Soul House Cookies

It’s been a while since I’ve set words down to publish on this blog.  In spite of my lack of narration, I have continued with my recipes.  Hosting a regular dinner party does afford one the discipline to look into cookbooks… at least monthly.  I even started an entry that I left in draft form some place on this computer… but I’m afraid I let the mental occupation of my past few months distract me from posting.

Part of that was work.  So I guess I can’t feel too guilty for giving attention to what pays for the ingredients of my kitchen.  The second – and more recent – part of my distraction was the fact I agreed to step into a play halfway through the rehearsal process and perform two weekends of it.

One major reason I agreed (in spite of my better judgment to avoid doing plays during Banned in Boston season) was because of the director.  The last play in which I was involved was his production of Crimes of the Heart.  It closed on September 16^th.  I remember visiting my grandmother the following Sunday.  We talked about the play because she had read the review in the Worcester Telegram.  That was the last conversation I shared with her.

I thought of that as I drove home the nights I didn’t have rehearsal and would pass her house.  I knew the tv room light wouldn’t be on, that she wasn’t reading the review of this play.  I knew the house was lit for different, exciting reasons… but I couldn’t help but sigh and acknowledge this was the first time I have been in a play and she didn’t know.

She didn’t come to all my plays.  And that’s probably a good thing.  There have been times in my life when I’ve been involved in shows right on top of the next… and that’s not reasonable for anyone, never mind my 70,80, 90 year old grandmother.  But she did come to a lot of them.  Even when they were in the basement of Hovey and required descending those stairs and going backstage to get to the bathrooms.  Even when it was a bleak Irish tragedy, with no real redemption when the stage goes black.  She wouldn’t hesitate to express an opinion of the story… or the appreciation of the work.

She always liked to tell me how George Edward liked theater.  Because in a family of sports fans, I was noticeably the artistic one.  But then another cousin or two would do a show… and she would tell me.  Because theater was my thing.  So I would appreciate it.  She also told me about a professor at Clark who used to put on plays.  She would go to those plays with her father.  Or maybe it was her brother… but she always liked those plays.  He did a lot of Shakespeare, so I would probably like them.  That Clark professor, it turns out, went up to Barre in the 1950’s and revived the Barre Players.  The theater where I cut my teeth on directing and got to act in some of my favorite roles.  Where my grandmother sat in the audience several times.

I missed those conversations this month.  Even though the story of the Clark professor was a familiar tale. It was a comfortable routine.  A sort of warm blanket to fall into when I felt the letdown of a show’s closing.  I knew it wouldn’t be there at the end of last weekend, but I decided some comfort was necessary.  So I made cookies.

Actually, this used to be one of the things I did at Hovey.  Not for every show… but certainly the ones that I really enjoyed being part of.  I like to bake and a cast full of actors in need of a quick sugar fix was always the perfect opportunity to share a batch of cookies and not be left with the lot for myself.  So that’s what I made before our last Saturday show.  It proved most handy after the show… as our performance was next door to a bar… and these cookies were necessary carbohydrates.

Her recipe is the one you can find on the back of Nestle’s chocolate chips.  But… somehow… it tastes better because it is in her handwriting.

I actually have six or seven left that I put in the freezer.  For a rainy day.  Or a day I just want to think about sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea, one of these chocolate chip cookies from the tin in the pantry closet, talking to my grandmother about theater.

Alligator Pear Cocktail

It is 1:30am.  The dishwasher is running.  I am sitting in the living room across from the fire to which I added a log not just an hour ago… even though I could have let the coals die out and saved a log of my dwindling wood supply.  But… I kind of want to hold onto this evening, this very good night… and not go upstairs and shut my eyes on it quite yet.

Tonight was my supper club of March.  We have approached the 1920’s in our theme of decades this year.  I even applied gray eye shadow for the occasion…  but left my cloche hats in their boxes.  Still, it was… it was just one of those nights when life is simply, good.

