A Super Heavy

By Steve Tomashefsky

Read to the Chicago Literary Club

January 23, 2006

If you heard the paper I read here last year, you may recall that I grew up in Pearl River, New York. Pearl River is an unincorporated hamlet west of the Hudson River in Rockland County, the first New York county north of New Jersey. Our house was only a few yards from the state line.

Just to the south, in Montvale, New Jersey, there was an ice-cream shop called Huff’s Octagon House. It was a large barn-like structure that only opened during the warm months of the year. On some special summer evenings, after Dad, Michael, and I had spent all day weeding the garden or digging and burlaping the trees Dad sold, we all went to Huff’s for an ice-cream dinner.

Dad was a great gardener in those days. Growing up in Brooklyn, he never – as far as I know – had occasion to put a spade in the ground or to plant a seedling. He told us about playing stickball in empty lots and shooting other kids with a home-made gun that launched pieces of linoleum with rubber bands. He told us about watching his older cousin Bob Lawrence put pennies and caps on streetcar tracks to see what would happen when the streetcar ran them over. He told us about listening to Toscanini’s radio broadcasts and of watching movies at the great Paramount theater in “downtown” Brooklyn. He told us about moving house as often as once a year, because, in the slack pre-war market, landlords were usually willing to throw in a month’s free rent to new tenants.

Dad’s green thumb seems to have emerged all of a sudden when he and Mom moved to Pearl River in 1951. It was still something of an agrarian community back then. Several farmers raised dairy cattle, and there were two large apple orchards. The Kreuz family, whom my mother knew from vacationing at a nearby bungalow colony when she was a girl, grew kale – not for human consumption but to feed the rabbits at a large local laboratory. The Kreuzes themselves ate a good deal of cabbage. There was always a pot of it boiling on the iron stove. The sour, sulfurous smell bit into your nostrils as you entered their house. Mom and Dad professed to like it, but I suspect the real reason we went there was so Dad could discuss farming with Mr. Kreuz.

To serve the local farmers’ needs, there was a GLF feed store where you could buy bales of hay, hundred-pound sacks of 5-10-5 fertilizer, vegetable seeds in bulk, and useful chemicals like DDT, 2,4D, and Malathion. For Dad, it was like a grown-up version of the Macy's toy department. There was always something we needed. No Saturday was complete without a drive over there to find it.

Dad bought a walk-behind gas-powered rototiller, and with his own hands cleared almost an acre of woods to make his garden. He not only cleared away the trees and the weeds. He removed all the rocks from the soil. As he often liked to point out, Rockland County came by its name honestly as a terminal glacial moraine. He used the rototiller to work sphagnum peat moss and “activated” sewer sludge into the dirt to increase its organic content. We got the sludge from the local sewage treatment plant. You could drive over and for free you could shovel away as much as you wanted. I don't know how it got “activated,” but Dad swore by the stuff. Considering where it came from and its still-pungent aroma, I didn't much care to handle it. But Dad kept telling us how safe it was. He would pick it up without wearing gloves just to make his point. And since he was a biochemist by profession, he must have known what he was doing.

After he had cleared and prepared the land, Dad grew asparagus, tomatoes, corn, peas, string beans, peppers, and melons. Once or twice he grew potatoes, tobacco, and cotton, just to see if it could be done in the local climate. I think he was also influenced by music. He used to sing in the shower, and one of his favorite songs was “Old Man River”:

He don’t plant ’tater,

He don’t plant cotton,

And them what plants ’em

Is soon forgotten.

That old man river,

He just keeps rollin’ along

So he planted ’tater and cotton. He also had a large rose garden, and he planted irises, daffodils, and crocuses all around the house.

Some of the vegetables needed an early start to ripen in our short growing season, so he began planting seeds in the basement early in the spring, later transferring them outdoors to a cold frame he had built – a sort of mini greenhouse that kept the seedlings warm and protected them from late-season snows. After the last frost, he transplanted the seedlings to the garden, where they had about a month’s head start from where they would have been had he planted the seeds outdoors.

Michael and I were required to help in all those projects. Mostly our job was to do the weeding, though after a while we also helped plant seeds and thin the seedlings when they sprouted. Dad showed us how to plant the smaller seeds by rolling them between the thumb and forefinger so they would fall into the furrows in the right amount. I don’t have any idea who had shown that to him.

