Iris Underwood: The way with food
I come from a land that flowed with raw milk, honey and chocolate gravy. I come from folk who used what they had to sweeten a hard life. Descendants of Scot, Irish, and German immigrants, they fed their family tree pinto beans, greens, cornbread and fried potatoes.
Therefore, when my father swept us north in the Great Migration of 1954, my mother carried the flavor of Appalachia with her. That’s the way with food.
It follows you, calls your name whether three or three thousand miles from your birthplace.
It comes forth from you, inhabits and comforts the space between the place you left and the place you enter. Food holds you together, no matter the distance.
The day my dad turned his maroon Chrysler Fleetline onto Yacama Street in Detroit’s city limits, Mom hauled her cast iron skillet into the kitchen of the house they rented. Her most prized wedding gift from a beloved aunt, Mom set her Aunt Jemima cookie jar on the counter in display.
Within four walls of a strange kitchen, she established our southern table amongst homes occupied by Poles, Italians and Germans.
Far from her folk, milk cow, and garden, Mom transplanted my two sisters and me into the small patch of earth in our barren backyard. She watered us with homogenized milk. Like a long-legged hen, she watched over us, scratched the soil to produce a small patch of Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans.
When Mom held me close, the scent of green beans, fried chicken, and apple pie on her clothes and in her hair comforted me. Soon, our entire large house smelled of our familiar, affectionate South, unlike the unfamiliar, spicy blend of oregano, basil, garlic and tomatoes wafting from the neighbor’s kitchen window. My mother never touched a garlic clove in her life. On the other hand, her light rolls grew famous.
Not yet 5 years old, I didn’t understand these mothers and grandmothers who wore black dresses and scarves, who spoke with their hands and unknown languages, were also transplants. They were just as desperate as my mother to preserve their native food and stories of their homeland.
I did not understand they, too, were aliens, caught between two worlds. The old and new. The homespun and manufactured. These matriarchs also battled to defend their family fold in a strange land with strange people. They used what they had to cling to their heritage.
For most immigrants, cooking was their connection to the homeland they left behind, a ritual to honor their forebears. Preparing one’s ethnic food was an instinctive and distinctive devotion to making a house a home, foreign territory friendly.
A pot of spaghetti sauce and bottle of wine were the Italians’ consolation in their isolation.
Our German neighbors found comfort in their polenta and sauerkraut, and the Polish their Golumpki and Pierogi.
And if born in America’s Appalachia, apple pie and whipping cream were synonymous with love and acceptance. For, in the old order, food came from their labors, orchards, vineyards and livestock, to be harvested and shared with family.
As many mothers of her generation, what Sadie Lee McCoy O’Brien set on our table was the pride of heritage. There, she staked claim to where we stood on Yacama Street. To this day, that declaration spread out before us on a table abundant with pleasure, remains faithful knowledge, memory, and imagination.
Indeed, I hunger for Mom’s apple pie a la mode.
