Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  Borscht is the Mennonite catnip. It makes our eyes roll back in our head a little. If you meet someone who has a Mennonite name, let's say the new research librarian at your college, the encounter might go like this:

  YOU. So you're a Wiebe! May I ask if you're Mennonite?

  MR. WIEBE. Yes, on my father's side. We're the Wiebes in Manitoba. I knew some Mennonite Janzens when I went to school in Minnesota. Are those your folks?

  YOU. No, mine come from Ukraine via Ontario. I'll have to have you and your wife over for some Borscht sometime.

  MR. WIEBE, trembling. Borscht? Really?

  YOU, modestly. Oh, I can get the ole kettle boiling!

  MR. WIEBE, salivating now, with a wild look in his eye. Do you make the kind with beets in it?

  It's important to note that at some point in the last century, Mennonite hausfraus began to substitute Campbell's Tomato Soup for beets. But we purists still prefer the beets. It's the difference between Cracker Barrel and a nice Vermont cheddar. What I'm saying is, there's a place in Mennonite hearts for unlovable foods: beets, braised cabbage, lard. We even do a whimsical little thing with headcheese.

  In every company there's always someone who blasts the copy room with microwave lunches. I'm not talking about Jenny Craig. I'm talking about the stygian stink of something that makes your gorge rise, for instance, a leftover seafood chermoula. The smell perfuses the copy room, which is where, as we all know, companies like to keep the microwave. Lord knows nobody wants to be the guy whose lunches make people pinch their nostrils shut. But there's a guy like that in every crowd. You may recognize him. He's the passenger who unleashes an early morning saucy wet burrito as soon as your aircraft takes off from Newark, and who, just as you think it can't get any worse, bites the head off a pungent pouch of hot-sauce. Olé!

  I turned out to be a variation of that guy. I don't know how it happened, but I grew up to be the gross professor who brownbags a leftover container of cabbage soup, which I heat up at 11:00 a.m., just before other people are ready to smell hot food. My colleagues, mature midlife scholars, are too tactful to make outright gagging noises, but they sure don't come knockin' when that Borscht starts a-rockin'.

  Don't get me wrong; it's good soup. As an adult I have even sometimes served it to guests as a kind of novelty, though I naturally don't mention the vinegar thing. People do like Borscht. They regularly have seconds. (On a side note, Borscht is mighty useful as a weight-loss staple, given its low-carb cabbage goodness. I encourage my readers to communicate this information to the diet guru Suzanne Somers. Borscht is my gift to her. I give it freely.)

  But Borscht is not what you want to tuck into your child's lunch. Trust me. Complications attach to cold Borscht. Back when I was a child, with what was no doubt our limited technology, the chief function of the thermos was to transport liquid, not to retain heat. The Borscht thermos therefore became a time bomb of toxic stink, an odor so scurrilous it could clear a room. I am also willing to consider the possibility that it was only our thermoses, Aaron's and Caleb's and Hannah's and mine, that did not retain heat. My own thermos never matched my diaper bag, so who knows where my mother found it?

  As midlife foodies, Hannah and I formed a plan to make Mennonite foods less embarrassing, more appetizing. We even toyed with the idea of writing our own cookbook. The challenge would be both gustatory and aesthetic. For instance, what could you do to make a boiled hoop-cheese dumpling more fashion-forward, particularly when the white dumpling wears the telltale Mennonite vest of cream gravy? This slightly sour dumpling, called Verenike by our people, is unsurpassed in deliciousness, but I am ready to admit that it would not cut it with the ladies who lunch. It has an albescent quality similar to the Mennonite ladies who prepare it. As a people, we are pale as pork chops, flavored by centuries of inbreeding and shame.

  Alas, Mennonite cuisine is not what I would call imaginative. At the local farmers' market in my little town, I sometimes see a booth run by Old Order Mennonites, whose women wear head coverings and long modest dresses. The last time I saw the Mennonites I asked them if they had any tiny new red potatoes. The two young women tending the booth looked at each other and tried not to smile. They obviously found my request inexplicable. There were regular-sized potatoes aplenty, right there in front of me. Why on earth would I want tiny runtling potatoes when I could have the big boys? I could see over the young women's shoulders to a basket on the back counter, and in that basket I spied what I was after: marble-sized potatoes, fresh as spring. "How about those?" I asked, pointing.

