Patricia J. Williams

Ethnic Hash Patricia J. Williams
Recently, I was invited to a book party. The book wasabout pluralism. "Bring an hors d'oeuvre representing your ethnic heritage," said the hostess, innocently enough. Her request threw me into a panic. Do I even have an ethnicity: I wondered. It was like suddenly discovering you might not have a belly button. I tell you, I had to go to the dictionary. What were the flavors, accents, and linguistic trills that were passed down to me over the ages: What are the havits, customs, and common traits of the social group by which I have been guided in life-and how do I cook them? My last name is from a presumably Welsh plantation owner. My mother chose my first name from a dictionary of girls' names, "It didn't sound like Edna or Myrtle, " she says, as though that explains anything. I have two mostly Cherokee grandparents, There's a Scottish great grandfather, a French-Canadian great uncle, and a bunch of other relations no one ever talks about. Not one of them left recipes. Of course the ancestors who have had the most tangible influence on my place in the world were probably the West Africans, and I can tell you right off that I haven't the faintest idea what they do for hors d'oeuvres in West Africa (although I have this Senegalese friend who always serves the loveliest, poufiest little fish mousse things in puff pastries that look, well, totally French). Ethnic recipes throw me into the same sort of quandary as that proposed "interracial" box on the census form: the concept seems so historically vague, so cheerfully open-ended, as to be virtually meaningless. Everyone I know has at least three different kinds of cheese in their fondue. I suppose I could serve myself up as something like Tragic Mulatta Souffle, except that I've never gotten the hang of souffles. (Too much fussing, too little reward.) So as far as this world's concerned, I've always thought of myself as just plain black. Let's face it: however much my categories get jumbled when I hang out at my favorite kosher sushi spot, it's the little black core of me that moves through the brave new world of Manhattan as I hail a cab, rent an apartment, and apply for a job. Although it's true, I never have tried hailng a cab as an ethnic ... So let me see. My father is from the state of Georgia. When he cooks, which is not often, the results are distinctly Southern. His specialties are pork chops and pies; he makes the good-luck black-eyed peas on New Year's. His recipes are definitely black in a regional sense, since most blacks in the United States until recently lived in the Southeast. He loves pig, He uses lard. My mother's family is also black, but relentlessly steeped in the New England tradition of hard-winter cuisine. One of ft earliest memories is of my mother borrowing my father's screwdriver so she could pry open a box of salt cod. In those days, cod came in wooden boxes, nailed shut, and you really had to hack around the edges to loosen the lid. Cod-from-a-box had to be soaked overnight. The next day you mixed it with boiled potatoes and fried it in Crisco Then you served it with baked beans in a little brown pot, with salt pork and molasses. There was usually some shredded cabbage as well, with carrots for color. And of course there was piccalilli-every good homemaker had piccalilli on hand. Oh, and hot rolls served with homemade Concord grape jelly. Or maybe just brown bread and butter. These were the staples of Saturday night supper. We had baked chicken on Sundays, boiled chicken other days. My mother has recipes for how to boil a chicken: a whole range of them, with and without bay leaf, onions, potatoes, carrots. With boiled chicken, life can never be dull. The truth is we liked watermelon in our family. But the only times we ate it-well, those were secret moments, private moments, guilty, even shameful moments, never unburdened by the thought of what M t happen if our white neighbors saw us enjoying the primeval fruit. We were always on display when it came to things stereotypical. Fortunately, my mother was never handier in the kitchen than when under political pressure. She would take that odd, thin-necked implement known as a melon-baller and gouge out innocent pink circlets and serve them to us, like 140e mounds of faux sorbet, in fluted crystal goblets. The only time we used those goblets was to disguise watermelon, in case someone was peering idly through the windows, lurking about in racial judgment. I don't remember my parents having many dinner parties, but for those special occasions requiring actual hors d'oeuvres, there were crackers and cream