We also helped harvest the crops. I especially enjoyed picking peas and shelling them. Raw and fresh from the vine, the peas were sweet as sugar. Why anyone cooks them I’ll never know. It was one of Dad’s articles of faith that corn could be picked only after the cooking water was already boiling on the stove. The moment the corn was pulled from the stalk, it began losing flavor. So the picking, shucking, boiling, and eating all had to take place within about half an hour. Dad often said the corn grew so fast he could hear it squeak. I listened and listened, but I never managed to hear even a whisper.

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Early on, Dad became interested in trees and shrubs. Whenever we took a family vacation, Dad would find out whether there was an arboretum along the way. For a few years we went to an old rambling hotel at Moriches Bay on Long Island. On our way there, we always stopped at the Bayard Cutting Arboretum near Islip. Then we switched to a cottage on Cape Cod, and on our way we stopped at the Arnold Arboretum in suburban Boston. They were detours only Dad really wanted to make. Walking around a big park full of trees labeled with their Latin names was not what Michael and I called fun. But for Dad, as I've come to believe through my own experience, I think there was the pleasure of meeting in person a tree he had only read about in a book. Putting a face to a name, if you will. “So this is what Ginkgo biloba really looks like. So this is the true color of an Acer palmatum leaf. So this is how tall Picea pungens can really get.” In just a few years of living in Pearl River, Dad had become adept at identifying all types of trees, and even though I wasn’t all that interested in the trees themselves, it became a challenge to Michael and me see how many we could identify – by the English names, of course – before looking at the little tags.

After he had landscaped the house, Dad continued planting trees in the garden. He grew many kinds, but he specialized in evergreens like junipers, spruces, and mugho pines. He had so many that he eventually got the idea to start selling them. So for many years he operated a weekend landscaping business known as “Phil’s Nursery.” Mostly, people bought trees or bushes and carried them away. But occasionally we would deliver them and plant them at the customers’ homes. Dad guaranteed that every tree would survive. I asked him how he could guarantee a tree would survive if he had no control over whether the customers watered it or cared for it properly. He looked at me as though he’d never given that much thought. “You’re supposed to guarantee what you sell,” he said. We hardly ever had to replace anything.

People would select their trees while they were still planted in the ground. We would then dig them up. Dad got empty burlap sacks from the feed store, and we would use them to wrap the root balls after digging the trees. At first I found it hard to cut through the roots, but then Dad showed me how to push the spade with my feet to get more oomph. I remember once watching a horror movie with Dad on TV in which a man was supposed to be digging his own grave. The man was having a hard time, having just been tortured, and the mad villain was yelling at him for being so slow. “I don’t understand why he isn’t using his feet on the spade,” Dad said with no trace of irony. “The work would go much faster.”

It was hot, sweaty work, and once or twice a summer, our reward was an ice-cream dinner at Huff’s. No meat. No vegetables. Just ice cream, a complete meal in one course.

The routine was always the same. Dad ordered a large coffee-flavored Super Heavy. A Super Heavy was a sort of milkshake, but with little or no milk to thin the ice cream down. It was basically just some ice cream with some syrup, stirred for a few seconds in the Hamilton Beach mixer. The result was not quite solid but definitely not liquid. You couldn’t drink it through a straw. If you even tried, your cheeks would crater inward and make you look like someone in a Dorothea Lange photograph. Though it was soft, a Super Heavy did not at all resemble so-called “soft” ice cream like what was served at Dairy Queen or Carvel. That was pumped up with air and had a weightlessness on your tongue. A Super Heavy was dense and almost gluey and was intensely sweet.

The large Super Heavy came to the table in a chrome container shaped like a tall beaker. You poured the contents with great difficulty into a tall footed glass. The test of a great Super Heavy was that the long-stemmed spoon would stand up straight when you stuck it in.

Because Dad always had a large Super Heavy, Michael and I always wanted one too. But Mom and Dad thought a large was too much for a child. It actually wasn’t that we wanted more to eat. But the regular Super Heavy came in a glass without the chrome container, which held the extra portion to be served after you finished the first pour. It wasn't even so much that we wanted seconds. But we wanted our own chrome container.

