“Ceremony is punctuation that rhythms and rhymes and defines our lives.” - Dr. Jessica Harris on eating together, High on the Hog
I wandered St. Lawrence Market, looking for something to eat.
I had been planning to cook mushroom burgers, using the wine cap mushrooms I’ve been growing in the backyard; their nickname is the “garden giant,” and if you leave them they can grow so the caps are as big as your face. But the weather wasn’t cooperating with me, and I’d only gotten one big one instead of the four I was aiming for.
It was busy and I snaked through tourists explaining peameal bacon to one another, trying not to hit anyone with my bike helmet. On the lower level I found a nearly empty stall selling Ukrainian groceries and was hit with an overwhelming desire for pierogies.
I hadn’t had pierogies not made by Cheemo in a long time, and bought two frozen packs. Once home, I boiled the little dough balls and made a sauce with the rest of my mushroom harvest: caramelized onion, nutty little wine caps sauteed in butter, a drizzle of cream, thyme, pepper and smoked paprika. I’d picked a handful of mulberries on the way home from the bush outside the police station1, carried them home cupped in my palms and arrived with fingers stained purple. I macerated them while the pierogies cooked and plopped a few on the side, sweet and savoury.
The dumplings were perfect, pillowy and light, dough only resistant around the edges where they’d been neatly pinched together. They reminded me of my grandma’s wareneki, a Russian Mennonite dumpling. Hers are always so light, filled with a tangy crumble of cottage cheese and topped with schmaundt fat (cream gravy) and a runny sweet compote of saskatoon berries.
I’ve always loved eating and cooking (in that order), but lately I feel myself becoming more conscientious about it. It’s a confluence of things: the pressing need to keep our grocery bill slightly below “astronomical,” my foray into trying to be a Garden Person, a burgeoning obsession with foraging, and my current occupation of spending all day writing at home or the library, which makes planning and cooking dinner a welcome time-marker of my slightly hermit-like existence.
I’m especially enjoying cooking with things that I myself have pulled out of the earth. Imagine! I text my Mom: I think I’m turning into Grandpa. I was having people over and was excited to give them a “garden tour” of my little back yard. I finally understand why this was a mandated part of going out to my grandparents’ house. “Time for the garden tour,” Grandpa would announce, slapping his knees and getting up from His Chair, as though we had booked this attraction in advance. Behind their house, where their property stretched from bush into alfalfa field, they’d erected an Edenic little patch surrounded by fencing to keep the deer out. He’d lead us out there and unlatch the door, always covered by a trail of snaking grape vines, busily growing future fodder for Grandpa’s homemade wine. Inside, he’d lead us down rows of tilled, piled dirt, pointing at the leaves erupting from the soil and pop-quizzing us: what’s that? “Carrot?” I’d guess confoundedly, when “I dunno,” was deemed an unacceptable answer. He’d grasp the greens and pull out a beet, chuckling at my naivete.
I didn’t appreciate the quizzes at the time, but the fertile space of my Grandparents property always made me feel creative. I remember a long afternoon spent rolling and shaping giant rhubarb leaves into a kind of still life sculpture of food; a big flat leaf platter set with bundles and shreds of leaves representing a magical feast only I could see, each place setting laid with the most fork- and knife-like sticks I could find. “Don’t actually eat those, they’re poisonous,” the adults said when they saw my leaf collection.
One thing my Grandma always grew was sorrel, a necessary ingredient in another Mennonite specialty, summa borscht. She harvested it continually over the summer so that there was always a ziploc bag in her freezer. When we came over for lunch, even in the dead of winter, there was often a big pot of summa borscht on the stove, ready to be served alongside thick slices of bread and cheese and a jar of pickled herring for Grandpa. It was kind of an odd soup: creamy white and opaque, with chunks of farmer sausage and potato floating through, and green shreds of this strange herb I’d never seen in the supermarket.
Recently I found a sorrel start and excitedly brought it home for my garden. After it was unceremoniously harvested by a squirrel and then kindly replaced by a friend, I started snipping from it and building up my own freezer bag, until I was ready to make my own borscht.
When I asked my mom for the recipe, she sent a photo of a typewritten page from the cookbook my grandma had made for her when she moved out at eighteen, annotated in several colours of pen from throughout the years. Before I had the chance to make the soup, however, I received an urgent text from Grandma telling me that she’d heard I was going to make summa borscht and I should know she’d made some recipe improvements over the last several decades that I should take into account.