cheese, small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, Red Devil deviled ham with mayonnaise and chopped dill pickles. And where there were hors d'oeuvres, there had to be dessert on the other end to balance things out. Slices of home-made cake and punch. "Will you take coffee or tea?" my mother would ask shyly, at the proud culmination of such a meal. THE ICEBOX There is a plate with little leftover lamb chops in my refrigerator. They look lonely and cold, with those ridiculous frilly paper socks dressing the ends of their elegant arches of bone. Their presence reminds me of a TV program I saw about hunger and homeless- ness in New York City, They interviewed lots of mid- die-Glass New Yorkers who didn't want to look at the homeless; who wanted them removed from the bus stations, from the parks, from the streets, from the common view; who gave reasons such as: they're unsightly, they defecate in public, they smell, they might attack young children. Then came interviews with policy analysts about why the homeless should be permitted to stay. They gave reasons such as: they have a right, where else can they go it has always been thus, and besides, they perform an ecological function by scavenging through garbage cans for recyclables, like aluminum cans. The one time a reporter talked to a homeless person, the exchange was direct. "Why would you rather sleep on the street than go to a city shelter?" asked the reporter. The old man snapped back: "Don't put words in my mouth! I don't want to sleep on the street; I'd rather be sleeping in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue overlooking the park with a maid and a chauffeur and a cook who could make me a dinner of lamb chops. What's your address?" The program closed with some observations about how "aggressive' these homeless can be toward vulnerable middle-class citizens, who were urged to Act Now to prevent their own slaughter. Anyway, those chops have been lying at the back of my refrigerator ever since, like a moldy existential offering. I have a big rattling vault of a refrigerator. It's quite new, actually-my industrial strength investment in culinary self-gratification, with the handy-dandy freezer drawer down on the bottom, It came with a refrigerator Installation Person who is supposed to install it and fasten it to a bracing system up against the kitchen wall, so that when the children swing on the door, as he tells me they will surely grow to do ("not mine," I say, he rolls his eyes), the thing won't heave forward and crush them beneath an avalanche of Dean and Deluca delectables. So there he is, my Refrigerator In- stallation Person, bolting and banging things into the wall, when his beeper goes off. 91 1, it flashes. "What sort of refrigerator emergency rates a '91 I'?" I ask. He runs to my telephone to call Refrigerator Central. Turns out ltzhak Perlman's fridge is on the blink. He must fly, later for now, same time to- morrow, try not to lean on the door, OK? Go, I say. Go, I pray. I am awed. I am honored, overwhelmed with an unseemly pride. To think that Itzhak Perlman and I share the very same refrigerator repairman. I am filled with happy musings about what he must be having for dinner. Oh, the humanity. Six degrees of separation and all that. THE MELTING POT For years, my mother's father worked as the solemn, brown-faced mattre d' at one of Boston's finer eating establishments. By all accounts MY grandfather was a gentle steward and tireless "race-man," quietly devoted to the cause of social equality. Long after he died the civil rights movement swept the nation, and my family set out to dine at places whose thresholds we had never quite dared to imagine crossing before. Dressed up and slicked down, we were a determined little band of gastronomical integrationists, Our favorite place to go on special occasions was a wonderful seafood restaurant. The newspapers always crowed about the clam chowder, but the restaurant's real draw as far as I was concerned was the lobster-baked or steamed, the best anywhere. If my sister and I had been very good, my parents would take us there to celebrate birthdays- or, some years later, graduations from high school, college, and law school. Eating lobster was a kind of class sabotage in Boston. It was hard not to be inclined toward some notion of human equality when besmirched by the splattered devastation generally wrought by the arduousness of the endeavor. This particular restaurant was quite formal, yet the lobsters were served whole, gloriously encased in those pretty red shells-so impenetrable, so resistant, so hard-the sweet lobster meat quivering within. The restaurant