So it became a standing routine. Dad would order his large coffee Super Heavy, Michael and I would ask if we could have large Super Heavys, and Dad and Mom would say no. How I longed for the day when I would be grown-up enough to order a large Super Heavy and get the chrome container just like Dad.

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Food played a central role in our family’s life. Except for a few years when both Mom and Dad were taking evening courses in graduate school, we ate dinner as a family every night. Mom often said she knew nothing about cooking when she and Dad were married. But just as Dad had become a large-scale gardener, Mom became a proficient cook, basing her cuisine primarily on the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book, a classic first published in 1941 in its familiar red-and-white checkerboard-covered three-ring binder, and still in print today. Mom had a rotating repertoire of favorites like broiled lamb chops, veal parmesan, chicken a la king, and – my favorite – tuna casserole. The main ingredients are a can of tuna fish and a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. It tastes much better than it sounds.

Dessert was part of every meal. Mom liked to make puddings of all sorts. She made rice pudding, tapioca pudding, and bread pudding from scratch. She also often made cooked pudding from a package, usually butterscotch flavor. She cooked the pudding in little Pyrex ramekins that held a single serving each. When the pudding cooled, it developed a skin on top that seemed remarkably like human skin. I loved to peel it off and eat it before getting to the pudding below. For a time, Mom tried serving us instant pudding, which also came from a box and was, of course, easier to make. But the instant pudding never developed the skin on top. Michael and I let Mom know it was not acceptable.

Many of our favorite foods had to be eaten a certain way, like the pudding. As is well known, Oreo cookies had to be split apart. The icing always stuck to one of the two wafers making up the sandwich. You then scraped the icing from that wafer with your teeth before eating the wafers themselves. My favorite cookie was the Mallomar. Its base is a round Graham cracker, on which there is a domed marshmallow. The whole thing is robed in milk chocolate, which hardens into a thin shell over the cracker and the marshmallow. You might say it was a 'smore with a culinary school degree. The proper way to eat a Mallomar was to shatter the chocolate shell and pick it off the marshmallow in little pieces, as you would pick the cracked shell from a hard-boiled egg. Once the marshmallow was stripped clean, it could be pulled away from the Graham cracker and eaten in one bite. The cracker would be eaten last.

The story of Marcel and his madeleine in Proust's Swann's Way has become a cliché known to everyone who hasn't read the book. But what I find most unsatisfactory about Proust's description is its narrowness. I'm sure we all have experienced the flood of memories brought back by a certain taste or smell. Yet how rarely is that experience limited to one type of cookie? For me, there are dozens of tastes and smells that take me back to places in time, reconnect me with a person, or focus my mind on how some things have changed and others have remained the same. Mallomars, lamb chops, butterscotch pudding, thick milk shakes, and the special sogginess of a tunafish sandwich that has matured all morning in a school lunchbox, when the oil from the tuna combines with the mayonnaise and permeates the soft white bread. To this day, I'd rather eat a tuna sandwich that has aged for a few hours than one just freshly made, because that's how I originally learned to like them.

School lunches were often a source of friction. In the early years, Mom made our lunches every day. Her tunafish and egg salad sandwiches were superb. I've never had better. The key was to use few ingredients: no celery, no olives, no lettuce, no hard-boiled eggs in the tuna. She used only solid white albacore tuna packed in oil. The packed-in-water kind was chalky, and the chunk light kind was too fishy. (I've since come to prefer the chunk light kind, one of the few food prejudices I've outgrown.) She put some chopped onions in the tuna, but nothing in the egg salad other than the Hellmann’s mayonnaise she used in both sandwiches. No other mayonnaise tasted right. Someone once told me the possibly apocryphal story that Tabasco sauce and Hellmann’s mayonnaise used to be the only American-made prepared foods good enough to be sold in the food halls at Harrods in London.

When I was about eight, Mom had to take Michael to the eye doctor one day, and she left me with her cousin, Elaine Casper. Come noontime, Elaine asked what I wanted for lunch. I said an egg salad sandwich. Elaine obligingly made me one. She asked me how I liked it, and I told her – truthfully – that it tasted like soap. She was, let us say, offended by my candor. But, as I later observed, she had used Miracle Whip instead of Hellmann’s. What did she expect? When Mom came to pick me up, Elaine told her – truthfully – that I had been lacking in graciousness. Perhaps I partly saved my skin by assuring Mom – truthfully – that no one could possibly make egg salad better than hers.

