The (Almond) Joy of (Home) Cooking

When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Time Forgotten

A Google search of food and memory brings up an easy two dozen articles about foods that allegedly help prevent memory loss. Eat more walnuts! Eat more salmon! I’m more interested in the food that conjures up a world of memory on its own.

Bring your finger to the bridge of your nose. Right there on the other side of the nasal bone is your amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain conveniently close to your center of smell. This part of the brain houses memory. It also plays a role in the way we process emotion. That’s why food is such a trigger for powerful feelings and recollections from the past.

With his trusty amygdala, Proust spent the last three years of his life within the confines of his cork-lined bedroom evoking a world of sensory riches, an expansive past, all sparked, at least on the page, by a tea-soaked madeleine.

You, too, store a whole ocean of memory in that little nut-shaped part of your brain. It’s why a Colombian friend, inspecting my vegetable garden, stopped cold at the sight of my monster collard greens and started to tear. “My mami used to make these for breakfast, scrambled with eggs.” It’s peasant food, she shrugged, but. . . But it came with warm rush of memories -- of the rural community where she grew up, of the sun-baked heat, the bright mineral smell of the soil, the clothes strung on the line. We’re talking more than breakfast. I clipped her two dozen leaves, each as big as an elephant ear, so she can make collards and eggs and give her children a taste of her own past.

I think Proust was lucky. Likewise my Colombian friend. The foods that so trigger memory or longing may not be as elegant as a teacake or as pure and earnest as greens and eggs. A Bavarian baker turns rhapsodic over the cheap mustard buns he’d get at festivals. Imagine a hot dog or sausage roll split, slathered with mustard and pickles -- everything but the sausage, which he couldn’t afford. Mustard buns, he says, were crunchy and divine eaten at once, greasy and leaden if you waited too long. For his Alabama wife, a professional chef, home is her mother’s salmon croquettes, “canned salmon and bechamel, pretty nasty, actually.” An English friend who lives in Paris, the culinary mecca of the world, occasionally yearns for that Brit standard, beans on toast. Preferably not even heated (he has other issues). For another friend, home is the midwest and the taste of Sara Lee chocolate cake, that thick brown block which her family served -- sometimes frozen -- at every birthday when she was growing up. She knows more sophisticated chocolate desserts, she knows processed food isn’t good for you. It’s still her favorite for food for celebration, because it evokes a lifetime of happy memories.

We don’t get to choose the foods of home. I wish mine was a fiery Bengali curry, a healthful, soulful collard and egg scramble or a sweet, buttery teacake. It is, instead, egg salad. Specifically, egg salad with olives on challah, made by my maternal grandmother. It is something I haven’t eaten in years, and being vegan, could never eat again (and don’t tell me about tofu “egg” salad. I love tofu but do not eat “food” in quotation marks).

I still recall with a fullness at the back my throat and an immense sense of longing the creaminess of the eggs. My grandmother knew just how much to mash them, just how much mayonnaise to add. I remember their gentle pale yellow, the little sparks of salt from the sliced green olives, the tender bread cut into four neat triangles. She somehow intuited my passionate though unarticulated preference for sandwiches cut into triangles, rather than squares. In the same way, she always knew the right temperature to serve it -- cool, not shockingly cold.

And remembering that, I remember everything -- her smell, sweet and rosy from Jergen’s lotion, her bathing me with a hard bar of Ivory soap in her white enamel kitchen sink, the shag carpet in the living room, which seemed, at least to my little girl eyes, to spring up as tall and wild as kudzu.

I do not long to eat egg salad again. What I long for is that absolutely crystalline time and place and sense of being loved.

We are all looking for return, for that place we thought of as home. Sometimes we spend our lives searching for it. Sometimes, we can find it in the memory of a simple sandwich. Food is sustenance, but it is also what connects us to each other, to the planet and to what Proust called “the imminent joy of going home.”

Almond Rice

No egg salad recipe here, I decided instead, to go for the amygdala/almond metaphor and provide an almond recipe. But what? I’ve already done almond cookies. And I thought it was interesting that other than Proust and my Sara Lee-loving friend, the other seminal foods of the past are savory, not sweet.

Left to my own devices, I would do a spicy Romesco, that fabulous sauce of ground almonds and roasted red peppers, or an elaborate biryani, but for the dish to work, it must be child-appropriate and simple. Yet not boring for adults, either. Huh.

The biryani got me on the right track. I remembered the rice with toasted slivered almonds we ate one evening in the desert in Morocco, miles from civilization. One lone cinnamon stick seemed to perfume the utterly comforting dish. Even my slightly tarted up version seems something a child would willingly eat and perhaps years later be a small part of “the immense architecture of memory.”

Being me, I suggest of course, you make it with brown rice. It’s not only healthier, it plays up the nuttiness nicely.

1 cup brown rice

3 cups vegetable broth or water, divided use

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, sliced

1 pinch saffron

1 cinnamon stick

1 teaspoon allspice

1/2 cup red lentils

3 Medjool dates, chopped

1/2 cup slivered almonds

Bring 2 cups vegetable broth or water to boil in a medium-sized saucepan. Add brown rice. Cover and reduce heat to low. Cook for 30 minutes, or just until the rice absorbs the liquid and leans towards tenderness. It will continue cooking later. Set rice aside and let cool. May be prepared a day ahead, covered and refrigerated overnight.