armed Boston's finest citizens with all the implements of attack: linen napkins, starched bibs, slender forks with cruel little tines, elegant silver tongs, exquisitely wrought nut-crackery things desired to twist and snap and crush. I always envied the ladder-backd calm of the old-fashioned "proper Bostonian," so imperturbably self-confident amid even his self-induced tUO40#@ the flying lobster bits, the splashing butter, the badly spotted bit), the impossible heap of crustacean parts sliding from the plate; the public struggle like some wet and salty version of mud wrestling I marveled at the apparent lack of tension between the sloppiness of the enterprise and the prerogative of being unflappably highborn. I have never been able to relax while eating lobster in public. I am afraid that the world will see me as the sort who is always soiled after a good meal, it being my nature to roll in the trough. I suppose this anxiety about propriety and place, race and class, marks me as hopelessly bourgeois. The quest for acceptance is a kind of escape; the borders of oneself are patrolled so closely that one is always looking outward, looking toward a home beyond where one is. I wonder if the real privilege of high status is freedom from such anxiety. QUADROON SURPRISE Some have said that too much salt cod too early in life hobbles the culinary senses forever. I have faith that this is not the case, and that any disadvantage can be overcome with time and a little help from Williams-Sonoma. Having grown up and learned that you are what you eat, I have worked to broaden my horizons and cultivate my tastes. I entertain global gastronomic aspirations, and my palate knows no bounds. After all, it Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben can Just Get Over it who am I to cling to the limitations of the past? Yes, I have learned to love my inner ethnic child. And so, I leave you with a recipe for the Twenty-first Century: Chicken with Spanish Rice and Not-Just-Black Beans Boil the chicken Boil the rice Boil the beans Throw in as many exotic-sounding spices and mysterious roots as you can lay your hands on-go on, use your imagination! - and garnish with those fashionable little wedges of lime that make everything look vaguely Thai. Watch those taxis screech to a halt! A guaranteed crowd-pleaser that can be reheated or rehashed ge6oration after generation. Coffee Tea?

Ethnic Hash
Patricia J. Williams

Recently, I was invited to a book party. The book wasabout pluralism. "Bring an hors d'oeuvre representing your ethnic heritage," said the hostess, innocently enough. Her request threw me into a panic. Do I even have an ethnicity: I wondered. It was like suddenly discovering you might not have a belly button. I tell you, I had to go to the dictionary. What were the flavors, accents, and linguistic trills that were passed down to me over the ages: What are the havits, customs, and common traits of the social group by which I have been guided in life-and how do I cook them?
My last name is from a presumably Welsh plantation owner. My mother chose my first name from a dictionary of girls' names, "It didn't sound like Edna or Myrtle, " she says, as though that explains anything. I have two mostly Cherokee grandparents, There's a Scottish great grandfather, a French-Canadian great uncle, and a bunch of other relations no one ever talks about. Not one of them left recipes. Of course the ancestors who have had the most tangible influence on my place in the world were probably the West Africans, and I can tell you right off that I haven't the faintest idea what they do for hors d'oeuvres in West Africa (although I have this Senegalese friend who always serves the loveliest, poufiest little fish mousse things in puff pastries that look, well, totally French).
Ethnic recipes throw me into the same sort of quandary as that proposed "interracial" box on the census form: the concept seems so historically vague, so cheerfully open-ended, as to be virtually meaningless. Everyone I know has at least three different kinds of cheese in their fondue. I suppose I could serve myself up as something like Tragic Mulatta Souffle, except that I've never gotten the hang of souffles. (Too much fussing, too little reward.) So as far as this world's concerned, I've always thought of myself as just plain black. Let's face it: however much my categories get jumbled when I hang out at my favorite kosher sushi spot, it's the little black core of me that moves through the brave new world of Manhattan as I hail a cab, rent an apartment, and apply for a job.
Although it's true, I never have tried hailng a cab as an ethnic ...