At school, there was a brisk market in trading lunches. Kids who brought a sandwich they didn't like tried to trade for something better. It was an early experience in the rough-and-tumble of market forces, as we tried to reallocate our resources according to their highest and best use. Sometimes, in the lunchroom equivalent of achieving a successful leveraged buyout, you could even trade a sandwich for a dessert. Perhaps for that reason, Mom frowned on the practice. Not that I was much inclined to trade. Mom's tuna and egg salad were much better than the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches most kids brought. I never learned to like P-B and J. And in a way I felt bad about that, because it was the classic American school lunch of the time. Not liking peanut butter and jelly somehow distanced me from the main stream in a way that, as a grade schooler, I found uncomfortable. But not uncomfortable enough to pretend to liked it, I guess.

Our school system offered a hot lunch that could be purchased for 35 cents. It included a salad, a main dish, a dessert, and milk. The food was trucked in from a central kitchen and served up by so-called “lunch ladies,” who never seemed happy to be there. With good reason. The food was well-nigh inedible. The classic entrée was called “bean and bacon broil.” It consisted of half a hamburger bun topped with American cheese, two strips of bacon, and a scattering of several baked beans. The whole thing was then put under a broiler until the cheese melted. By the time we got it to a table, the cheese had hardened again into a tough, leathery hide.

Revolting as the hot lunches could be, I regarded them as a desirable luxury. Being served, even by the grim lunch ladies, was more appealing than bringing my own food from home. To be sure, I didn't always eat the hot lunch. It could be more fun to rearrange the beans into patterns on the leathery cheese than to eat them. And to this day, as much as I like to cook, I almost always prefer to eat out even if I could make something better at home.

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Along with his expertise in gardening, Dad had become a gourmet of sorts. A big part of that was paying attention to details and being willing to experiment. Perhaps he got that from his scientific training. Perhaps it was also the result of his upbringing in a kosher home. He liked to tell the story of the day, as a teenager, when he first tasted bacon. How could something so wonderful have been denied to him? It was not just food. It was pleasure.

Of course, Dad recognized that much depended on context. Bacon tasted better for having been forbidden. When he was in Europe during the war, he received a care package containing canned gefilte fish. Now, gefilte fish – ground fish mixed with vegetables and spices into a sort of dumpling – was a highlight of his mother’s cooking. It was a labor-intensive dish, especially when made, as Grandma Mae did, from fresh, whole whitefish and pike. As Dad told the story, when he ate the canned gefilte fish in his foxhole, it tasted so good he immediately wrote home, saying “Mom, this canned gefilte fish is just as good as home-made. You don’t have to work so hard any more.” Of course, when he came home and tried the canned version again, it was awful.

Dad did have more enduring blind spots. He insisted that pretty good champagne was being made in New York State. He believed that the cheapest canned beer at the supermarket was just as good as the most expensive brands. But he wasn’t a cheapskate. When he received his Ph.D. in 1968, he took Mom, Michael, and me to the Four Seasons for lunch after the graduation ceremony. I venture to say none of the other thousands of graduates that day did the same.

The Four Seasons was, in those days, one of New York’s most prestigious restaurants. It was for a time the flagship of a firm called Restaurant Associates, which had started out owning the dining facility at Newark Airport and had grown to encompass such grand places as The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, The Tower Suite, The Brasserie, and La Fonda del Sol. Dad explained the Restaurant Associates franchise to us the way some fathers explained the baseball draft to their sons. He regarded the Restaurant Associates brand as a near-guaranty of sophisticated, if horribly expensive, dining. So when they opened a new room called The Top of the Sixes at 666 Fifth Avenue, Dad lost no time in obtaining a reservation.

I was not a member of the dining party. But I remember the details as though I had been at the table. Dad and Mom went on a Saturday night, leaving Michael and me to eat our favorite sitter’s meal of Tater Tots, Honey Buns, and some form of protein. They got home long after we went to sleep.

Mom and Dad slept late that Sunday, as they often did. When Dad finally got up, Michael and I mobbed him for details of what the meal had been like. In retrospect, that in itself seems odd. How many sub-teenagers would have cared about what their parents had eaten the night before? But Dad’s description of the meal was spellbinding. The napkins, the silver, the plates, the appetizer, the fish course, the meat course, the dessert, the wine – Dad managed to convey both sophistication and amazement at the same time.

