Nine Kids, No Dishwasher
By
Celeste Behe
Celeste Behe, a native New Yorker, is a nostalgist who,
according to one book author, "writes like Garrison Keillor would, if he
were Catholic and had nine kids.” Celeste is working on a memoir-cum-cookbook
entitled “Nine Kids, No Dishwasher: A Celebration of Life, Love, and
Table." This selection is an excerpt
from her manuscript.
During my carefree
childhood in the Bronx’s Little Italy, cooking and cleaning were to me as
unfamiliar as life below East 180th Street, and just about as
relevant. Unlike most of the girls in my neighborhood, I didn’t know the
first thing about housekeeping. For some reason my mom didn’t inherit the
gene which drives Italian mammas to teach their daughters how to hang laundry,
mend woolen stockings, cut ravioli, and fetch papa’s slippers—all before the
age of five. I had only two chores, which I performed weekly. One
was to polish the brass kick plate on the front door. The other was to
tend the swan. The swan, made of clear, hollow plastic, lived on our
coffee table. It was filled with colored water which, every Saturday morning, I
would pour out through a small opening in the swan’s back. I’d then tint
a fresh pint of water with my choice of McCormick food color, refill the swan,
and place it back on the table. End of chores.
Needless to say, I had lots of
time on my hands, especially during the summer months. But I was never bored. One reason for that was that there was almost
always a celebration just around the corner—literally. Our Lady of Mt. Carmel church, only three
blocks from my house, held observances throughout the year of holy days and
holidays. The street festivals, commonly called “the feasts,” were the most
popular of these. When a feast was in
progress, East 183rd Street looked like an evacuation route: apartment buildings stood silent and empty,
while their residents jammed the street in a noisy throng. The kids came for
the midway games and trinkets, the teens came looking for romance, the older
folks came to visit with the neighbors…and everyone came for the food. Everyone, that is, but my mother.
Mom scorned the food stands as
places where inferior goods were prepared for visiting non-Italians who—poor
souls!—didn’t know what real Italian
food tasted like. She had a particular
contempt for the zeppole that were sold at the feast. Mom wouldn’t be surprised, she said, to learn
that were fried in the same stuff that had kept our ’53 Ford running smoothly
for over a decade. Authentic zeppole,
she maintained, were cooked in peanut oil, which was how she made them for her
own family. At our house, no holiday meal was complete until those deep-fried
delicacies appeared on the table. Fresh
“zeps,” as they were fondly nicknamed by my older brother, were delicious
morsels indeed. But one had to be
pre-pubescent in order to enjoy them, cooled-down and greasy, as breakfast
food.
“Joe! Where’s the zeps?”
“It’s 8 in the morning! Whaddaya
mean, ‘zeps’? You’re not gonna eat them
for breakfast, are you?”
Well, yes, I was. And I did.
So did Joe, for that matter.
And
why not? The carbohydrate boost that kids
get from eating cold pizza in the morning is nothing compared to the kick-start
provided by dense, oily zeppole rings pressed into a saucer of granulated sugar
and devoured with gusto.
Zeppole hold a special place in my memory as
a staple of feasts both public and private.
But it is only one of the many foods that notch my personal timeline,
which begins on May 23, 1959. In
Timeline Year Five, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” tops the charts, Muhammed Ali
beats Sonny Liston, and the government of Italy
asks for help to keep the Leaning
Tower of Pisa
from falling over. I’m hooked on
“Wonderama,” and I keep myself busy playing with Wendy the Weather Girl
Colorforms and drawing pictures of my first crush, television’s Leonardo Lion, the King of Bongo Congo.
Americans’ per capita red meat consumption is 134 lb. per year, the Gemini
astronauts are swigging Tang, and Milky Way is “The Good Food Candy Bar.” Eggs are wholesome and nutritious, so my
conscientious mother sees to it that, when it comes to consuming raw eggs,
Rocky Balboa will have nothing on me.
Every morning Mom prepares a sweet, eggy concoction which I drink out of
a Captain Kangaroo cup with “flicker eyes.”
The stuff tastes like a milkshake, but it’s got a nice boozy kick. Could it be liquor that puts the flicker
into the eyes of the good Captain?
Indeed it could. The punch-packing ingredient was marsala, a
fortified wine imported from Italy. So,
while my peers were spooning up their oatmeal under the benevolent gaze of the
Quaker Oats gent, I was swigging breakfast with a tipsy sea dog.
But considering her Italian
background, it was only natural for my mom to juice up my breakfast. And, by the time I was seven, the juice
wasn’t just for breakfast anymore. The
culture of “la vita dolce,” even on this side of the Atlantic, demanded that,
on special occasions, young children imbibe a small share of a celebratory
drink “per buona fortuna.” In my family,
the occasion could be a birthday, holyday, holiday, or name day. But the basic components of the celebration
never varied: pretty blue concave
glasses brimful with gaily fizzing Asti Spumante, tiny barrel-shaped shot
glasses filled with rich red Rosolio, and an almond-encrusted cassata to die
for. When company was present, other
potent potables, such as Strega, Fior D’Alpi, Goldschlager, and Sambuca, often
made their appearance as well. I was
beguiled by my requisite driblets of liquor, but not because of their flavor or
potency. What fascinated me was how the stuff looked. Like the colored water in the apothecary jars
of the pharmacy window, the yellow hues, rosy tints, and golden tones of the
drinks were riveting. Even more so was
their novel packaging, particularly the flecks of genuine gold floating in the
Goldschlager, and the sugar-encrusted twig resting at the bottom of the Fior
D’Alpi bottle.
While I was busy contemplating
the booze, the grownups around the table were busy drinking it. Consequently, the banter would grow more
animated with each clink of glasses and accompanying cry of “Salute!”
Neighborhood news was usually the topic of conversation, and my mother had a
decidedly unique way of disseminating it.
Whether her intention was to keep my brothers and me ignorant of certain
grown-ups’ failings, or simply to mitigate the impropriety of spreading gossip,
I don’t know. But when nattering about
the folks in the neighborhood, Mom would never use the natterees’ real
names. Instead, she would dub them
with “code names” which would, at least to her children, make them as good as
anonymous.
There wasn’t an individual in the
neighborhood who didn’t have a quirk or quality, possession or profession that
made him a candidate for dubbing. The
beloved local bum who was always begging for loose change was named
“Dime.” The dapper apartment superintendent
with the jaunty cap was “Brown Hat,” and the owner of the white longhaired cat
was called “Snowball’s Mom.”
A typical gossiping session would
sound something like this:
“I met Fancy Car this
morning. He told me that Hair Net fell
and broke her hip, and had to be taken to the hospital. The Haughty One in the rectory said that
Father Nearsighted went to give Hair Net the last rites. I heard that The Professor was at the
hospital, too, probably because of his drinking. And did you know that Coffee Grinder and Too
Much Jewelry are going to be married?”
Copyright 2012©Celeste Behe
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