The Memory Chalet Read Online Free PDF Page B

appeared, was usually Dutch—for reasons that I never understood. Tea was ubiquitous. My parents disapproved of fizzy drinks—another unfortunate heritage of their political dalliances—so we drank fruitified, uncarbonated soft drinks, or Nescafé in later years. Thanks to my father, Camembert, salad, real coffee, and other treats occasionally surfaced. But my mother regarded these with much the same suspicion she harbored towards other Continental imports, gastronomic and human alike.
     
     
    T he contrast with the food that my paternal grandmother prepared for us every Friday night at her house in North London could thus not have been greater. My grandfather was Polish-Jewish, my grandmother born in a Lithuanian shtetl. Their taste in food ran to Northeast European Jewish. It was not until decades later that I was to taste the flavors, variety, and texture of the Jewish cuisine of South-Central Europe (Hungary, in particular), nor did I have the slightest familiarity with the Mediterranean cooking of the Sephardic tradition. My grandmother, who had made her way from Pilvistok to London via Antwerp, knew nothing of salad and she had never met a green vegetable she could not torture to death in a saucepan. But with sauces, chicken, fish, beef, root vegetables, and fruit she was—to my understimulated palate—a magician.
    The characteristic quality of a Friday night dinner in those days was the repeated contrast between soft and crunchy, sweet and savory. Potatoes, swedes, turnips were always brown and soft and appeared to have been drenched in sugar. Cucumbers, onions, and other small, harmless vegetables came crunchy and pickled. Meat fell off the fork, having long since fallen off the bone. It too was brown and soft. Fish—gefilted, boiled, pickled, fried, or smoked—was omnipresent and the house seemed to me always to smell of spiced and preserved sea creatures. Interestingly and perhaps revealingly, I have no recollection of the texture of the fish or of its provenance (probably carp). It was its wrapping that one noticed.
    Along with the fish and the vegetables there came dessert. Or, more precisely, “compote.” All manner of stewed and squeezed fruits, prominent among them plums and pears, would appear faithfully after the main course. Occasionally they had been compressed inside a thick pastry of the kind traditionally employed in Purim hamantaschen, but more commonly the compote was freestanding. Liquid refreshment consisted always and uniquely of a horrible sweet wine for the adults and lemon tea for everyone. Together with bulk in the form of black bread, challah, matzoh balls in soup, and dumplings in all shapes and varieties (but only one texture—soft), this meal would have been recognizable to anyone born between Germany and Russia, Latvia and Romania in the course of the past half-millennium. For me, transported weekly from Putney to Pilvistok, it represented Family, Familiarity, Flavor, and Roots. I never even attempted to explain to my English schoolboy friends what we ate on Friday nights or what it meant to me. I don’t think I knew and they would never have understood.
     
     
    A s I grew older, I discovered other ways to add taste to a hopelessly, helplessly bland domestic regimen. In England in those days there were just three paths to interesting food if your grandparents did not happen to come from exotic foreign parts. There was Italian food, still confined to Soho and the bohemian fringes of the aspirant talking classes. This was beyond my teenage or student budget. Then there was Chinese food, not particularly interesting or widely available in those years and in any case commercially adapted to British taste. The only serious Chinese restaurants in London before the mid-Sixties were in the East End and patronized by Chinese sailors and a handful of East Asian immigrants. The menus were frequently untranslated and the dishes unknown to locals.
    The real escape route lay to the Indies. I