Although there was an interval when my mother attempted to convince her children that Tiger’s Milk Bars made from carob were as nice as chocolate, we really didn’t eat in the 1970s like it was the 1970s. There were no TV dinners in our harvest-gold Frigidaire freezer out in the windswept lonesome wastes of Napeague, no Kaukauna Port Wine Cheese Spread, no Hamburger Helper, no pigs in any blankets. There was a bottle of French or Italian red wine for the grown-ups and, to give an example, raw bay scallops for everyone, served with a dipping sauce of soy, ginger, and rice vinegar. We ate a fair amount of squid, calling it “squid” not calamari, and bluefish smoked at home over wood that had been soaked in seawater. Venison stew made with burgundy. Venison that someone had shot. That kind of thing. We ate sorrel and, I remember at least one time, dandelion greens. We ate our green salads at the end of our meal, not before the main course like heathens, and dressed them with olive oil, sherry vinegar, and shallots. There was no Russian dressing in that house in the 1970s. God forbid.
I don’t quite know how it came to be that my parents’ culinary habits were on the advanced side for that era of sesame-seed buns and Fresca. My father, I somehow got the message, had acquired a taste for raw fish, and deviated generally from normal American cuisine, during his time in the Navy, when he was a lieutenant aboard a battleship with the American fleet at Yokosuka, Japan. In the 1970s we ate raw fluke and flounder cut with a sharp knife into translucent strips as a special treat. When the whole “locavore” thing came into fashion some 20 or 25 years ago I was affronted: This was our family’s unique and proprietary way of eating; and could all you hipsters please step off? Step away from the wild-grape leaves, the homemade sea salt, and the beach plums? I still get a bit irrationally hostile when I come upon strangers harvesting cranberries in our once-desolate bog.
This is all stupid, I understand, as well as weirdly self-aggrandizing, but I forgive myself with the consoling thought that it’s a fairly common and a fairly natural impulse to get territorial about your own supposedly special tastes and quirky habits, whatever they may be, when you spot someone else acquiring them. I think my father invented locavore cooking and there’s probably someone else out there who thinks they invented the charcuterie board. Or the smoothie. I was also quite annoyed in the 1990s when Martha Stewart popularized big, square glass pantry jars with moss-green tin lids, and paperwhite narcissus bulbs forced in moss-green bowls on beds of beach stones. Again: my pantry jars, not Martha Stewart’s, and my paperwhites. Or, to be more precise, my grandmother Nettie Edwards’s green-lidded pantry pickle jars and bowls of paperwhites. Step away from the narcissus, Martha.
Inside the lower half of the hutch cabinet in the kitchen of our weather-battered house, which hunched its back against the wind off Gardiner’s Bay, out by the Smith Meal fish factory at Promised Land, was an apparatus made in Italy, stainless steel, that you used to press out fine sheets of homemade pasta. I don’t think my parents made their own pasta frequently in the 1970s, and the pasta machine mostly gathered dust, the sticky dust of a kitchen where things were frequently fried in duck fat, down there on the bottom shelf near the bamboo dumpling-steamer and a specialized asparagus pan and tongs.
I thought of that Italian pasta-making machine last week when I returned home from work to discover my son, Teddy, in the kitchen holding a giant pan of homemade fettuccine Alfredo with two hands and two pot holders. He’d called me on my cell earlier, in the afternoon, to hint that something special was cooking in the kitchen: “You are going to be very surprised,” he said. “You’ll never guess.” I was indeed astounded. He’d made the fettuccine with flour, eggs, and water, rolling it out on the kitchen table and cutting it into ribbons. Three days later, he acquired genuine Italian-semolina pasta flour and made more fettuccine Alfredo. You better believe my praise, my parental positive reinforcement of this new hobby, was over the top. I think I might go upstairs right now, at midnight, to wake him up and tell him again how much I loved his fettuccine Alfredo.
On Saturday, we dragged ourselves to Greenport to clear out, once and for all, the cottage at Peconic Landing out of which my mother has been moved only recently, bundled off — protesting only very quietly and with a sort of soft astonishment of her own — to the so-called “skilled nursing” wing, wrapped in a microfleece blanket, a pair of fuzzy slipper socks, and a lavender cashmere sweater that is the last souvenir of her former dignity. We banged around the cottage, packing a few sticks of furniture and a couple paintings into the Star delivery van, clanging the pots and crashing the pans, which had been entirely unused since she and Chris moved up there five years ago. I don’t know if they ever did cook supper once in that kitchen. Certainly no squid, no venison stew, no dandelion greens. No cranberry relish, no rice-paper-thin fluke. Helen and Chris have gone to the place where they will be served Russian dressing.
I looked over the long row of old cookbooks that had made the final voyage from East Hampton to Greenport, but decided not to take home again Craig Claiborne’s “New York Times Cookbook” or “A Feast Made for Laughter.” We never do get our recipes out of a book anymore, do we? Teddy, I believe, learned to make fettuccine on YouTube.