The Ghost in the Pantry (1 of 42)

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COPYRIGHT
The Ghost in the Pantry by Erin Ferretti Slattery. Copyright 2009 by Erin Ferretti Slattery.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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The Ghost in the Pantry: Culinary Travels through Four Generations

Erin Ferretti Slattery

Preface

Part One

It’s the mid-1890s, and there are no ghosts. My Irish great-grandfather Slattery is a hat-maker and businessman strolling down narrow Stetson Street in Orange, New Jersey, dreaming of New York City. A young great-grandfather O’Neill is getting an earful from his father about deciding to go to Charles Frohman’s school of acting in New York (rather than to the law school his father had hoped for) to become a Shakespearean actor. Great-great-grandmother Angelina Ferretti sits in a garden outside of Milan with her first-born, a daughter named Theresa; great-grandmother Manion scans the Colorado prairie horizon with a flour-dusted hand. Meanwhile, my husband’s great-grandmother Dostálová , who would grow up to run a bakery (before the Communists took it over in 1948) with her husband, leans against a plum tree in the family’s orchard in the heart of the Czech territories of the Austrian empire.

Thirty years later, my grandfather Ferretti’s family calls Denver home; the thriving brick city on the Platte even has its own campanile, the Daniels & Fisher tower. The 1920 census notes that Italian-born Theresa (nearly thirty) is a clerk in a paper company, and that the American-born teenagers, Louis and twins Tony and Phillip (my grandfather), work as delivery boys for a tailor. Soon, my grandfather will strike out on his own, becoming a partner in a vegetable shop, and later, a partner in an insurance firm. Across town, my grandmother on my mother’s side is a quiet thirteen-year-old from Siebert, a speck of a town in a county nearly as far east as you can go before hitting Kansas.

On my father’s side, my grandmother was seven years old, living on Sixty-First Street, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, about ten miles southwest of where I sit writing now. Her father the actor ran the Bush Terminal and, on the side, a publishing company. Her grandfather had been (in her words) a “wild Irishman,” a sea captain who bootlegged cotton down to the Bahamas during the Civil War blockade of the South. My great-grandfather on my father’s side had died two years before, during the 1918 flu epidemic; my grandfather was a boy of eleven who remembered walking to a beer garden near Shanley Avenue, Newark and drinking cream soda and celery tonic as families sat together at the long tables.

In my husband’s family, the same pattern of families striking out for new places exists, as it does for many. For his parents, coming from the small towns of Vsetín and Svitavy (to where the grandparents with the bakery moved), “next,” in the late 1960s, was Prague, and the neighborhood of Žižkov, a short walk from downtown. His mother and father, an editor and photographer, respectively, were probably sitting at a table with friends, laughing and being introduced to each other while my parents were doing the same in Southern California. While my husband was growing up in Prague, my brother and I were growing up in Orange County, where my family lived until 1989.

When we moved to Colorado in ‘89, my family inherited the contents of my grandparents’ house—and discovered the loose ends of lives—a small turquoise suitcase filled with jewelry, secreted in the back of a closet; keys to who knew where in the pockets of my grandfather’s suits; stacks of recipes and a pantry full of meticulously dated spices with my grandmother’s typewritten labels. “Saffron for a dollar seventy-five!” my mother exclaimed, studying a label in disbelief.

Looking into the pantry’s third shelf in Žižkov—the shelf I’d claimed for my jars of Italian herbs, fajita seasoning, and chipotle powder when my husband and I moved to Prague from Israel—had the same effect as peering into the pantry in Colorado that first week we moved in, at its rows of spice jars, some opaque with age; at a shiny cake-decorating tin with a stamped, scallop-edged paper label. Whole histories were tucked back in the shadows. It wasn’t until this year, though, that I unearthed the stacks of Jakub’s mother’s recipes from this shelf while in Prague for two weeks over the summer and realized that they formed a giant part of the kind of family story repeated worldwide. Her own story was cut short in 2006 by a terminal illness when she was fifty-eight. Working on this cookbook, I wanted to reclaim aspects of family history that had been neglected, lost, or abandoned. I wanted to cook with ghosts.

Visit The Ghost in the Pantry online for more recipes—and photos!

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