Summer of 2019

The teachers at my daughter's preschool told me that they had been hearing about the summer vacation for a week - the train ride, Connecticut, Marblehead and Boston. We were going to meet family, friends, new people and eat food that had stories attached to it.

Cucumbers capture my daughter’s fancy and peaches are in season and so my aunt layered carefully sliced cucumbers tossed in dressing, layered with wedges of peaches and sprinkled with herbs from the garden and cheese in a large wooden bowl, from a Bon Appétit recipe she said, served against the backdrop of tall trees and pleasant weather on the deck in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Earlier she was thinking aloud, more than a few times, of how much to make: how many peaches and how many cucumbers? Will it be too little or too much? The bowl mostly empty and a couple of glasses of wine later, the back and forth thinking was a smile-worthy after thought.

As the breakfast conversation went along, my aunt was bent over a bowl in the kitchen sink, intently scrubbing as she talked about her butcher’s recommendation to scrub the trotters before cooking them to add more flavor. She wasn’t convinced - she was used to trotters being cleaned by roasting in India where she grew up eating them - but she wanted to find out. As a kid, I remember packed family breakfast tables centered around a reddish-brown spiced broth with multiple pieces of trotters floating in it, not to mention plates piled with bones that had been eagerly savored. If this didn’t appeal to me as a kid, it does now, starting with the pressure-cooker whistles signaling the hearty breakfast feeling of aatu kaal kozhambu (trotters in south Indian spiced broth).

When I told an old friend, who studied in Boston many years ago, that I would be visiting Marblehead, Massachusetts, the only thing he mentioned was eating lobster there with his mother. When I told my hostess, whose house we were renting in Marblehead, that I thoroughly enjoyed the small seafood market by the water, I could tell that she was trying to guess which market? “Little Harbor Lobster,” I said, and she smiled and replied, “aren’t those people so nice?”. They were. As was the seafood they supplied, mostly right off the waters by the shop. Besides the lobsters for which my wife suddenly developed a fancy, the man at the market also brought my attention to striped sea bass and scallops from the local waters which reminded me of a puzzling moment from years ago: a seafood restaurant in Alsace that sourced scallops from Boston instead of nearby Normandy and its popular coquilles St. Jacques?

Shopping and cooking in a new place made the rented place feel more like home and interestingly enough opened up the outdoor dining area to more conversation and comfort. This didn’t stop my four year old from waking up wondering what she was going to eat for breakfast from the bakery that came highly recommended from the hostess.

Cambridge, Massachusetts for me brings forth flashes of stories from her autobiography and images of her kitchen, but to walk by her house at 103 Irving Street added a few goosebumps. My daughter smiled when I told her we were in front of Julia Child’s house.