The most amazing part of the meal was not really a course as such. It was the “intermezzo,” a scoop of grapefruit sorbet served between the fish and the meat courses to cleanse the palate. Dad had never heard of that before, and for him it was the highlight of the meal – not because it tasted better than the rest of the food, but because it provided a note of elegance and attention to detail that – despite their other advantages – places like Huff’s Octagon House certainly lacked. Who knew that the palate needed cleansing between the fish and the meat? Yet once the idea was broached, it seemed exactly the right thing to do. That one little scoop of sorbet was mostly water – cold like a super heavy but melting away to a thin stream of nothing as soon as it entered your mouth. For Dad, it justified the extravagant cost of the entire meal.

Mom and Dad often went out to restaurants on Saturday nights, leaving Michael and me home with a sitter. But they also seemed to enjoy taking us out to eat. Of course, the rooms were less exotic than The Top of the Sixes. A regular stop on our circuit was The China Joy in Westwood, New Jersey. At the time, it was the only Chinese restaurant for miles around. Though there were four of us, we always got the “dinner for three,” which allowed you to select, for a fixed price, one entrée from column A and two from column B of the menu. You also got wonton soup and egg rolls. If we added an appetizer of barbequed spare ribs, there was just the right amount of food. The entrees were the classics of Cantonese-American cuisine that hardly anyone serves any more: Shrimps with lobster sauce. Pork lo mein. Char sue ding. Chicken subgum. Moo goo gai pan. I liked to order moo goo gai pan just so I could say the name out loud. But because we were ordering the dinner for three, someone inevitably didn’t get to have a choice. Michael and I had to take turns being the odd son out.

I don’t think we ordered the dinner for three because my parents couldn’t afford the dinner for four or even because they were trying to teach Michael and me to compromise and take turns. I think they just thought the dinner for four was too much food. Again, when it came to eating out, my parents were not cheapskates. I know that now because from our early years, Mom and Dad saw that we were introduced to the luxury of lobster.

My mother’s father, Grandpa Izzy, had moved to Worcester, Massachusetts in the mid-1950s. He was a rather short man who claimed, knowing we wouldn’t believe him, that he would have been much taller had there been oatmeal for breakfast in Tsarist Russia, where he was born. Starting when I was about six or seven, we would visit Grandpa Izzy for a few days every summer. He was not an adventurous eater. Indeed, oatmeal was in the exciting column on his menu. But he was a great schmoozer, and he knew the places where people said you should eat. In Worcester, the good food was served at a diner called Messier’s. Its specialty was lobster, which was served either boiled or baked and stuffed with bread crumbs and crab meat.

From the beginning, when we visited Grandpa Izzy in Worcester, we ate lobster at Messier’s. And not the plain, boiled version either. We always got the baked, stuffed version. Mom and Dad showed Michael and me how to crack the claws with a nutcracker, how to pick the meat out of the shell with the little one-pronged fork and – with notably less success – how to look reasonably dignified with lobster bibs hanging from our necks. I loved the taste of lobster, but I also loved the effort needed to eat it, something akin to performing surgery and definitely akin to making a mess at the table – the one mess that, however, was permissible, up to a certain point a least.

A few years later, in the early Sixties, we started going to Cape Cod for our summer vacation. We continued eating lobster there. On our first visit to a place in Chatham called The Chatham House, Michael and I each demolished a substantial baked, stuffed lobster, pulling, peeling, scraping, and sucking the meat out of every crevice, even working over the little legs that most diners didn't bother about because the return of meat for the investment of effort is so low. After we had finished, a stranger came over to the table and told my parents he had never seen children so young eat a lobster so expertly. I mention that now, not to flatter Michael and me, but because Dad used to repeat that story endlessly with the same degree of pride he would have shown if we had aced our final exams.

In Provincetown, there was a pizzeria called La Cucina del Re – The King’s Kitchen. Dad had a flair for languages, and he asked the owner what king the place was named for. The owner said there was no king. His name was Raymond, and the name was a pun. Dad liked that. He always did the “Puns and Anagrams” puzzle in the Sunday New York Times, and though he wasn’t much on making puns, he always encouraged others’ attempts.

