August 30, 2021: Secret Ingredients -

A friend contributed a recipe to a Portland-themed cookbook, but if you follow that recipe, the resulting concoction doesn’t have quite the oomph of the version he serves. Pressed on this point, he said he’d purposely left out one ingredient.

Does this seem odd to you? It seems odd to me. Maybe he just didn’t want to share His Special Dish, but couldn’t say as much. That’s all I can come up with.

This made me think of my Aunt Fran, who jealously guarded her special cheesecake recipe. She was of that vintage when women could refuse to share a recipe on the grounds that the dish was Theirs. (I believe this goes with that weird thing where a woman might get upset if someone at a gathering wore an identical dress. Because her dress was Hers. This also seems odd.)

I never used The Joy of Cooking until I met Rick, who had a copy, and then, lo and behold, one cheesecake in the Joy was exactly Aunt Fran’s cheesecake. HA. Problem solved. Also, hilarious that she thought a Joy of Cooking recipe could be Hers. Except that we were all convinced it was Hers, so I suppose that made it true.

I was already thinking about my dad’s family - Dad and his sister Fran, plus their parents, Emanuel and Celia – after watching Finding Your Roots, the episode with Audra McDonald and Mandy Patinkin. It was a break from Current Events, some of which are good (child poverty rates down, terrible Trump-era environmental decisions getting reversed) and many of which are anxiety-producing, as you know.

I wouldn’t usually watch Finding Your Roots, but like a recipe with a missing ingredient, I was low on oomph. I wanted a little hit of kindly, wise Skip Gates. Professor Henry Louis (but we got to call him “Skip”) Gates, Jr., was one of my teachers in college, and I find him a comfort.  Such a nice person.

I am not really into family history, or, truth be told, into history. I did look at the online Ellis Island passenger lists this morning, briefly. Terrific website. I found people with my ancestors’ names, but different  dates. (Mine may have come through Boston, or elsewhere, but determining that seemed to involve microfiche. I would have to be wildly interested in a topic to search microfiche.) After a short foray, my interested flickered out. 

BUT Mandy Patinkin’s family got me thinking about my dad’s side. I had a Grandma Celia. Mandy Patinkin also had a Grandma Celia! (Lots of Jewish Celias back then.) Stubbornly, his never learned English. Stubbornly, mine denied having any Old World roots. I once asked my Grandma Celia where her family came from.

“Boston,” said she.

 “And before that?” I asked.

“Boston.”

I barely knew Grandma Celia. We only met a few times. She no doubt had different reasons, but she seems to have shared my lack of interest in family history. So we had that much in common.

My dad was born in Boston (you guessed that), and ended up teaching at the University of Washington, where he met and married my mom. He died ten years ago, aged 90. (I remembered him on his birthday this year, as I always do, but didn’t compute until a few weeks later that it had been his 100^th birthday. Holy moly.) My mom was already lost to dementia when dad died, so my brother and I just sent out announcements to everybody in the parental address book, even people we didn’t know.

Sometime thereafter, my Dad’s cousin Miriam wrote to me. I hadn’t heard of her, but I had only met a couple of Dad’s numerous East Coast cousins. She and her boyfriend were going to drive through Portland in a few weeks. Could we meet for brunch?  

Miriam said she had idolized my dad, her older cousin (she was the baby of her cousin-set). She had been sad when he settled in Seattle, and she had wondered why he didn’t come home more often. I said I believed he quit going home because Grandma Celia was unhappy about him marrying my mom, who wasn’t Jewish.*

Miriam gasped. “Your mother wasn’t Jewish?!?! Nobody told me that!”

I got to watch her process the news. She had just discovered the missing ingredient!

Maybe the family tried to protect the baby cousin from learning about a scandal.  Maybe they didn’t know she didn’t know. Why did Cousin Bud go away and never come back? No one explained it to her. But AHA. Now everything fell into place!

The bit about Grandma Celia being unhappy is true. I inherited a letter written to her by Grampa Emanuel, on the occasion of my parents’ engagement. Grampa Emanuel urges her to get over it. He says she should think of it as if my father, their son, had contracted a chronic, incurable, but not fatal disease. They would still love him under those conditions, wouldn’t they? They should still love him now! Besides, he had done this sort of thing before. Remember Girlfriend X? She was worse.

It amazes me that I have this letter. It’s a long letter from one spouse to another, when they lived in the same house. And somehow, my dad got ahold of it. How? Did Grandma Celia brandish it at Dad? Did he find it in her dresser when she died? Why did neither toss it out? I keep it in an album. Priceless.

I called Aunt Fran to report on the brunch with Miriam and her boyfriend. Aunt Fran said, “Miriam doesn’t have a boyfriend.” I said Actually, she does  - he’s tall and has a ponytail and uses a walker. Aunt Fran said I must be thinking of someone else.

All of this leaves me pining for cheesecake. That’ll be my award-winning PBS show: Finding Your Cheesecake.  Cheesecake is my plan for tomorrow.

*To be fair, my mom’s side behaved badly about the match, too. It’s just that nobody on Finding Your Roots happened to remind me of any of them. Maybe next time.