Part of that, I’m not going to deny, is due to the compliments to my cooking.  Tonight was a total experiment.  By experiment, I mean to say I cooked four dishes outside of my norm.  Things that might even be considered weird by modern definitions… but appropriate for my dinner theme… and all from a cookbook that came from my grandmother’s… and I have no doubt… my great-grandmother’s kitchen.

As I type that… I’m not exactly sure which great-grandmother passed on these recipes.  I want to say Rose Alba, because one of the recipe books is stained so completely in the pie section – on the page of a prune pie recipe, that I have heard was one of her trademarks. I am certain she was the one opening up the book of Lorain Cooking to double check her measurements, even when she knew them after baking pies every Sunday.

There are no stains on the second cookbook, a guide to good housekeeping from Better Homes and Garden.  Indeed, I had a renegade splatter of tomato juice this afternoon and panicked that I was damaging this piece of history… even though the cardboard binding attached with my grandmother’s masking tape has already fallen away.  I wonder if that was given to my grandmother by her mother-in-law… or by her mother.

I never saw a photograph of Teresa Conroy until last October.  Well, let me say this again.  I didn’t realize I had seen a photograph of Teresa until I started sifting through pictures to make a database for my family.  There was a family portrait (that I have yet to scan and will not be including in this blog post at 1:30ish in the am) that hung in the dining room of Mt. Pleasant Ave.  I did not know that one of the young women in that early 1900s serious photo was my great-grandmother.  I knew that my grandmother lost her when she was 18 in 1939.  I don’t know if the fact that was the year Gone With the Wind was made into a movie makes that detail register in my brain… and that my grandmother was probably more concerned with the grief of her mother than Vivien Leigh that year… or the idea of being 18 and losing her mother is such a startling thought that I have never forgotten it.

I found an envelope of her pictures… just a handful of pictures.  Compared to the world of Facebook and iPhones, that seems like such a poor representation of a life… well lived, even if she died before either of her children reached the age of twenty.

My favorite is her dressed in Frank’s (the man who would become my great-grandfather) WWI uniform.  

But, there is another – actually a couple others – of her with a friend, when she is smiling, off the cuff, and so genuinely… happy.   

There is also a picture of her in a nurse’s uniform.   And, in the pile of pictures of her eventual husband, a picture of him in France, dark in shadow… handsome.  On the back is inscribed, “Dreaming of you.”

I piece these details together into a story… a story I will never know.   A story I probably would not have really known if I had asked my grandmother.  What do we know of our parents and their youth?  Their recklessness, their hopes and dreams before the burden of responsibility… before the larger problems of the world turn their hair gray and dull the shine in their eyes?  When they shift from hopeful dreamers into authoritarian stewards?

I never knew Teresa Conroy.  I don’t know if this cookbook I used tonight ever spread open on her kitchen counter as it did mine today.  Maybe it did.  Maybe she cooked spaghetti for two and a half hours in the oven as opposed to on the stove.  Maybe she made a white sauce for tuna or filled a cocktail glass with an alligator pear and catsup.  Maybe she cheated on Prohibition.  Maybe she thought it was a good idea.  Did she?  I wonder what she would have thought if she knew her daughter liked bourbon and ginger beer.

Maybe I’m more in tune to these speculations because I am writing a novel that takes place over several decades, but focuses on the 1910’s and 1920’s.  Maybe it is because tonight I had a supper club gathering that focused on the decade that decided alcohol was taboo.  Or maybe… I just find the recipes of these cookbooks an interesting challenge to our contemporary tastebuds and idea of easy cooking.  Whatever it is… whatever informed my fascination… tonight I had a good meal.

At some point I will share all four with you, dear readers.  But for the now, the most amusing is the cocktail dish.  And, yes, I mean dish instead of drink.  I don’t know if Teresa Conroy or Rosa Alba Rivers (Brennan) would have served a cocktail to her husband or group of friends in the 1920’s.  I don’t know if either woman would have snuck a shot of moonshine or vodka into this recipe… but one of them, I suspected, bought this collection of recipes.  And whether or not she contemplated filling a martini glass with an avocado and ketchup, I still like to think by serving it tonight, I knew her more.  Even as I laughed at the odd concept, I felt for a fleeting second that I could have had one of those women at my dining room table laughing and scooping up the surprisingly tasty concoction in delight.

