Sixty Years of Perfect Pairings

May 7th was my grandparents' 60th anniversary. What an incredible milestone. In the twenty five years that I've been witness to their love for one another, I've never seen it waver or change. I sent them a card that likened their partnership to other great partnerships in this world. Most of the card's offerings were food related and it led me to ponder how food has played a role in my relationship with them.

Throughout my life, my family has gathered together in December at my grandparents apartment in Miami. These vacations always began with a phone call and my Nana asking what kind of cereal my brother and I wanted. This was the greatest phone call of the year, not because I cared about cereal in particular (although there was this incredible kind of cereal shaped like animals that only existed for a few years and could only be found in the Winn Dixie on Key Biscayne), but because it meant that it was on her consciousness to stock her kitchen with all the things she knew I liked and couldn't easily get in our small town in Northern California: bialis, lox, pickled herring, smoked whitefish, corn rye, green tomatoes.

Ironically, when I was really young, I thought eating was a burden. But the Miami apartment was always a food mecca. There, even things I didn't like I ate, and loved. Pizza and American cheese topped my list of feared and disliked foods, yet Nana made the BEST English muffin pizza and I'd come in from a swim at the pool and munch ecstatically. (For the remaining 11 months of the year you couldn't get me near the stuff.) I learned to love many foods in Miami: grapefruit that my grandfather ate for breakfast simply cut in half around its swollen belly. When I was really little I always wanted to sprinkle sugar on mine, but overtime I learned to like it the way he ate it; even today, it's one of my favorite fruits. I also learned to dress my salad only with balsamic vinegar just like Zaidee did every night. Growing up, I always knew this about my mother: when she would go to the movie theater as a child and all the other kids her age would order ice cream or candy from the concession counter, she would ask for a pickle. Like my mother, I have an affinity for the sour, salty and briny. I can stand with a jar of peperoncinis and eat them one after another until the jar is gone. Genetics is an amazing thing this way, perhaps I got my taste preference from my mother, more likely I inherited it straight from my grandfather, just as she did.

There are many foods I will always associate with my grandparents' inviting dinner table: Sweet potatoes, roasted in the oven and served steaming, whole or in half, with their syrup sticking to their skin. Chocolate bobka, warmed lightly so the fluffy dough meshed with the barely melting chocolate. Even though I stopped eating meat years ago, I still think fondly on Nana's duck, fricassee, chopped liver, and brisket. My little fingers getting greasy as I picked around my plate.

On most nights Nana cooks dinner. Zaidee always eats happily, never complaining about the way this or that is cooked. Maybe it's because after sixty years Nana knows just how Zaidee likes it, maybe it's because after sixty years they both like it the same way. Maybe it's because the food Nana cooks is made with so much love it's nearly impossible to dislike. I learned to eat under my grandparents' watchful and loving eyes. I developed my palette in large part because of how they stocked their fridge and fed me between rowdy bouts at the beach or general mischief with my cousins.

Even now, living in urban areas where all kind of food is accessible to me, I find that certain things don't taste as good as they do in their kitchen. Green tomatoes are never better than straight from the jar, my fork staked through it's middle, juices dripping into the sink, my bathing suit dripping onto Nana's kitchen floor. I can't imagine my life without my Miami food. I can't imagine Miami food without my grandparents. Grapefruit and Balsamic vinegar, bobka and sweet potatoes, bialis and smoked whitefish, American cheese and English muffins, Nana and Zaidee. Sixty years of perfect pairings, here's to many more...