Raymond’s pizza had an unusually crisp crust. At home, we were used to a New York style pizza with a crust so thin and pliable that it would fold like an accordion on the way home from the take-out if the car took a curve too quickly and the white cardboard box slid across the back seat. The crust had to be pliable, because the proper way to eat the pizza was to roll up a triangular wedge from the pointed end until it was a cylinder whose ends you could bite off. I’ve never gotten used to the Midwestern custom of cutting pizzas into little squares. You can't roll them up, and they get cold well before you’re finished with the pie.

Dad wanted to know how Raymond got his crusts to be so crispy. The secret, Ray said, was putting cheese directly into the dough. That appealed to Dad’s training in biochemistry. Almost every time he told the Chatham House story, he also revealed Raymond’s secret recipe for a crispy crust.

We took our last family vacation in 1965, a driving trip across eastern Canada. Our first stop was Montreal, where Grandpa Izzy had first landed when he emigrated from Europe. We stayed in rather modest accommodations, perhaps because Mom and Dad had decided to splurge on a dinner at the Beaver Club, the flagship restaurant of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. I ordered the house specialty: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding – much more because of the pudding than the beef. I had read about Yorkshire pudding in English novels, but I had no idea what it was. I had expected something resembling a custard and was surprised when I was served something more like a pancake.

At some point during the meal, my eye caught a dessert being served at the next table. It came in a tall glass and appeared to consist of cake, cream, and fruit in layers. I asked our waiter what it was called. He told me it was English trifle. I immediately determined I must have it for my dessert. But when the waiter returned to take our dessert orders, he said the trifle was sold out. My disappointment was enormous. I remember thinking how odd it was that a large expensive restaurant had sold out of a dessert early in the evening. Bad management – or was the waiter lying? Were they saving it for some more favored customers? The imagination can become very creative when you are denied something on which your heart had been set. “Trifle” then became, for me, the touchstone of something I wanted but was no longer available.

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In our family there was a premium on being clever, even about food. One day a large delivery van pulled up in our driveway with a crate for Mrs. Tomashefsky. It turned out to be a large upright freezer. Without telling us, Mom had entered a contest to write “Why I Love Birdseye Broccoli” in 25 words or less. The freezer was her prize. We never actually ate much Birdseye broccoli – or any frozen vegetables that Dad had not grown himself – so Mom's composition must have been the product of sheer imaginative wit.

Some years later, Swanson’s came out with a TV dinner that had a small tray of soup along with the meat, vegetables, and whipped potato. Mom occasionally served TV dinners or left them for us when she and Dad went out to a restaurant on Saturday night. Consistent with my paradoxical preference for buying awful school lunches, I regarded TV dinners as something of a luxury. Dad got the idea that the Swanson’s folks should include a few almonds in the carton, so they could advertise a TV dinner “with everything from soup to nuts.” Mom wrote a letter to Swanson’s suggesting the idea, but they respectfully declined, citing the complexities of packaging.

Though his personality was low-keyed, Dad could be dramatic at the table. On special occasions, he liked to drink a glass of sherry before dinner. He would sip it and, making the motions of a man laying bricks in a cellar wall, intone: “‘For the love of God, Montresor!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘For the love of God!’” quoting from Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. He later moved on to madeira, which he liked to pour over vanilla ice cream for dessert. “Drowned like maudlin Clarence in his malmsey butt!” he would exclaim, quoting Byron’s Don Juan and referring to the story, recounted in Shakespeare’s Richard III, that the Duke of Clarence was murdered and stuffed into a barrel of malmsey wine.

Perhaps it is no surprise that weight was sometimes an issue in our family. Dad got a lot of exercise in the garden and, though he was no Charles Atlas, he was in good shape. But though I also dug trees and rototilled the dirt, I seemed always to require clothing from what was called the “husky” department of the clothing store. I found that depressing, because in their attempt to find an attractive marketing euphemism, the retailers had created a ghetto for us overweight kids. I never understood why a store couldn't just display the clothes in a continuum of sizes from small to large on one rack.