  "Those? You want those?" The young woman could hardly contain her amazement. "Those are the culls. We're throwing them away."

  "Can I buy them?"

  "Okay. Fifty cents."

  The young women giggled as I walked away.

  But I should have given the Mennonites-and my frugal mother-more credit. Long ago when I was studying in France, I signed up to take a cooking class. This wasn't a course at Gastronomicom or L'École Internationale de Pâtisserie; it was just a course offered by a three-star chef. I was surprised, almost miffed, by the fact that there weren't terribly many surprises, beyond the secrets of cooking with wine. Why, we were learning things I already knew how to do! I felt sheepish, like Dorothy when she realizes that she's been wearing the ruby slippers all along. I already knew, for instance, how to make velvety sauces, how to cook a nice cut of meat to any degree of doneness, how to set a tart perfectly and plumply in its pan. It can't be that easy, I thought in dismay; there has to be a special kind of cosmopolite knowledge that, once learned, will change me forever.

  When I came back to the United States, I gave my first sit-down dinner party for ten, planning a decisively L.A. menu of scallops with three-tomato relish and tomatillo vinaigrette. My guests were industry hipsters, non-Mennonites all, people to whom current culinary trends meant something. It was a debut of sorts, and I was nervous. Would my guests taste my turnip potato gratiné and know me for a poseur and a fraud? Would they intuit that I had trained on brown gravy and homemade applesauce?

  The dinner went off without a hitch. I even received two requests for the recipe for my lemon tart with raspberry coulis. That night as I cleaned up after the party, I experienced one of those serene Browning moments: "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world!" Finally, the weight of my Mennonite past no longer seemed an insupportable handicap. In fact, with respect to cooking, I was downright glad I had been given the secret Menno starter kit. Without it I could have never been so confident as I simultaneously freshened the appetizers, served the meal, and enjoyed the company of my dinner guests.

  Yet it never struck me that I might come out of the Mennonite Closet of Shame foodwise until five or six years ago. I'd spent the last twenty years cooking more or less seriously, learning from Hannah, avidly reading and experimenting with piquant elegancies. Every April my department colleagues throw a banquet for our graduating English majors. Each professor brings a dish. The event lies somewhere between a potluck and an upscale dining experience, as several of my colleagues are excellent cooks. On this occasion I had signed up for an entrée, but a busy schedule had gotten the best of me, and suddenly it was Saturday. Nick said, "Who cares what you bring? Just take something out of the freezer. They're college kids. They'll eat cardboard."

  True enough. As a professor, I see firsthand the horrifying things that undergraduates cheerfully consume, from Pop-Tarts to pork rinds. But I thought that our majors deserved something special, something elegant, for this dinner to celebrate their milestone achievement. Alas, there wasn't time for something elegant. So I took out a big pan of frozen Hollapse (pronounced HollapSAY).

  Hollapse represents one of the many Mennonite destinations for cabbage. The cabbage is subjected to a Mennonite trifecta of boiling, browning, and baking. Each cabbage leaf is pulled steaming from the head, and it rests like a hammock in the hand. The leaf is then filled with a seasoned meat-and-rice mixture, rounded and shaped, braised and simmered. Eac
h little bundle is secured with a toothpick and put to bed in a tomatoey sauce. The toothpick is hard to detect and might surprise the eater. So might the first whiff of the savage cabbage smell. But Hollapse is what I had on hand, and Hollapse is what I brought to the department function.

  I know that I cannot take it as a compliment that the seniors polished off an enormous kettle of Hollapse in record time, because it is true that they would have eaten anything with gusto. But something changed when my student Ricky sat down beside me. He had excused himself to go back for seconds, and now he brought back a plate with three more Hollapse stacked up like an Egyptian pyramid. He had ladled a veritable Nile of sauce over the whole. "Dude," he said, "I don't know what these fuckers are, but they're amazing!"

