The Other Grandma

Before anyone starts to feel to sorry for me that I grew up with a mean, praline-rationing grandmother, you need to know about my other grandmother. Unlike my father’s mother who was a cerebral, WASP-y woman who could not cook to save her life, my maternal grandmother (always called Bama by her five grandchildren) was an Italian/Greek food pusher who pretty much resided in her kitchen. (My parents lived “A Big Fat Greek Wedding” ~40 years before it came out on film.)

Trips to Bama’s house were filled with eating that started the second we walked in the door…

Welcome! Have some food.
How was your trip? Have some food.
Tired? Have some food.
Happy? Have some food.
Sad? Have some food.
Have you lost weight? Have some food.
Bored? Have some food.
Did you fall down and skin your knee? Have some food.
Full? Have some food.

As if that were not enough, she would also send us out with our grandfather to get ice cream or doughnuts at least twice a day. And… “Oh, here is some candy. Would you like a cookie? They are just fresh from the oven…“ Luckily for my sisters and me, my mother concurred my grandmother’s food-centric views and additionally felt that grandparents are supposed to spoil grandchildren. Woo-hoo! We ran amok.

While my other grandmother lived just through the woods, Bama lived 3 to 4 hours away in the big city (well, it seemed big to me at the time, but it was only Modesto) in a pink house with white trim. And each bathroom in the house was a different pastel color – butter-mint green, baby blue and Pepto Bismal pink (the master bath) – with exact-color matching tile, tubs, sinks, toilets, fuzzy toilet lid covers, rugs, walls, towels, soap and knick-knacks (we used the blue bathroom with the cyanotic cherub soap dish that I vividly remember to this day).

Also residing in my grandparent’s candy-colored house, was always at least one pet bird belonging to my grandfather (he started with canaries, but had moved on to parakeets by the time I was around). Every morning my grandfather would save a crust from his morning toast, dip it in his coffee and place it on his empty breakfast plate. Then he’d open the door to Corkey’s cage (all the parakeets were named Corkey), the bird would climb down its little ladder and peck at the toast until it all that was left on the plate was a few crumbs and a faint smear of coffee. After eating, Corkey (probably as a result of all the caffeine he just ingested) would proceed to fly around the kitchen. That would cause my grandmother to try to cover her heavily hair-sprayed bouffant hairdo with her hands and yell: “Nick, Nick, the bird is going to get stuck in my hair!” This ritual was repeated daily until my grandfather’s death (the last of the Corkey’s came to live with us, but he did not outlive my grandfather by more than a month).

And trips to Bama’s house always culminated with a huge dinner for all the surrounding family. A long table (or maybe it was two) was set up in their large rec-room (which had been the garage before extensive remodeling) and my mother and grandmother would spend the whole day in the kitchen cooking. Then the extended family would start showing up, all bearing bowls and dishes of food. To me, everyone was “Aunt-this” or “Uncle-that” – I have no idea how many were actually relatives. I also have no idea how long those meals lasted, one moment I would be sitting at the table, leaning against my mother and then I would wake up in the next morning in the room with three twin beds and the (quite terrifying) pictures of clowns on the walls.

The oddest thing is that while I associate my Bama with food and with the exception of the rabbit ear cookies (koulourakia) that she kept between layers of wax paper in a large hat box under her bed (and how can one forget something like that!), I really do not recall any details about the things she cooked. I don’t remember what she served at those huge family dinners, what kind of cookies she stuffed us with fresh from the oven or what we ate for lunch sitting at her kitchen table next to the picture window with little pots of cacti lined up all along the sill. Not even a single memory of any food made with the huge, sweet lemons off the giant tree in her backyard.

But I am fortunate to have some of my grandmother’s old cookbooks and recipe cards so I do know that, like me, she was a copious note-taker regarding her cooking. All of her cookbooks are heavily annotated with changes, substitutions and comments on the tastiness of the resulting dishes. I have never had the opportunity to know my grandmother or to watch her cook from the perspective of an adult and avid cook myself. But when I make things from her recipes, I like to think about her cooking the same thing in her kitchen all those years ago. Now if she had only made pralines…