For a time, Mom was also concerned about her own weight. She tried a new product called Metrecal, a canned drink that supposedly contained all the nutrients needed for a balanced meal, with a fraction of the calories. It came in several flavors, all sweet, like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, and it looked like a thin milk shake. Thus, having a can of Metrecal was, in a way, like having dessert for dinner at Huff’s. But Mom refused to let us have any, saying that it was only for adults and that we didn’t need it. Of course that only made it more desirable. But Mom stood firm, and in any event the product didn’t stay on the market for very long. Interestingly, the brand name was recently revived by a suburban Chicago couple whose target market is baby boomers who remember Metrecal fondly from bygone days. Somehow, though, it no longer seems very attractive, at least to me.

Calorie counting became less of an issue when I got to college. Perhaps because the food there was so terrible, I lost a fair amount of weight. We dined from sectioned plastic trays onto which the college equivalent of lunch ladies dolloped portions of mashed grey substances and green vegetables that had been boiled until they barely held their original shape. One of my roommates, who had attended a private boarding school, had been eating that sort of food for so long he would just mix the tray’s entire contents together into one mushy mass and eat the whole thing with a spoon. College food made bean and bacon broil seem tasty in retrospect.

The sun broke through the clouds during my junior year, when, in the wake of sweeping social changes motivated by the Vietnam war, Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates were offered the opportunity to exchange dormitories. I decided to move to a Radcliffe dorm and quickly discovered that the food was vastly better than what was served at Harvard. The vegetables were fresh, the meat was tender, and you served yourself on actual plates. Dad and Mom were dubious about my making the move, but when I explained that the improved food service was my main motivation, they were reconciled to my decision.

Whenever Mom and Dad came to visit me at college, we went to Durgin Park, an old restaurant near Faneuil all HHall in Boston whose slogan is “Your grandfather ate here.” Their specialty was baked, stuffed lobster, and that’s what we always had. My wife and I ate there only a few months ago. I had not been there in over 30 years, and I feared that my memory had magnified the experience beyond any possible reality. But it was exactly as good as I had remembered.

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Rebecca and I were married right after college. We spent a couple of months traveling in Europe, trying to live on $15 a day. We caught a break in Rome, where my cousin Nancy was doing post-graduate work at the American Academy. She had hooked up with a recently divorced woman from her home town, who was also living in Rome with her son and had obviously decided it was finally time to enjoy her life.

One of the first things Nancy asked us when we got to Rome was “Have you ever had spaghetti alla carbonara?” We hadn’t, nor did we even know what it was. “You have to have it,” Nancy said. “It’s the best thing in Rome.” Nancy and her friend took us to a restaurant in Trastevere called Il Grappolo D’oro, where spaghetti alla carbonara was a specialty. When it arrived at the table it was like no Italian food I had ever seen. The sauce was not red and contained no tomatoes. It was a golden yellow and was thicker than heavy cream. It contained bits of crisp pancetta, along with a healthy dose of cracked black pepper.

Two or three times in my life I have tasted something so good that it felt like my face had been slapped. That was how I felt about the spaghetti alla carbonara. It was creamy, eggy, garlicky, salty, and spicy all at once. If it is possible to become addicted to something after taking only one dose, I became addicted to spaghetti alla carbonara that night. When we returned home, I scoured menus and cook books for references to spaghetti alla carbonara, but with no luck. At several places, I did find fettuccini Alfredo, which is superficially similar, but without the depth and richness. It took perhaps ten years for Italian restaurants in America to catch up with this magnificent dish. In 1983, Calvin Trillin suggested in an essay that our national Thanksgiving dish be changed from turkey to spaghetti alla carbonara. His essay, which runs to 13 pages, rests largely on the notion that turkey is nasty and, in any event, Columbus – an Italian – had more to do with our all being here than the Pilgrims did. But he says very little about how good spaghetti alla carbonara is.

In December 1972, we moved to Chicago, where we both found low-paying jobs while deciding what else we wanted to do. We decided to live on a $15-per-week food budget, which was actually possible to do in those days if you ate a lot of chicken and eggs. That’s when I learned to like chunk light tuna, which was much less expensive than the solid white kind my mother used to buy. Our splurge dessert was chocolate pudding cake, which we made from one 29-cent box of chocolate Jiffy Cake, one 29-cent box of chocolate Jiffy Cake frosting mix, and an egg. When it came out of the oven, the cake was on top, and the frosting below had a thick, pudding-like consistency. It was so good we continued to make it long after we could afford other desserts.