  Since then I have increasingly drawn Mennonite recipes into my cooking. I no longer see Mennonite cookery as the madwoman in the attic, the embarrassing relative who must be kept away from the party at all costs. My Mennonite dishes have been getting bolder, sneaking down to elegant tables, quietly presenting themselves before senators and producers and architects. So what if I mix the food of shame with the fruit of knowledge? In the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden, shame comes inevitably with knowledge. Knowledge actually causes shame. Remember when Adam and Eve taste the fatal fruit, only to realize their nakedness? And they reach for fig leaves to cover their naughty bits, thereby beginning a long trajectory of genital embarrassment? That story would end differently if it were up to me. I'd have Eve taste the fruit all right, and also give it to Adam, because who doesn't enjoy feeding the man she loves? Maybe the fig leaf could stay too, since cooks do need aprons after all. But in my version, Eve wouldn't run away and hide. She'd invite God to sit down and take a load off. "I've made a flavorful little Apfelstrudel," she'd say. "Try some."

  SEVEN

  The Big Job

  Hannah and Phil and I went to a karaoke party that had been offered up for bid at an auction. The hosts had purchased it for six thousand dollars, a sum that included all the bells and whistles of the lounge karaoke: lights, mikes, backups, optional air guitar, mariachi shakers. After the host had broken the ice with an upbeat but mediocre rendition of "New York, New York," the guests, mostly midlife affluent professionals, applauded his bravery. Yet they evinced no willingness to sing show tunes in front of their business acquaintances and peers.

  Then a very tiny white-haired woman drifted to the front of the room. Her name was Olive, and she was eighty-five. Olive was Phil's colleague's wife's mother. Olive's progress toward the mike was slow and peripatetic, but she finally got there. She serenely waited for a young man to lower the mike for her, and then she commenced, in a quavery old-lady voice, the familiar tune of "You Are My Sunshine." Every banker, socialite, decorator, and developer at that party surged into the room, martinis sloshing. Olive's voice wobbled delicately under the loud accompaniment, but we could hear her. Then a strange thing happened.

  On the chorus everybody joined in, as if by prearrangement. And they sang with gusto. People were waving their lighters. The folks standing in the back clasped their arms about each other's waists and swayed, as in old-time movies. I had never seen anything like it. Powerful was the applause for Olive, who was the undisputed star of the evening. Hannah later managed a short conversation with Olive, who told her that her one regret was that the karaoke machine hadn't offered her the selection she would have preferred to sing: "Brighten the Corner Where You Are."

  Olive's revelation naturally led us to speculate about what our mother might have sung had she been in attendance. We imagined our mother getting up there with perfect aplomb to sing one of the songs she had taught us years ago in Pioneer Girls.

  Mein hand on myself

  Und vas ist das hier?

  Das ist mein Tinkerboxer,

  mein Mama dear!

  (pointing to various body parts)

  Tinkerboxer! Hornblower! Meatgrinder!

  Rubbernecker! Breadbasket! Hitchhiker!

  Sitter-downer! Seat-kicker! Ja ja ja ja-

  Dat's vat I learned in der Schul, ja, ja!

  Part of the charm of this piece was that you had to sing it in a hearty German accent, which I'm here to tell you a roomful of helpless little girls will indeed do when they have no other choice.

  I called my mother in California to make sure that Hannah and I were accurately remembering the various body parts in the Hornblower song. Mom was only too glad to sing all the verses over the phone. Then she giggled over how Hans, Deena and Aaron's five-year-old, had asked her for a second piece of chocolate dump cake. "That's how he says bundt," she told me artlessly.

  "I foresee that we'll never refer to your bundt cake again by its proper name."

  "Guess what I did today?"

  "What?"

  "I toilet-trained Hans!"

  "Isn't Hans a little old to be working on that?" I asked.

  "Oh, he can urinate just fine!" exclaimed my mother, always upbeat. "But the silly guy has had the idea that he needs to do his Big Job in a diaper at night."