So let me see. My father is from the state of Georgia. When he cooks, which is not often, the results are distinctly Southern. His specialties are pork chops and pies; he makes the good-luck black-eyed peas on New Year's. His recipes are definitely black in a regional sense, since most blacks in the United States until recently lived in the Southeast. He loves pig, He uses lard.
My mother's family is also black, but relentlessly steeped in the New England tradition of hard-winter cuisine. One of ft earliest memories is of my mother borrowing my father's screwdriver so she could pry open a box of salt cod. In those days, cod came in wooden boxes, nailed shut, and you really had to hack around the edges to loosen the lid. Cod-from-a-box had to be soaked overnight. The next day you mixed it with boiled potatoes and fried it in Crisco Then you served it with baked beans in a little brown pot, with salt pork and molasses. There was usually some shredded cabbage as well, with carrots for color. And of course there was piccalilli-every good homemaker had piccalilli on hand. Oh, and hot rolls served with homemade Concord grape jelly. Or maybe just brown bread and butter. These were the staples of Saturday night supper.
We had baked chicken on Sundays, boiled chicken other days. My mother has recipes for how to boil a chicken: a whole range of them, with and without bay leaf, onions, potatoes, carrots. With boiled chicken, life can never be dull. The truth is we liked watermelon in our family. But the only times we ate it-well, those were secret moments, private moments, guilty, even shameful moments, never unburdened by the thought of what M t happen if our white neighbors saw us enjoying the primeval fruit. We were always on display when it came to things stereotypical. Fortunately, my mother was never handier in the kitchen than when under political pressure. She would take that odd, thin-necked implement known as a melon-baller and gouge out innocent pink circlets and serve them to us, like 140e mounds of faux sorbet, in fluted crystal goblets. The only time we used those goblets was to disguise watermelon, in case someone was peering idly through the windows, lurking about in racial judgment.
I don't remember my parents having many dinner parties, but for those special occasions requiring actual hors d'oeuvres, there were crackers and cream cheese, small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, Red Devil deviled ham with mayonnaise and chopped dill pickles. And where there were hors d'oeuvres, there had to be dessert on the other end to balance things out. Slices of home-made cake and punch. "Will you take coffee or tea?" my mother would ask shyly, at the proud culmination of such a meal.

THE ICEBOX
There is a plate with little leftover lamb chops in my refrigerator. They look lonely and cold, with those ridiculous frilly paper socks dressing the ends of their elegant arches of bone. Their presence reminds me of a TV program I saw about hunger and homeless- ness in New York City, They interviewed lots of mid- die-Glass New Yorkers who didn't want to look at the homeless; who wanted them removed from the bus stations, from the parks, from the streets, from the common view; who gave reasons such as: they're unsightly, they defecate in public, they smell, they might attack young children. Then came interviews with policy analysts about why the homeless should be permitted to stay. They gave reasons such as: they have a right, where else can they go it has always been thus, and besides, they perform an ecological function by scavenging through garbage cans for recyclables, like aluminum cans.
The one time a reporter talked to a homeless person, the exchange was direct. "Why would you rather sleep on the street than go to a city shelter?" asked the reporter. The old man snapped back: "Don't put words in my mouth! I don't want to sleep on the street; I'd rather be sleeping in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue overlooking the park with a maid and a chauffeur and a cook who could make me a dinner of lamb chops. What's your address?" The program closed with some observations about how "aggressive' these homeless can be toward vulnerable middle-class citizens, who were urged to Act Now to prevent their own slaughter.
Anyway, those chops have been lying at the back of my refrigerator ever since, like a moldy existential offering.
I have a big rattling vault of a refrigerator. It's quite new, actually-my industrial strength investment in culinary self-gratification, with the handy-dandy freezer drawer down on the bottom, It came with a refrigerator Installation Person who is supposed to install it and fasten it to a bracing system up against the kitchen wall, so that when the children swing on the door, as he tells me they will surely grow to do ("not mine," I say, he rolls his eyes), the thing won't heave forward and crush them beneath an avalanche of Dean and Deluca delectables. So there he is, my Refrigerator In- stallation Person, bolting and banging things into the wall, when his beeper goes off. 91 1, it flashes.
