Savoring the foods and family traditions of summers past
While friends went off to camp or passed weeks by the beach, I had a very specific variety of immigrant-kid summer, moving in with my grandparents in Nairobi, Kenya, and filling long unstructured days with books and food — lamb samosas that my grandfather folded neatly into delicate triangles, stuffed potatoes my grandmother tied with string.
On special occasions, my aunt burned the hair off goat trotters to make paya. She set a lipped steel pot over the charcoal outside and simmered the meat until it turned almost gelatinous, the marrow slipped easily out of the bones and the delicious turmeric-stained fat pooled at the top.
The pleasures of hot curried hooves in the middle of August are hard to explain to those unfamiliar with them. And maybe this is what I miss the most now that I’m grown and don’t have summers off to surround myself with my East African-Asian family: Among them, I had nothing to explain.
Over the last few months, we’ve asked readers across the country to tell about their own summer food traditions, the kinds built over the years on vacations and reunions and long weekends eating outdoors.
The callout was a collaboration with the team behind Race/ Related, the New York Times newsletter that explores issues of race, culture and identity. And the stories that it drew show how summer meals have the power to remind us where we’ve come from.
Jeanne DePasquale Perez, 60, told me how her father used to pick up live shellfish off the beach in Point Lookout, on Long Island, pry them open and slurp them on the spot.
“I thought we were very peculiar,” said DePasquale Perez, the granddaughter of Spanish and Italian immigrants. “I just wanted a tuna fish sandwich, but of course my parents would bring a red pepper frittata to the beach and Welch’s juice bottles with wine in them instead of juice.”
Italian food is a part of mainstream American culture now, but when DePasquale Perez was a girl in Brooklyn, in the 1960s, she says a red pepper frittata was still considered an oddity, a snack that reminded her how different she was from other children.
To make that frittata, her mother and grandmother held peppers directly over the gas flame of the stovetop until the flesh softened and the peel charred, then kept them in a paper bag until they were cool enough to slip out of their skins.
DePasquale Perez, who is working on a graphic novel about her childhood, paid attention. She says she still makes a red pepper frittata using the same technique.
Jean Gogolin, who is 76 and lives in Westfield, N.J., has sweet memories of Pennsylvania Dutch cracker pudding — a sweet, boiled egg custard thickened with crushed saltine crackers and coconut.
Albert Moten Jr. still gets together with his family in New Orleans, to replicate the summer cookouts he grew up with, boiling turkey necks and crawfish with corn on the cob, and frying fish.
Moten, who is 45, says his family may cook at home, or head to the park with a couple of butane tanks and some 5-gallon pots. They may be celebrating a milestone birthday or nothing grander than a clear summer day stretching out in front of them.
The smorgastarta is a giant Swedish sandwich filled with a variety of ingredients, from egg salad to smoked fish. It’s a project, built in advance and chilled, ready to slice and feed a crowd, like a savory cake iced with mayonnaise or cream cheese instead of frosting. Sarah Gannholm, 48, tasted one for the first time at a family funeral in Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea.
Though she found the dish a little absurd at first, it went from being a curiosity to a part of her culinary repertoire. Gannholm’s grandmother came from Norway, and her husband’s family is Swedish. “I’m not one of those people creeped out by mayonnaise,” she said.
Lola Lobato, 55, spent summers in Venezuela, eating fried snapper with tostones and grated cheese. She lives in Miami now and is a vegetarian, and she still makes fish tacos and colorful arepas for her family. Jashin Lin, a 28-year-old photographer based in Kansas City, Mo., learned to make jiaozi, the crimped Chinese dumplings, from her parents.
In hot weather Sarah Dadouch’s thoughts turn to makdous, a Middle Eastern dish of salt-cured eggplant stuffed with a mixture of peppers and walnuts, packed in jars of olive oil. When she and her family still lived in Damascus, Syria, Dadouch would help her mother make big batches of makdous.
This was before war raged across the country. Dadouch, who left Syria for the United States in 2010, is now 24 and a student at the Columbia University School of Journalism. She moved to New York a few weeks ago.
“You bury your yearning for Syrian dishes deep in your heart,” she said, “but it creeps to the surface every night.”