Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (28 page)

I asked him if there
were a cooking scenario in which you might, conceivably,
plotz
. The
rabbi’s answer encapsulates, in concise form, thousands of years of Jewish
logic and higher thought:

”If
you're a
plotzer
, I guess, then yes.”

Despite what sitcoms
would have you believe, ‘
schlemiel’
and ‘
schlamazel’
were around
before
Laverne and Shirley
. The rabbi shared a definition:

“A
schlemiel
is someone who comes up with the stupidest idea ever, and the
schlamazel
is the one who thinks it's brilliant. (
For instance, if I were to suggest to
The Girlfriend that we have lutefisk for dinner, and if she were to say that
sounded great.
)

My favorite Yiddishism,
and one I learned from my rabbi, is the conjunctive adverb ‘davka
.’
As
befitting a Yiddish word, I found several definitions. Here’s a couple from Rabbi
Alan:

“Two
definitions are useful. You can define it using that scene in ‘Casablanca’
where Bogart says
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,
she walks into mine.”
So you put in
davka
there—‘
davka
she
walked into mine
. . .’

It’s
that sense of
'Woe is me,'
and
'Of course,'
and that Jewish
'Here
we go again,' and ‘I
had
to suffer this way.’

And
then there's the piece of
davka
when someone will do something ‘
davka’
it means they're doing it even though they know it's annoying, and probably
because they
know
it's annoying they’ll keep doing it.”

“If
you have an ingredient that you
davka
throw in because, you know, that's
just the way you are. It doesn’t make any sense, there's no reason for it, it doesn’t
fit the flavor profile. There can be ‘davka’ ingredients . . .

There
are people that get on kicks—they read somewhere that, say, ginger . . .
cleanses their bodies. So
davka
, they have to put ginger in everything.”

It’s a deep word,
‘davka.’ I should probably only bring out that word if I’m cooking for a
holiday seder or something like that.
Davka
, I intend to use it
all
the time
.

We didn’t get to all of
the Yiddish words on my mental list, but trust me; they
all
apply to
cooking and food somehow.

Unfortunately, we had to wrap things up
because I was dealing with a lot of
tsouris
, and on top of that I had to
schlep
to the
facacta
store with a little
mazuma
because
we had
bupkis
in the house to eat, and I get a little
meshuggah
if I don’t have a
nosh
. . .

While putting this book
together, I had a chance to talk with an inventive chef with forty years of
kitchen experience—a web-savvy culinary veteran known for an adventurous palate
and resourcefulness under pressure.

She’s as comfortable
preparing
crème brûlée
as they are wild game. I’m
referring, of course, to my friend Carl’s mom.

Carl is extremely
Scandinavian. One of four children of a mixed-marriage (father is Norwegian,
Mom is, if you can believe it,
Danish
), he looks so Nordic I always
expect him to be skiing while carrying a rifle.

Turns out, he’s more
Frisbee golf than biathlon, but he definitely
looks
like his heritage.
He’s from Willmar, Minnesota, doncha know . . .

Willmar
is a town of about twenty thousand people almost exactly halfway between the
equator and the North Pole. Machine Gun Kelly pulled off a notorious bank heist
here in 1930. Big railroad town.

According
to the town’s website, it’s “the fastest-growing non-metropolitan area in
Minnesota” (just a tip, city planners–when choosing a slogan, shorter is
usually better. Think in terms of ‘City of . . . something’).

Carl and I were talking
about the book and he said I should talk to his mom. I thought, why not
interview
her? I figured I’d get a couple of cute homespun stories and a little local flavor.
I ended up getting a cooking education.

It’s weird interviewing
someone’s mom. I figured I would dial down the snark a bit; after all, this is
someone’s
mom
.

Also, what do I call
her? Her name is Mary, but that feels way too familiar. I tend to treat moms
the same way I would an ex-president. Whatever I might think of the
person
,
I always respect the
office
. So I think I’ll go with ‘Mrs.
Olson.’

For people
raised by the tube, I don’t mean the ‘Mrs. Olson’ from Folger’s.
Our
 Mrs.
Olson made it a point to tell me that Folger’s is their “everyday coffee—not
for company.”

Mrs. Olson took time
out from a vacation to give me a look into the world of an unheralded chef who
has spent decades in the cooking trenches.

You want authentic?
During our half-hour interview, she gave me two “
there y
a
go
”s, one “
oh my word
”
and
a “
you betcha
.
”
So have a seat, get your elbows off the table, and pay attention to Mrs.
Olson.

