Food Anger

“If you screw up a dish bad enough, just serve it anyway and call it ‘Chicago Style’.” – Anonymous

“Why are you so angry?” My much younger co-worker, whom I generally admire asked me.

We were in a chat group at work discussing what type of foods we should bring to the various office social events we had planned throughout the year. I had just been assigned to bring ‘doughnuts’ with the suggestion of where I should get them. I replied, “those are not doughnuts” and we were off to the races. Despite me stating one of the few iron clad laws of the universe, that to be a doughnut, a pastry must have a hole in the middle, neither she, nor the other members of the chat were willing to concede the point.

I think we can all agree, that they didn’t want to admit to being wrong.

We went through a number of products that you could get from a doughnut shop that did not have holes in them. “What about such and such? You can buy it at Dunkin and it has no hole,” the collective challenged.

I had an answer for all of these, “that’s a Bismarck,” or “that’s an Eclair,” I responded jauntily, knowing that I was on the side of righteousness. However, blinded by ego and group think they refused to yield and switched to a topic they thought would be friendlier ground.

“Ask him about Chicago deep dish,” one of them typed. Obviously a deliberate attempt to poke the bear, I rose to the occasion and stated the well known fact that unless you can fold a slice in half, it’s not pizza, and that what you buy in Chicago is simply an over-baked casserole. Being a native New Yorker, I put a pitch fork in the argument by stating my Queens street cred, hoping that would finally have them waving a white flag.

But no. They went for the nuclear option and someone asked how I made my lasagna. I knew where they were heading, fueled by provincialism and underdeveloped taste buds they were laying the old cottage cheese ambush. “Ricotta and Cottage cheese taste the same.” I scoffed at this, not willing to dignify it with a reply.

So they pressed onto other topics, finally running out of steam when I informed them that no matter how crappy your beer turns out, you can always throw in a ton of hops, call it an IPA, and some hipster will post a glowing review and it will become a thing until something even crappier tasting arrives.

While I had convincingly won every single battle, I still had the feeling I was losing the war. Did I indeed have food anger? Where did it stem from?

Rather than go to the expense of traditional therapy let’s save a couple of years of useless blather and cut right to the end and blame it on my mother. To be fair, she’s passed on, and so I don’t have to be scared that I might say the wrong thing…like the time I told her Aunt Sis really knew how to mix up a good bowl of mashed potatoes. I thought she might put me up for adoption. I don’t remember what she said but is was something along the lines of “well maybe you’d like to go live in the sticks with her!” (my aunt lived in suburban Chicago where, she had once informed my mother, that they actually had indoor toilets).¹ My mother, not easily fooled, never bought into this because as far as she was concerned, anything past the end of a subway line might as well be Outer Mongolia.²

So if, I do have food anger, I definitely inherited it. I was exposed to the most horrific family bloodbaths where food was concerned. For instance, my Uncle George, husband of my mother’s sister, Aunt Leonia, only kept mayonnaise in the house so he could make be beg for it on my sandwiches and then taunt me over it. Or the time my mother unmasked Leonia’s “homemade” Pound Cake recipe by triumphantly marching the box around a house full of guests after finally discovering it in a trash can. This was widely seen as a de-facto victory in the food war, because previously, my mother’s rum infused fruit cake, and Leonia’s pound cake, had occupied unassailable positions in the family recipe hierarchy.

My mother was not gracious in victory. She constantly reminded me that no one else could pull off the lasagna correctly, and never never let me hear the end of how Leonia had stolen her peach cake recipe, because “she always has to be the big shot, trying to butter up to pastor and all those busybodies by making it for every church dinner. If they only knew.” More so than the historical blowups around the mashed potatoes and pound cakes, it was the slow drip of these constant reminders of past wrongs that inflicted the real trauma on me.

I sometimes wondered if it came from our Acadian and Creole backgrounds where food was deeply ingrained in the culture. But I don’t think that can be it. No one argued about how to make gumbo, we all just did it. Even I could make it right. Everyone knew Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce was the correct hot sauce, and that you had to keep the bottle away from my grandmother otherwise it would wind up in the cake.³

I think it had more to do with Drake’s Bakeries, the large Northeastern supplier of baked treats like Ring Dings, Yodels, and the heavenly Devil Dogs. You see, my mother and all her sisters and brothers worked there, and the Drakes culture was deeply embedded in our family and their wide group of friends. The bakery hierarchy didn’t stop at the factory, it was well known that the actual bakers were at the top of the hierarchy and I believe it informed their friendship hierarchies as well. Well into her seventies, decades after Drakes had moved out of Brooklyn, Leonia married a former colleague. When people asked where they met, she would always put on an air, straighten up a little and tell them they met at Drakes. Then taking a pause for dramatic effect she would tell them “Yes. He was one of the BAKERS.”

So this is how I came to develop food anger, at least it’s my best theory. But I’m all better now, I just wish I had a Drakes Devil Dog which is 10x better than any of that garbage that Hostess makes.

Don’t even get me started on bagels.

¹ My mother had actually visited my Aunt Sis in a more remote part of Illinois years earlier, where Sis had relocated with her sailor husband after the war. There were no indoor toilets where my formerly prissy aunt now lived, and nothing was going to convince my mother that there was a single one in the entire state.

² Is there an Inner Mongolia? Had you asked my mother she probably would have just pointed across the bay towards New Jersey.

³ This was no empty threat. One day, my Uncle Andrew, shoveled in a mouthful of cake that my grandmother had baked. “For God’s sake Mother!!! What the hell is in this cake?” My grandmother calmly asked if there was something wrong which Andy answered with “Wrong? My mouth is on fire!” This she answered, sweetly informing him that she had added some peppercorns to give it a little “zest.”

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