’s still a whole shelf of my dad’s glass jars in the cabinet: jams and pickles, capers, things my mother would never have bought and no one can bring themselves to throw away.
Still, the legacy of sausage pasta lives on. Pandora makes it on birthdays, Sundays, or whenever we are all together. We put on the same kind of jazz my dad always played, and the kitchen fills with the smell of rosemary, garlic, and red wine. Pandora makes sure that all the counters are clean and tidy before serving, while the rest of us sit at the table, drinking wine or stealing from the salad. When everything is ready, she puts the pot on the table, opens the lid, and, if home can be found in a moment or a feeling, then that is it. ♦
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