Salt Pepper & Hot Sauce
Welcome to my first newsletter here on Substack. It is aptly named Salt Pepper & Hot Sauce in honor of the three things my dad would put on his food when I was young, before he even took his first bite. He knew most of the meals we ate needed a little cha cha.
I did not grow up thinking much about food. We did eat fairly healthy with homemade granola and 100% whole wheat bread that tasted as dry as the desert once it cooled, but was great right out of the oven, warm with butter. We ate homemade muesli, plain yogurt with a spoonful of jam stirred in, broiled chicken breasts with a slice of Monterey Jack melted on top. There was an over abundance of white rice and canned refried beans, thanks to the boringest weekly dinner my sister would make. But I always loved the homemade mac and cheese with toasted breadcrumbs, spaghetti pie, my mom’s cocoa cake showered with confectioner sugar, Mexican lasagna. A “lasagna” that has no roots in Mexico whatsoever, its heyday long gone with all the other questionable casseroles of the eighties, but damn if it didn’t taste good.
Every Saint Patrick’s Day my mom would boil up a big pot of corned beef, cabbage and potatoes, make a loaf of Irish soda bread, and a 9x13 glass dish of the Irish flag made out of jello. I didn’t really like the jello all that much, its texture was weird with a layer of creamy white gelatin in between the green and orange, but I liked the sentiment and tradition of it and would look forward to it every year. And I was glad our tradition was not that of the neighbors, who dyed their milk green.
Somewhere along the way, I did get interested in food. I have memories as a teenager of cooking a Spanish themed meal for Christmas one year, with a cookbook I checked out of the library, much to the chagrin of my brother who would’ve preferred twice baked potatoes and honey baked ham. Another time I made Tom Yum soup for Christmas Eve, an alternative to the traditional oyster stew my dad would make, always a bit gritty and for a kid, the texture of an oyster is about as alluring as chewing your arm.
When I was seventeen I started working at Zingerman’s Deli, a mecca of all things delicious in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and whatever glimmer of food interest was emerging in me, that about clinched it. Matzo ball soup, latkes, blintzes, knishes, gigantic rueben sandwiches, whitefish salad, all kinds of rugelach, cheeses and salamis from everywhere, raisin pecan bread I still get a loaf of when I’m home. It was a far cry from the meatloaf and lasagna roll ups of my childhood, and expanded my world without me even realizing it.
I cannot quite put my finger on what it is I love about food, or cooking. There was never an aha! moment, I wasn’t drawn to the kitchen like a magnet, I did not grow up cooking bolognese at my grandmother’s knee. I never wanted to train as a chef because I never wanted to join the army, which is how most restaurant kitchens are run, and the hours suck. Instead, I found my way to cooking by having potlucks with people who were better cooks than me, and eating food with people who would gladly sit outside at a table in the middle of an empty parking lot, on a cold cloudy covid afternoon, just to eat jambalaya and a smoked salmon reuben.
When it comes down to it, all I really want to do is cook food for, and eat food with, other people who like to cook and eat good food. It’s not that complicated except for where things are at these days. I don’t know much right now, other than the fact that the world is not going back to the way it was, even if the veneer may look the same. The longing that so many of us feel, after a year of barely a whisper of seeing other people—to eat a good meal with friends, elbow to elbow, knee to knee, a big warm hug at the end of the night—that collective desire alone seems like enough to shift the very foundation under our feet. Maybe it already has.