  You can tell a lot about a person's family of origin by examining the elimination vocabulary of the parents. When we were growing up, our mother favored the term Big Job (the capital letters are a thing of mine own) to refer to any and all bowel movements. The only exceptions she made were for nonhuman entities, as when a bird dumped on the patio directly in front of where she and I were playing Scrabble, and she would exclaim, "Oh, look at that! That bird did an oompa!" Oompa was for the birds. Big Job was for the home. Indeed the latter sobriquet accurately reflected our household's premium on hard work, where even natural functions were framed in terms of practical industry and achievement. Come to think about it, Big Job captured the very essence of what it means to be Mennonite. Until that very moment I had forgotten the term Big Job.

  I said suspiciously into the phone, "Are you eating something right at this very moment? While you're telling me about Hans's Big Job?"

  "It's a piece of cherry-plum Platz," she confessed. "Deena was just letting Hans do his Big Job in the diaper at night! I thought it was high time he moved past that! He's five years old!"

  I thought it was high time he moved past it, too. But there was more. I waited patiently while my mother chewed and swallowed the rest of her Platz.

  "Guess what Deena has been doing to try and get him to go on the toilet."

  "You've got me stumped," I said. "What?"

  "She's been cutting a hole in his diaper! She's been telling him to sit on the toilet and do his Big Job through the hole in his diaper!"

  "Nice visual, Mom. I take it you somehow showed Hans the error of his ways?"

  "I did," she said joyfully. "Now Hans is doing his Big Job like a grown-up!"

  "Congratulations on this important toilet intervention," I said. "I hope Deena appreciates what a fine job you've done. What a fine Big Job. May I suggest offering her a piece of chocolate dump cake as you tell her the news?"

  Fortunately, neither Hannah nor I could recall the pleasure of having been toilet-trained with Mom at the helm. My report on Hans's toilet-training lesson reminded Hannah of the time Mom had taught her to brush her teeth, and Hannah had somehow understood that dental hygiene was a goal she should pursue exclusively on Sundays. "In kindergarten they told us to brush our teeth every day," Hannah explained, "but when Mom said that the body was God's temple, I figured that since we went to church only on Sundays, that's when we should brush our teeth. I was really worried about the mixed signals I was getting."

  "Why didn't you just ask Mom? Were you that shy?"

  "It wasn't so much an issue of being shy as not wanting to challenge authority," she said.

  "Thank you!" I exclaimed. "What is it about being Mennonite that teaches little girls not to challenge authority? We all grow up so obedient, we'll do anything rather than rock the boat."

  I told my sister about the first time I became conscious that an adult could make a bad decision. Before my year in Mrs. Eplett
's sixth-grade class, I had assumed that teachers, like all authority figures, were equally competent to teach me whatever it was I needed to learn. So did my friend Lola, who was also in the same class thirty-four years ago. She remembers the event much as I do.

  We both remember Mrs. Eplett's fierce red wig, which often slipped forward a little, like Paul Revere's as he rode his horse ventre à terre in our history book. Mrs. Eplett, a spanker, favored a position over the lap, like a baby. We were terrified of her. Now she was sitting cozily on top of a desk at the front of the room, and she leaned forward as if confiding a secret. "Let's all pledge to keep this discussion strictly confidential," she urged. We nodded, solemn. She waited a beat for effect, and it was so quiet you could hear the portentous click of the clock's second hand. "It is at all times important to face facts," she said. "And here is a fact. Are you ready to face this fact?"

  We were ready.

  "We have something to discuss about Milla. We need to do this now, while she is absent. Sometimes Milla offends." Mrs. Eplett made a fanning motion at armpit level.

  We nodded again. How true. This was serious.

  "People don't know when they smell bad. It's often not their fault. And Milla's parents weren't born in America, so they have Different Customs. Do you remember when Milla brought that box of garlic snails for us to try?"

  We remembered, shuddering.

  "Well, Milla's mother cooks with garlic. I might not like it. You might not like it. But class: some people like it. And garlic has a heavy odor that gets into your perspiration. That's what we're smelling when we think that Milla has BO!"