Family Recipes?
My sister called me up last night with an emergency. It seems that her 14-year-old son had declared us “uncool” if we didn’t have any family recipes.
“So … do we have any family recipes?” she asked. “I was thinking, maybe, chicken with 40 cloves of garlic….”
That sounded reasonable enough — we’re of Italian descent, and the infamous 40 cloves was a favorite at home and has been one of my most popular “cooking for a crowd” recipes since college. However, defending ourselves against the label of “uncool” was serious business, too serious for any snap decision-making, so we settled down to address the issue with scientific precision. First of all, what qualifies as a “family recipe”?
A “family recipe” couldn’t be something we’d started cooking as adults, we decided, no matter how much of a tradition it had become since. That disqualified our herb-rubbed Christmas turkey, her chicken enchiladas, my homemade egg nog, and the fearsome “belly bomb” meatloaf muffins our father and stepmother had taught the grandson to cook. Perhaps, if her son passed them down to his kids someday, they’d become a family recipe, but they didn’t count for the two of us.
Nor could it be something we’d loved that our mother had never passed along to us before her death, we decided, which disqualified her decadently good sour-cream-and-dark-chocolate tortilla torte and her fruit flummeries. We might be able to find the recipes online, but they wouldn’t be a family recipe.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, Mom didn’t tend to cook the same meal over and over again, or at least not that either of us could remember. Neither did she make a point of passing her recipes down to us. However, I’d copied out a few of them back when I’d been a starving college student desperate for something besides Wonder bread and Top Ramen, and I still had some of those scrawled notes in my recipe folder: corn pone, beef burgundy stew, garlic-laden cocktail mushrooms, and penne arrabiata, for example. But although my sister remembered the stew, she either didn’t remember or didn’t like the others, so they didn’t qualify as family recipes, either.
We sat there in silence, baffled, feeling the label of “uncool” descending upon us.
“Wait!” my sister yelped, suddenly. “Octopus hotdogs!”
She burst into laughter while I recoiled in horror. Yes, I remembered octopus hotdogs — in visceral detail. My sister claims I got sick because I’d had the flu. I claim I got sick because I’d gotten too involved playing with my octopus hotdog, with its little mustard-drawn smiley face, so when the time came to cut off a leg and take a bite, I traumatized myself.
Most likely it was some combination of the two. Either way, the event spelled an end to my participation in that particular childhood lunch tradition.
But … octopus hotdogs. They were the only thing both of us could remember our mother making for us regularly when we were children that my sister had made for her own son when he was a little boy.
“With ketchup on top — red hair if you’re a girl, blood if you’re a boy,” my sister continued, with ghoulish satisfaction. “Octopus hotdogs; that’s our family recipe.”
I might rather be uncool.
drupagliassotti @ January 26, 2009