The Kitchen on Center Ave

On the summer I learned to eat.

+ Chuck’s pork chops and fried apples

this personal essay is part of a collection of pieces in FANZINE OCTOBER: WHAT IS A RECIPE?

“Do you think you can repeat this recipe on your own now?” my grandfather asked. 

I turned my glance away from the pan and gave him an incredulous look but his eyes were glued to an episode of ‘60 Minutes’ on an old television that sat on the bronze colored kitchen hutch. It was just an entire sleeve of pulverized graham crackers, beaten into pork chops that were sliced exactly a finger and a half thick. They popped on the heavy cast iron skillet, bubbles of Crisco escaped from underneath them and inched up to tan the sides of our dinner. That was it. Not even a pinch of salt. 

“It’s pretty simple,” I replied. 

I handed him another Miller in exchange for a bowl of apples. The bright green skins teased into long spiralling threads and each fruit sliced into 16 wedges. 

“You still can’t make a good pot of rice,” he rebuffed with his mischievous blue eyes. 

I dropped the apples into a pot where hot butter was already waiting and sprinkled sugar that glittered gold and a thick spoon of cinnamon on top. I swished it around with a wooden spoon that I let rest against the edge patiently. The ice clanged empty against my glass and I filled myself another Rob Roy the way I’d watched my grandmother make them. Enough cubes to graze the rim, two parts Red Label, one part sweet vermouth, a quick pull of red grenadine and a couple shakes of bitters. The drink was consoling and refreshing and my grandmother could make them without looking, the movements of her wrists both industrialized and natural, of which I have never been able to repeat. 

He’d hear the ice swivel in my glass and say, “Why don’t you bring the tequila up.” It had been stashed away in the basement, my grandmother’s fortress, the stairs too steep for my grandfather to wander down although he tried once.  

We used to eat pork chops with fried apples and white rice every few weeks. It was the summer after I had graduated college and I decided to move in with my grandparents until February when my flight left for Buenos Aires. I wanted to save up enough money to last me for a year and spend some time with my Poppa Chuck who just north of 80 was on his last run — whether he or the rest of the family wanted to admit it. And they had a separated apartment on their acre property that my parents’ house just couldn’t compete with. I took three jobs and worked 70 hour weeks, one day off every fourteen days. In the morning I temped as an office assistant at a water district, a few evenings a night I moonlighted at the customer service desk of a Target and on the weekends I wrote movie reviews for the local newspaper. 

On the days I worked both jobs, I was lucky if I found enough time between gigs to warm up a can of Campbell’s soup and sleep for fifteen minutes in the dark living room curled up with Mack, the border collie I’d picked from the litter. On my free nights, I’d come home to a handwritten grocery list laying atop whatever page from his personal recipe book had tempted him that afternoon. 

The grocery store was initially a chore — ducking away from my parents' friends and following directions that felt like I was about to perform open heart surgery. The green apples had to be hard but not waxy, smell tart but not sweet, and if they scrunched underneath my thumb they were shit and would grind under our teeth like sand rather than crunch smooth al dente. It was best to buy pork chops from the butcher rather than the meat fridges. The pork wrapped in styrofoam and plastic smell different, they sweat and let off a perfume like ammonia if you get there too late. When freshly sliced and wrapped in paper the odor is crisp, almost sweet. If the butcher insisted I grab a pack, I was to insist back that he slice them there or make him help me locate the prepackaged chops that had been cut 1.5 fingers thick, an annoyance for his deception. Graham crackers were luckily not difficult. Just grab the box of Honey Maid. It was like this with all of our meals but especially the pork chops. 

The first time he asked me to make them, I gave him the same incredulous look. We didn’t eat sweet and savory together at my parents’ house. My dad rarely cooked anything at all. I have no idea what his mother — who raised two kids alone on the salary of a nurse working overtime — cooked for him and his sister. My grandfather laughed when I served myself a pork chop and put the apples on the side next to a sticky mound of his white rice that was so creamy it was as if every grain had been injected with butter. “Who taught you how to eat?” he asked. I sliced off a piece of pork and pinched a chunk of caramelized apple on the edge of my fork, reluctantly trying, shocked by how much it made sense to my tastebuds.

Learning to cook and eat with my grandfather was also about finally understanding him, flavors and textures that slowly revealed themselves and found a balance. Poppa Chuck and grandma Jean lived just down the road from the home I grew up in, a four minute drive into the country. When I was a small boy, I spent most weekends at their house, Friday to Sunday, with my three sisters — or at least that’s how I remember it. We’d build tunnels by pulling the long curtains over the couches my grandfather built and sleep on foam mattresses with the dogs and cats (we liked Rags, we were terrified of Phyllis) next to the wood burning stove. On Fridays we’d eat pizza — a tradition at my house — but that was the only take-out exception my grandfather would allow. The rest of the weekend we’d eat fried chicken with mashed potatoes, IBC rootbeer floats and my grandfather’s rice waffles, a family idiosyncrasy that uses last nights white rice in the mornings waffle batter stuffed with long strips of bacon and their fat. 