A list of cocktails.  Alligator Pear is at the top.

Soda Bread or The Luck of the Irish

I’ve gotten a little sidetracked by life these past few weeks.  Weekends arrive and I find myself sleeping in to hours I haven’t indulged in quite some time.  Or I have an hour or two of productivity before a marathon of Agatha Christie shows seems like a good way to pass the time.  

I did attempt a recipe last weekend for Oatmeal Crisps.  Problem is I tried to multi-task whilst I attempted this seemingly simple oatmeal cookie recipe.  My history in the kitchen should have been smart enough to note that so much butter and shortening would make for very fragile and thin cookies… and oozing all over baking surfaces… which turned into oozing onto the bottom of the oven and an oh so delectable scent of burnt sugar.

So I’ll come back to Oatmeal Crisps when I’m less frazzled.

This weekend I baked.  I baked my own recipe.  Okay, a recipe I got off the internet ten years ago and take out of my overly stuffed folder of computer printouts once a year to bake my offering to the Brennan St. Patrick’s Day feast.

I’m eating some now, to go with my Bailey’s flavored coffee. 

If you want to try it, it really is quite simple… and (in my humble opinion) ten times better than any store bought variety.

Irish Soda Bread
Ingredients:
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
3 Tbsp. butter
¼ c. raisins (optional)
1 egg white, slightly beaten
¾ c. buttermilk
¼ tsp. salt

- 1.Mix together dry ingredients.  Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.  (I do this with my hands.  It is pretty good stress relief.)  Stir in raisins if desired.  (I’ve often forgot to do this and end up adding them later… but it’s messier that way).  Make a well in center of mixture.

- 2.Combine egg white and buttermilk.  Add all at once to dry mixture.  Stir until moistened.

- 3.Knead dough until smooth.  Shape into 7 in round loaf.

- 4.Lightly grease baking sheet.  (I use my pizza stone).  Place dough on sheet.  With knife, make criss crossed slashes on top to form an ‘x’.  Brush with buttermilk

- 5.Bake about 30 minutes at 375° or until golden.  Serve warm if possible.

So while this isn’t one of Gram’s recipes, I can say it tastes fabulous with some of her jam.  Or alongside one of the many various interpretations of corned beef my uncles provide every year.  

I often joke how St. Patrick’s Day has become a second Christmas in my family.  While we don’t have all the Brennans in attendance, the house is certainly filled to the brim and requires multiple seating stations to eat a plate full of corned beef, green mold, and soda bread.  There is a lot of Irish whiskey.  A lot of silliness.  And a lot of green.

I’ve been cynical about St. Patrick’s Day.  How pretentious our sudden love of immigrant heritage is.  How ridiculous it is to honor the poverty and depressive alcoholic traditions of our Irish forbears.  How people who pooh pooh Mexicans try to pull out the 1/48^th Irish genetic component in their bloodstream to justify getting shitfaced and irresponsible on this one day a year.

This year… I didn’t care about that. Maybe it’s this blog.  Maybe it’s the fact I’ve really started to see my family differently after the birth of my nieces and the death of my grandmother.  Maybe it’s because I make a damn good soda bread and welcome the excuse to pull out this recipe once a year.  Whatever it is, whatever the ingredients and instructions, the fact is I saw the greatest recipe to come from the Brennan kitchen(s) isn’t the food on our tables but that innate ability to measure, blend, and serve happiness.  

My grandmother always used to reflect after these gatherings how lucky we are.  Maybe it’s the luck of the Irish.  Or maybe it’s because we are master chefs in that recipe of family.