"What sort of refrigerator emergency rates a '91 I'?" I ask. He runs to my telephone to call Refrigerator Central. Turns out ltzhak Perlman's fridge is on the blink. He must fly, later for now, same time to- morrow, try not to lean on the door, OK?
Go, I say. Go, I pray. I am awed. I am honored, overwhelmed with an unseemly pride. To think that Itzhak Perlman and I share the very same refrigerator repairman. I am filled with happy musings about what he must be having for dinner. Oh, the humanity. Six degrees of separation and all that.

THE MELTING POT
For years, my mother's father worked as the solemn, brown-faced mattre d' at one of Boston's finer eating establishments. By all accounts MY grandfather was a gentle steward and tireless "race-man," quietly devoted to the cause of social equality.
Long after he died the civil rights movement swept the nation, and my family set out to dine at places whose thresholds we had never quite dared to imagine crossing before. Dressed up and slicked down, we were a determined little band of gastronomical integrationists, Our favorite place to go on special occasions was a wonderful seafood restaurant. The newspapers always crowed about the clam chowder, but the restaurant's real draw as far as I was concerned was the lobster-baked or steamed, the best anywhere. If my sister and I had been very good, my parents would take us there to celebrate birthdays- or, some years later, graduations from high school, college, and law school.
Eating lobster was a kind of class sabotage in Boston. It was hard not to be inclined toward some notion of human equality when besmirched by the splattered devastation generally wrought by the arduousness of the endeavor. This particular restaurant was quite formal, yet the lobsters were served whole, gloriously encased in those pretty red shells-so impenetrable, so resistant, so hard-the sweet lobster meat quivering within. The restaurant armed Boston's finest citizens with all the implements of attack: linen napkins, starched bibs, slender forks with cruel little tines, elegant silver tongs, exquisitely wrought nut-crackery things desired to twist and snap and crush.
I always envied the ladder-backd calm of the old-fashioned "proper Bostonian," so imperturbably self-confident amid even his self-induced tUO40#@ the flying lobster bits, the splashing butter, the badly spotted bit), the impossible heap of crustacean parts sliding from the plate; the public struggle like some wet and salty version of mud wrestling I marveled at the apparent lack of tension between the sloppiness of the enterprise and the prerogative of being unflappably highborn.
I have never been able to relax while eating lobster in public. I am afraid that the world will see me as the sort who is always soiled after a good meal, it being my nature to roll in the trough. I suppose this anxiety about propriety and place, race and class, marks me as hopelessly bourgeois. The quest for acceptance is a kind of escape; the borders of oneself are patrolled so closely that one is always looking outward, looking toward a home beyond where one is.
I wonder if the real privilege of high status is freedom from such anxiety.

QUADROON SURPRISE
Some have said that too much salt cod too early in life hobbles the culinary senses forever. I have faith that this is not the case, and that any disadvantage can be overcome with time and a little help from Williams-Sonoma. Having grown up and learned that you are what you eat, I have worked to broaden my horizons and cultivate my tastes. I entertain global gastronomic aspirations, and my palate knows no bounds. After all, it Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben can Just Get Over it who am I to cling to the limitations of the past? Yes, I have learned to love my inner ethnic child. And so, I leave you with a recipe for the Twenty-first Century:
Chicken with Spanish Rice and Not-Just-Black Beans
Boil the chicken
Boil the rice
Boil the beans
Throw in as many exotic-sounding spices and mysterious roots as you can lay your hands on-go on, use your imagination! - and garnish with those fashionable little wedges of lime that make everything look vaguely Thai. Watch those taxis screech to a halt! A guaranteed crowd-pleaser that can be reheated or rehashed ge6oration after generation.
Coffee Tea?