The rice waffles were the offering that brought my mom and dad over to pick us up on Sunday mornings. But they usually ushered us into the car and drove us home as soon as the dishes were washed. As I grew older, I would understand more about the divide. We were told through silent glances it was better not to talk to my dad’s mother, grandma Marty, about poppa Chuck after I told her about his hiding spot for butterfingers — a secret compartment in the desk at the law office he opened with my dad. Six year old me didn’t realize that she wouldn’t be excited to hear where her ex-husband hid his candy.   

As a teenager I began to mimic that silent distance, unaware of why except it was just easier. Easier not to ask my dad any questions about his childhood and his relationship with his father, why the air felt tense, why the answers were so short when it wasn’t simply quiet. Not that he would readily answer. Easier to keep that side of my life from my grandmother if there was nothing more to reveal rather than ask why she was still angry and why I had to be angry too, because I wasn’t and didn’t want to be. But there was always something there, something about my grandfather’s kitchen that pulled me towards him. The way he connected people with food. The way food brought our family to the same table. The way everyone relaxed and laughed after a few Rob Roys. The waffles, the fried chicken, the green beans with tomato sauce, my grandma Jean’s meatloaf and baked potatoes that her great aunt Julia taught her, the persimmon cookies he made every fall and the smell of white rice and melting butter that is the only thing I think about when I think of him glued to his favorite chair in the kitchen in that house.

When I moved in the apartment above the garage that tenseness was still there. My dad didn’t say anything but I could feel it. Once again I felt instructed, silently, not to tell my grandmother where I was staying. And the narrative I had always heard about my grandfather began to unravel. 

My grandma Jean worked as a court reporter two hours away and was out of the house a few nights a week. The nights that she wasn’t there became like confessionals. He never denied to me any of the things that he had done, that he knew he had been a bad father, that he had been self-serving and narcissistic and hurt people who loved him. He told me things about his own childhood, about people who had hurt him, about the father he never knew, and the absent mother he spent most of his adulthood trying to court, not to excuse or explain his behavior but to act as a sort of testament to him, to his humanity.

One night while we ate chicken cacciatore and tequila with lime and ice, he told me that he couldn’t get the image of my father as a little boy waiting on the curb with his overnight bag for someone who would never pick him up out of his mind. During the day, when he was alone, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Those nights in smokey bars chasing skirts didn’t feel so worth it now.

Soon after, in one of the few intimate conversations I have ever had with my dad, I encouraged him to come to the house and settle things, they had been back in each other's lives for forty years. They’d worked in offices that shared a wall. Everyone had remarried happily. There was another woman I called grandma in my life. We’d built new traditions. He had sent me and my sisters to spend our childhoods in that house and let my grandfather feed us and be to us what he hadn’t been with him. It was the moment for him to be fed too, to stop being silent, he didn’t have to forgive anything but it was clear he wanted to say something. He told me that he would and that he wanted to, but couldn’t get himself to do it.

When I realized he wouldn’t, and my grandfather did too, I kept listening. It was like they had both chosen me as this bridge to forgiveness, which I gave sometimes through silence and nods and sometimes by calling my grandfather a prick on the nights I brought up the tequila. And as we talked and ate I became the one that saw a different person, both the shadow and the light, and I forgave parts and made sure we didn’t edit out others. 

That was also a moment for me to begin to recognize my own shadow, my own selfishness, in my own way, the shadow I had been running away from, thinking that everything had to be bright. The shadows I am only beginning to feel comfortable with now ten years later, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that I am suddenly attracted to ideas of history and familial transcendence and the way pain and trauma and joy and laughter is passed through our bodies and into our hands and into the things I write and the food I cook.  

My grandfather passed away three weeks before my flight. That summer I learned to communicate and relate and make friends with the world through food. And understand that I am a lot like him, and a lot not like him. I am a lot like my own father too. Bullheaded in choosing my own way, intuitive and stubborn, quiet and thoughtful. I have chosen better ways to be bullheaded and intuitive and stubborn, and better ways to be quiet and thoughtful. 

His food that I recreate a decade later, none of which I wrote down, are all of those things. There is a family tradition that dictates that the author of a recipe be acknowledged in the name, so now when I make these, I call them Chuck’s Pork Chops and Fried Apples, although they are beginning to feel like they belong to me and that time. Of my fists and flesh pounding crackers into flesh and bone on the blue tiled countertop, the wood paneling, the dogs at my feet, the news in the background and the sound ice makes against a glass in need of refreshing. I have fed them to my father too. Because they are also his and ours. They change with me the way my imagination twists the memories of those nights and the tastes I have learned since that imprint themselves on those old recipes that will continue to pass on. Now I ask the butcher to slice the pork chops two fingers thick and I bread them with coconut crackers, because thicker fries better and coconut is all I can find (and it tastes better), which is what he would’ve done too.

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