O'Gara's Jambalaya or laissez les bons temps rouler

So I was thumbing through the recipes the other day and I found one for jambalaya.  I actually have a very good recipe for jambalaya given to me by my cousin who lived in New Orleans.  I love it so much the printed out email is crackly from greasy water damage.  I don’t really need to look at it, honestly.  She gave it to me seven years ago… and it’s a favorite dish to cook at this time of year or in the last waning days of summer.  My favorite part of that recipe is the suggestion to have a beer while cooking it.

But this is the recipe that I found in Gram’s box.

O’Gara’s Jambalaya
(Only Gram would have an Irish version of jambalaya.  Though to be fair, O’Gara is specifically Diane O’Gara from 1972)
1 lb. sausage
1 lb. cooked ham
2 c. cooked shrimp (or frozen fresh)
1 clove garlic minced
2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp. butter
1 onion chopped
1 bunch shallots (minced with tops)
1 green pepper chopped
4 tomatoes chopped and cut down
2 c. rice (vary as to occasion)
3 c. water

Brown sausage.  Cut sausage and ham into pieces.  Melt butter in heavy saucepan or Dutch oven.  Add onion, garlic, green pepper, shallots, and cook 10 min over medium heat, stirring frequently.  Reduce heat to low and add tomatoes, sausage, and ham.  Stir until all ingredients are blended.  Add shrimp, water, rice – judge for amount of rice needed – salt.  Stire 1-2 times.  Cook slowly!   1 hour or until water is absorbed and rice is tender.

I adjusted this because I make jambalaya often enough.  Firstly, I used expensive ham to avoid nitrates.  I eat ham like twice a year, so I figured whatever.  I used Andouille sausage because that’s what I always use for jambalaya.  Then rather than use butter, I just cooked the veggies in the juice/oil from the sausage.  Instead of salt, I used a Cajun seasoning mix I had.  I also don’t much like rice, so I cut it in half.  It’s still cooking slowly (!) now… but smells sooo good.

This time of year, actually, is the reason I have any mind to cook jambalaya.  After Hurricane Katrina, I started hosting Mardi Gras parties.  It was my first committed effort to hosting theme parties… and also a desire to take my career in fundraising home.  The first year was a pretty decent affair, with food from NOLA.  The next year I took the party up about five notches, when my cousin’s husband brought his band to play in our living room. 

We charged a cover and sent the money to support jazz musicians still recovering from Katrina.  I had intentions of growing it… but I moved, life changed… and I got sidetracked by other things.

But that party in 2007 was a helluva party.  One very special night I will always remember on so many levels.  Probably the highlight of my life at the amazing apartment I had in Washington Park, the highlight of time with that group of friends, and a memory of my grandmother... wearing a boa.

I thought of this photograph the minute I saw that recipe for jambalaya.  I thought of how she came to my party, supported my evening, supported my cousin’s band, and… even at 86 years, she liked a night out.

As I was thinking about what I would write in this blog, I heard her telling me – as she often did – that her grandchildren and children made life interesting.  She did say that or some other version of that phrase often.  I often nodded and shrugged, not convinced my life was that interesting.  There was a variation to that statement about how she learned things through us.  I thought about that statement and how willing and appreciative she was to come to our parties, our concerts, our plays, our graduations, our homes across the state… the country… a book signing, a fundraiser, a new home, to see a new baby, go to a museum, a garden, a favorite restaurant… and always with such joy and gratitude.  There were often hand written notes of that appreciation the week after.  Or a newspaper clipping… because she was always thinking of us, always proud in her own way of what we did… and glad to be a part of it.

When we cleaned out the pieces from her house a few weeks ago, there was a newspaper from 1996 folded up with the pictures of our little Olson family.  It was from a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which I played Helena.  She kept that all those years.  And I know there was something from all of us, whether it was a program, a recipe, a photograph, or something with which to remember a small adventure she took to learn more about the world and the world of her grandchildren.

A phrase that is often used in Mardi Gras is “Laissez les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll).”  I think Gram did that with every day of her life.  She let them roll with every patronage to her offspring’s homes, performances, and celebrations.  And they keep on rolling.