We celebrated our first anniversary at a neighborhood place called, simply, the Hungarian Restaurant. It was a storefront on Lincoln Avenue with, perhaps, ten tables. There was no kitchen. Anticipating more modern design trends, the owner cooked all the food at a stove in the middle of the dining room, perfuming the air with her sauces. The menu was limited. Szekely goulash, Burgundy goulash, and chicken paprikash. I don’t know how the Szekely differed from the Burgundy, but the Burgundy was more expensive at all of $6.95. Both goulashes came from huge stock pots simmering on the stove and were richly aromatic, deeply red-brown, and just mildly hot from the paprika. Mom used to sprinkle paprika on lots of dishes, but only for the color – the supermarket version had no flavor whatever. Bebe Hoffman, our neighbor in Pearl River, used to make something she called “frankfurter paprikash,” which was cut-up hot dogs and diced potatoes with some sort of paprika sauce. Douglas Hoffman, who was my age, said it was his favorite dinner. I once asked Mom why she never made it. She made a sour face, shook her head, and said that paprika was tasteless. None of us knew until much later what real paprika was like.

The Hungarian Restaurant was, in those days, a splurge for us. Dinner probably came in at less than $20 with the tip. By the time our tenth anniversary rolled around, Rebecca had a real job, and I had just been accepted to law school, with the prospect of attaining some earning capacity of my own. We decided we could afford to scale the culinary Everest of the day: Le Français in Wheeling. As many of you will remember, Le Français was known not only as the best restaurant in the Chicago area but also as one of the best two or three restaurants in America, capable of going tête to tête with the three-star restaurants of France.

What a meal it was! The appetizer was boudin de homard, a lobster sausage. It was nothing like a Cape Cod lobster. The meat was ground like gefilte fish and stuffed into a sausage casing. If I recall correctly, there was an herbal scent of tarragon, delicate and subtle. I ordered a bottle of Chateau Meyney, a 1966 red Bordeaux, then 16 years old and fully mature. The entrée was riz de veau – sweetbreads – in a rich cream sauce. And after the entrée was cleared, the waiter brought small cups of grapefruit sorbet as a palate cleanser. I don’t remember what he called it. Perhaps just sorbet au pamplemousse, but certainly not an “intermezzo.” Yet it immediately took me back to Mom’s and Dad’s meal at The Top of The Sixes some 20 years before. We had finally arrived!

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Not long after that, Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s causes a progressive deterioration of motor function, causing some people to shake uncontrollably and others to become rigid and stiff. In its early stages, the symptoms can be controlled with drugs, but as the disease wears on, the drugs become less effective. As yet, there is no cure.

For many years, Dad was able to function normally with his medication.

More recently, things became very difficult. Among other things, eating itself became a problem, because one effect of Parkinson’s disease is that it becomes hard to swallow properly. Liquids in particular become dangerous, tending to go down the windpipe instead of the esophagus. A common strategy is to thicken all drinks with a starch powder. While that does reduce the danger of choking, it tends to make all liquids taste as bland as Pablum.

To get enough nutrients, Dad also ate a dietary supplement called Ensure. It comes in a can and resembles the Metrecal Mom used to drink. According to the Ensure Web site, its “smooth texture and rich, creamy taste will have you eating like a kid again!”

When I saw Dad eating it, I thought of the Huff’s Super Heavy. The thick dessert he loved to eat had become the thick “creamy” supplement he had to eat. The pure pleasure of the thickness had become a necessity, to make sure he had enough nutrients and to prevent him from choking.

The comparison seems grossly unbalanced, the memory of the one so much happier than the reality of the other. When I had asked Dad if I could have a large Super Heavy, he told me I wasn’t ready for it yet. If I’d asked Dad for some of his Ensure, he probably would have laughed and said I wasn’t ready for it yet either.

I don’t believe I ever got to have a large Super Heavy at Huff’s. By the time I was old enough, Huff’s was gone. But life goes on. Dad used to say that. Life goes on. Find the things that give you pleasure, find the people you love, and pursue them. That’s what he did. When he died last year, he had nothing to regret. He had made the life he wanted. He had passed his zest for life to his children. He had retained his capacity to be amazed and to find satisfaction – in family meals, in tilling the soil, in trees, in a grapefruit sorbet, in lobsters, in a milk shake so thick you couldn’t drink it through a straw.