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sliced onion, stir until coated in oil. Cover and reduce heat to low, letting onion cook for about 20 minutes. The onion will still be pale and will have thrown off quite a lot of liquid. This is good. Add pinch of saffron and raise heat to medium.

Add red lentils to the onions. Stir to combine then add remaining 1 cup of water or broth. Cover again and cook. Red lentils are speedy and should be rosy and tender after 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, toast almonds at 375 for about 8 to 10 minutes, until golden and fragrant.

Add the cinnamon stick to the lentils. Stir in allspice, rice and chopped dates. Season with sea salt to taste.

Heat through at medium heat. Stir in toasted almonds just before serving.

Serves 4 to 6.

Calla Lillies, Almond Cookies and the Cycle of Life

All right everyone, your best Katherine Hepburn impersonations, please, as we say together, "The calla lillies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion.  I carried them on my wedding day and now I place them here in memory of something that has died."*

The cycle of life and death has been much on my mind lately, what with the anniversary of a family member's death, the death of a friend's father and several people I love recovering from serious illness.  In short, all kinds of crap has been happening at once.  Happily, signs of life are everywhere, including the birth of Gracie Soraya Abu Jaber-Eason and Stella Mary Espenkotter (go, girls!).  An orchid that had been merely two lackluster sticks has suddenly, inexplicably gone into lavish purple bloom.  Sweet, red tomatoes are proliferating on my vines.  I've been sloughing off dry skin like a molting snake.  And two days ago, I found this bird egg when I was out walking.  So there is a new bird in the Miami environs and I am glad. 

The enlightened Zen part of me knows loss and death and birth and growth are all part of the grand, mysterious cycle of life.  But most of me is not enlightened and thinks loss and death suck. I fret over why they happen, especially to people we care about, at an hour when a normal person would be asleep.  

Around 3:00 AM the other night/morning, I passed from wondering what loss teaches us (character-building?  No, thanks, got plenty already) to thinking about Katherine Hepburn's line from Stage Door.  Is there, I wondered, a food suitable to any occasion, the calla lilly of cuisine, as it were?  You could make it for someone in mourning or someone celebrating life.   It would need to nourishing and easily digestible for those regaining physical or emotional strength.  It would need to be pure and simple of flavor, rather than complex and elaborately spiced.  It would need to be deeply pleasurable and bespeak life in every bite.  Nourishing, pleasurable and chi (the Tao term for life force) for me means something green and leafy, but if you show up at someone's bedside with a plate of spinach, in most cases, you will not be greeted warmly, despite all your good intentions.  What else, then, epitomizes life force?

Around 4:00 AM it came to me -- almonds.  Rich in protein, magnesium, potassium and vitamin E, what is a nut but the essence of life?  It even looks like a seed -- or an egg.  It is the kernel of life.  Okay, but almond WHAT?  A handful of almonds offer neither comfort or celebration, but an almond cookie, we might be on to something.  Not almond biscotti, though they have their fans.  When you are of delicate disposition, you should not be forced to crack into your food.  What you eat should be tender.  It should yield.  Perhaps it was the chi thoughts that conjured the memory of Chinese almond cookies, sweet, tender, pure of almond and heart.

The problem -- traditionally, they're made with an abundance of egg, which seems karmically inappropriate in light of me finding the hatched bird egg.  They also contain, um, lard.  Cooks from southern-fried Paula Deen to Mexico maven Diana Kennedy say lard is the secret that makes food yummy.  Maybe so, but there's no way the rendered fat of an animal is chi-ish.  

At 5:00 AM, I went to the kitchen.  I surrendered to the need for butter, but would not egg. Instead, I upped the almond essence with a little almond butter.  This recipe is, I hope, suitable for any occasion.  Crisp at first bite, they dissolve in the mouth, they are light in texture, light of spirit.  Bring them to new parents, to a recovering patient, to someone whose heart is in need of a lift. These cookies are easy, pretty, and a sure and sweet sign of life.  

* George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, Stage Door, 1937.

Calla Lilly Almond Cookies 

1/2 cup unsalted butter (1 stick)

1 tablespoon almond butter

2/3 cup sugar

2 teaspoon amaretto

2/3 cup almond flour (or finely ground almonds)

2/3 cup unbleached flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

24 blanched almonds **

Cream together butter, almond butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in amaretto and almond flour (or ground almonds).  Sift together flour and baking powder and add to butter mixture.  Stir until just combined. Dough will be slightly sticky.

On a lightly floured board, form into a log 2 inches in diameter.  Wrap well in foil and refrigerate until well-chilled, 2 hours or overnight.

When ready to bake, heat oven to 350.

Slice dough into rounds 1/2 inch thick and place on a lightly greased cookie sheet, about 2 inches apart.  Gently press a blanched almond into the center of each cookie.  Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until cookies are just turning golden.

Remove from oven and cool.  Makes 2 dozen.

** To blanch almonds -- Pour whole raw almonds into a small heatproof bowl.  Cover with boiling water and leave for 15 minutes.  Drain.  Almond skins will slip off off, leaving you perfect, bare nut kernels.