At
least twice a month for forty years, Mrs. Olson has made some version of what
we call ‘hotdish’ (state law requires any interview with a local chef to
include a question about ‘hotdish’).

That’s
over a thousand freaking casseroles and at least a thousand cans of Campbell’s
Cream of Mushroom Soup, but when I asked her if the thought of all that made
her tired, she just said,
“Noooo, it’s part of motherhood.”

Do
the math—this woman has prepared at least two meals a day for almost half a
century. Oh, and she’s been doing it without a lot of gadgets.

She owns a food
processor, but she bought it to make one specific thing (a British shortbread
recipe) and that’s
all
she uses it for.

When I asked her what
her favorite utensil is, she thought for a few moments, and then said
“It
would have to be my wire whisk.”

Mrs. Olson learned
about cooking at a young age:

“My
mother cooked absolutely fabulous . . . and she was a baker. I used to envy the
kids that could have Wonder Bread—
all
our bread was homemade.

She
was happy in the kitchen. She was ten when her dad died and there were nine
children in the family, and she said she got stuck in the kitchen and learned
to love it.”

Carl’s maternal grandma
may have been a “fabulous cook,” but to hear
him
tell it, she made one
horribly memorable mistake.

Allegedly,
one day she made beet Jell-o. Now I’m with you. The words ‘beet’ and ‘Jell-o’
should never be that close to each other.

I
don’t even want to hear someone say “I had some beets, and then later had some
Jell-o.” There should be at least a paragraph between those two words at all
times. But let’s have mom address the incident:

“She
knew he liked beets, and she found a recipe for it—it wasn’t beet
Jell-o
it was beet
gelatin
(
that’s
much more
appetizing
).

I
t
was ‘formed,’ and to him it was Jell-o. She was just so pleased when she
brought this to the table, and then he couldn’t eat it . . .”

In the spirit of full
disclosure, I asked if she tasted the beet . . . gelatine—

“No,
no, no. It had chunks of cucumber, and diced celery . . . It’s like she had
cooked them and ground them up, almost like an aspic?

And
it just . . . ohhhhhhh.”
(By the way, in print you can’t tell, but it wasn’t a good
‘ohhhhhhh.’)
”

Before I talked with
his mom, Carl told me that “she was at the vanguard in bringing ethnic cuisine
to small-town Minnesota,”

However, Mrs. Olson was
quick to deflect any praise.

“Noooooo,
that was his take on it. But one of my favorite things to do is to walk through
the grocery store, and if there’s something I haven’t seen before and I don’t
know what it is, then I look at the package for directions.

If
not, I buy it, bring it home, and go online. The internet is indispensable!”
I didn’t have
the heart to tell her that some things on the internet aren’t true.

In addition to her
cosmopolitan (and seemingly random) approach to meal planning, she hasn’t lost
touch with her Scandinavian roots.

She mentioned
römmegröt
,
which I’ve since learned is a porridge made from sour cream, whole milk, wheat
flour, butter and salt. Apparently, you can add cinnamon to it to make it more
like . . . food.

Not
many people rave about
lefse
,
a traditional Norwegian flatbread; that’s probably because it’s traditional,
Norwegian, and flat.

Mrs. Olson was quick to
defend lefse as anything but boring:

“There’s
nothing
better
than soft, fresh right-out-of-the-pan lefse with
butter and sugar. I make the dough, but the boys still do the rolling and
baking. It’s the kind of thing, when everyone’s together right before Christmas
. . . you like to keep people busy.”

Speaking of family, I
asked about her husband, and she told me,

“He
wasn’t around a lot. He had a very intensive, demanding job, so he would show
up for meals and take off again.”

That makes me imagine
that her husband was some sort of spy, working dangerous undercover missions
under an assumed name, undercover in small-town Minnesota, but I have no proof
of this.

Even without an
espionage subplot, I figured with four kids, there had to have been
some
drama at mealtimes, so I asked her how she handled the inevitable ‘finicky
eater.’

“I
don’t have a lot of patience with that. You know, you say grace, you bless the
food . . . and now you don’t wanna eat it?”

As to the age-old
problem of getting kids to eat their veggies, she suggested some tips:

“You
can put vegetables in places where they don’t take ‘em out so easily.
. Y
ou
can sneak ‘em in places
(
in the lefse dough?)
. And even the
most finicky eater will eat them raw with a dip.

I
always figured they had to take three bites of something, and if they didn’t
like it, I didn’t push it, because sometimes kids have a definite aversion to
something.”

I wish
I
could
have go
tten
away with telling
my
mom I didn’t want to eat something because I had an
aversion
to
it.