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Traditional Festive Foods: A Personal Memoir
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10362 |
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Life
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12 / 1986 |
2,063 Words |
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Elaine Brooks
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Some of the most personal and emotional memories center on food--especially at holiday times. There must be some special significance that ties this season of celebration, this bright and fragrant time, so closely to favorite foods and well-remembered repasts--visions of sugarplums dancing through our lives.
The best Christmas Eve of my life was a miracle because of a molded ice-cream-and-sherbet Santa Claus. I was about three years old. It was a quiet, modest Christmas Eve--with just my mother and me--but it had the glow of magic.
My mother was divorced from my father; she worked hard and managed carefully, and there weren't many presents under the tree. But with peace and warmth, her love, and attention, she had prepared the most wonderful Christmas Eve a child could have. She dressed me in my cozy Dr. Dentons--the flannel pajamas with feet--and sat me in front of the fireplace in my grandmother's living room with the polished floors and carved mahogany upright piano. She served Christmas Eve dinner to me--just for herself and me--and no child ever felt more special. As I ate, she told me how Santa Claus would visit children's houses during the night, and I felt so happy in the light of the Christmas tree and the comfort of her love.
Then she served dessert. A perfect miniature Santa Claus stood before me on the plate. He had a red suit and hat trimmed in white fur; his jolly red face wore a white beard. His red suit and hat were raspberry sherbet (or strawberry--it doesn't matter). The white fur and beard were vanilla ice cream, and the sherbet suit covered a plump little ice-cream body. He was a delicious work of art that my mother had sought out and acquired as a treat for me to show me how special Christmas, her love for me, and my place in this world were on that wondrous night. It was amazing to put my spoon into the different textures of sherbet and ice cream, to taste the blend of icy and creamy vanilla and berry.
Soon after that miraculous Christmas Eve, I was taken away from my mother. The next years held turmoil and separation. Later, while I was still quite young, I went back to her on my own. Perhaps it was, at least in part, the memory of that ice-cream and sherbet Santa and the love he symbolized that helped us through the times of separation to a holiday of reunion.
My Mother's Italian Rum Cake
Important family gatherings, like Christmas and my grandmother's birthdays through her eighties, were occasions for my mother's rum cake. Because of this, I believe all of life's significant passages must be marked with this rum cake and, of course, several demitasses of espresso coffee with perhaps a lacing of anisette or sambuca, the traditional Italian liqueurs. At Christmas, mother would make the cake in the usual size, using ordinary layer-cake pans and a full dozen eggs for the cake and filling. For family events with all the cousins, out came the festival-size cake pans, which held twice the batter and required two dozen eggs in all! It was a logistical as well as an artistic culinary feat.
The cake is a version of the traditional Italian zuppa inglese--literally, "English soup"--which replicated but improved upon the common English dessert puddings called trifles. Especially in the nineteenth century,
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