With my safely updated recipe, I set to work boiling sausage and slicing potatoes. I didn’t have the truly massive amount of sorrel requested by the recipe, but I had enough to get by. I was a little skeptical of a broth made from boiling a sausage in unsalted water for 30 minutes, but it turns out Mennonites really know how to stretch an ingredient. After simmering everything together and stirring in a thick clot of sour cream, suddenly the entire house smelled like a childhood memory. I felt as though if I were to turn and look out the window I would see Grandpa’s garden, a deer grazing across the lawn, a hummingbird hovering next to the red glass birdfeeder.
I really don’t understand what flavour sorrel has, have no way to describe it other than that it activates some deep synaptic punch that throws me back to long sun-soaked late summer Manitoba days. Before it’s cooked, it looks a bit like spinach and tastes a bit like nothing; after it simmers in the borscht and mingles with the dill and the sour cream it has some kind of grassy, bitter, maybe lemony flavour—I think. None of those adjectives seem right. Especially when the mess of memory gets involved: suddenly I’m tasting the smell of cedar and woodsmoke and fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and the muted teal-ish hue of my grandparents’ kitchen, which is of course a colour and not a flavour, but I still can somehow taste it anyway.
“Glad to see a family member making our favourite Mennonite soup,” Grandma texted when I sent a photo of the finished borscht. “Can you get farmer sausage in Toronto?”2
For the past couple months I’ve felt cloistered in time—a time nun, living in ordinance to the calendar. It’s been a busy time and stressful time, though also one full of things to celebrate. I’ve finished the final draft of my MFA thesis, which is currently being read by my committee in advance of my defense at the end of next month. I’m nearing the end of the writing process with my other book project, which will also move into the editing phase at the end of next month. I’m starting to work on and dream up new projects, trying to figure out what post-Masters life will look like. Jon’s busy season at work is drawing to a close as the school year wraps up.
Along with good friends, coffee, and coworking dates, food and cooking are keeping me going, helping me mark the time and celebrate the milestones along the way—punctuating the rhythms and rhymes of life.
In a month, all my deadlines will be over, and I plan to be a lump that does nothing all of August. Until then, let me know if you have any good recipes I should try. 🍲
Writing News
One other thing to celebrate: I was delighted to find out recently that I’ve been awarded the Marian Hebb Research Grant through the Access Copyright Foundation! You can learn about the work Access Copyright does here!
As mentioned, I’m defending my MFA thesis in about a month. The defense is going to take place on Zoom and is open to the public, so if you’re interested in hearing about my novel, let me know if you’d like to attend and I can send you the information!
Book Corner
Some favourite food-centric books that come to mind:
Save Me The Plums is just the ultimate food book to me. I guess it has all my favourite comfort-book elements - memoir, food writing, being a high-powered magazine editor in 90s New York, going to Paris. Plus no one can write a meal like Ruth.
Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed is so wacky and subversive and dark and sexy and worth reading for many reasons. But sensual descriptions of frozen yogurt are definitely a major one.
I love everything Francesca Ekuwayasi writes, but especially her novel Butter Honey Pig Bread, which has some of the best cooking scenes and the best title.
I’m a sucker for family food stories, as you can probably tell from the Grandma’s soup story above, so I couldn’t help but tear up at Crying in H Mart.
The quote at the top of this newsletter comes from the Netflix documentary adaptation of High on the Hog, which is a gorgeous and richly researched history of Black cooking in the United States.
Special mention to Whetstone Magazine and Vittles for being the best food writing outlets currently publishing, imho. (And if you’re interested in amazing food writers, check out the work of Ruby Tandoh, Soleil Ho, Helen Rosner, and Tammy Teclemariam too!)
And a few other great books I’ve read lately:
I’m finally reading Autobiography of Red and I FULLY understand the Anne Carson hype now.
This memoir was a brisk, enjoyable read and made me think a lot about the politics of full-time art-making.
Another one I finally crossed off my to-read list: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is 🤯 Get ready for the next newsletter I write where I spiral out about how time doesn’t exist. (Only half kidding.)
As far as foraging goes, I believe All Cops Are not deserving of Berries.
You can, but it’s simply not as good. Though if anyone has a hook up that can rival Winkler Meats, I’m all ears.