SERIOUS PIG: An American Cook in Search of His Roots - Softcover

Thorne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865475970 ISBN 13: 9780865475977

Verlag: North Point Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

In this collection of essays, John Thorne sets our to explore the origins of his identity as a cook, going "here" (the Maine coast, where he'd summered as a child and returned as an adult for a decade's sojourn), "there" (southern Louisiana, where he was captivated by Creole and Cajun cooking), and "everywhere" (where he provides a sympathetic reading of such national culinary icons as the hamburger, white bread, and American cheese, and sits down to a big bowl of Texas red). These intelligent, searching essays are a passionate meditation on food, character, and place.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne

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Serious Pig

HERE

The cottage--for that, despite its lack of quaintness, is what it is--lies tucked into the side of a hill, just below the road into town and above a small cove, where the water glistens through a stand of trees. The walls have been insulated, a modern bathroom has been installed, as has electric heat to help out the woodstove when winter pulls its worst. Still, without a doubt, it is a summer place.

You know this immediately. It has the air of vulnerability always present in the sort of Maine house that is too airy, too full of light to have been built for living in all year round. There are other hints, too, especially in the motley mix of splurge and meanness that is the one feature common to almost any summer house: the neatly painted wood floors and the real pine paneling on the one hand; on the other, salvaged from older houses, the conspicuously mismatched doors and window frames.

These have their charm. Not so the kitchen, which sits in an addition tacked onto the back of the house by a later owner when the cottage was remade into a year-round rental property. This room has its amenities--lots of space, good light, plenty of counters, a decent sink. Against these must be weighed walls covered by fiberboard embossed in fake pine, a dropped ceiling of greasy Styrofoam, cabinets crudely hammered out of cheap plywood and shellacked to a repellent gloss.

The floor is covered with a casually laid roll of linoleum that has begun to split in long, curling cracks where the addition meets the house, for that part of the room rises when the ground freezes and comes down when it thaws. The refrigerator, turned as low as the knob will go, still ices up lettuce in the vegetable bin. Two of the burners on theelectric range will barely work--the other two, as with most electric ranges, work only too well.

Worst of all, this is a real Maine kitchen. The slapdash standards of construction actually reinforce its just-us-folks sense of coziness that is the vernacular Maine counterbalance to winter ... and to cold. That was what flashed into my mind the moment I first stepped inside. I hardly noticed the fake paneling, the torn linoleum, the crummy ceiling. Instead, I had a sudden vision of the previous occupant--an Israeli boat designer, as it happened--pulling open the battered aluminum storm door (a plywood square already replaced the lower wind-shattered pane of glass) on a bitter January night, stamping his feet and blowing on his fingers as he tugged it shut against the ice-edged darkness pushing in behind. A shiver ran up my spine.

I had come back to Maine to live in a summer cottage, because for me a Maine summer cottage was home. I had chosen Castine because it was almost an island, on the tip of a peninsula, out of the relentless up-and-down traffic of the highways that now sunder most Maine seacoast towns. At once patrician, historic, and picturesque, it was hardly free of summer folk--they came in droves. The difference was that most of them arrived by yacht. There were no motels on the outskirts of Castine, no fast-food places at its center. As full of traffic as it might be on a summer Sunday, you could walk the streets at nightfall from one dim streetlight to the next in total quiet, smelling the green sweat of the trees and watching the night float through the shoals of stars.

Sentimental? Well, right then I wanted to roll in sentimental. The first night I slept there I awoke at some early hour and heard an owl softly hooting as it flew by outside. The next morning I found roses blossoming in hedges all over town and wild swamp iris blooming in roadside gutters. I remember how purely happy I was those first few weeks, how often I kept thinking, Why have I waited so long?

I had first thought about what coming home might mean ten years before, when I moved into the upstairs apartment in my grandparents' house. I had come to keep an eye on my grandfather--my grandmother had died and he himself was failing--but it gave me the opportunity to return to the very place my mother brought me back to after I was born, to wait for my father to come back from the Second World War.

Instead, as it turned out, he made the army his career, and we went to him. I was four when my mother, my new baby brother, and I took the train to Texas. From there we went on to many other houses in manyother places. Some of these I remember better than others, but not one of them gave me a lasting sense of home.

Consequently, just as children forced to grow up with strangers learn to read adults with preternatural care, so have I come to read houses. Childhood memories, when summoned, arrive in the form of snapshots, a catalogue of unconnected favorite parts: the sharp twist of a staircase, the glint of a bath knob, the bright compactness of a butler's pantry, the dim, moonface glow of a radio dial on a bedside table.

There were two exceptions. One was my grandparents' house: a two-storied, dark-green shingled monster with a wide front porch, a basement made of granite blocks, an enormous, empty attic, and a second floor that my grandparents had turned into two one-bedroom apartments, which, when family wasn't staying in one or the other, they rented out.

Thirty years later, the one my mother and I had lived in together was nearly unchanged, right down to the electrical fixtures. The walls were papered with the same bland flowery chintz; the woodwork was stained the same dark oak; the same double sink--the deep side for hand washing clothes--waited in the kitchen ... as did the same secondhand Magic Chef stove that my mother, pregnant with me, had helped my grandfather carry up the stairs.

I had left when I was four, but flashes of memory came back to me as I settled in at thirty-five. Looking out the same bedroom window at the soft summer evening light on the roofs across the street, I become again the restless three-year-old who was sent to bed with the day still bright outside.

Even so, I remain astonished at the smallness of the place; it had been so large before. This sense of seeing everything through a reversed telescope never entirely went away, and sometimes I would lie down on the floor, just to make it fall back in place.

If I had a home at all, I thought, this was it. Instead, I had only returned for one last visit. It was my grandparents' house, not mine--as I would discover during the year of caretaking after my grandfather died, which he did just four years after I moved in. Soon after the estate was settled and the house sold, I came to Maine.

As some readers will already know, since, without my intending (or, until now, even noticing) this, it is the subject of the first chapter of each one of my three books--my grandparents had also owned a house there, a summer cottage, built at the edge of a cliff on an island in Casco Bay. When I was growing up, more summers than not, my father drove us--my mother, two brothers, a sister, and me--from wherever in the country we then lived to spend the summer there.

It was the one place in the world that I loved purely--by which I mean that it seemed to me so perfect that I craved it in all its parts. It haunts my memory the way certain childhood books do--the ones from which any random phrase can summon from deep memory a luminous wash that combines the sound of the parent's reading voice with the sight, feel, even smell of the actual page. This cottage is the place, were that possible, I would want to claim as home.

Except I can't. It's gone. When my grandfather died it went to an uncle, who renovated it out of recognition ... or, rather, into something very much like the cottage I was now renting in Castine. Although even to write this fills me with bitter...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: North Point Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0865475970
• ISBN 13: 9780865475977
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 530
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland