The Ghost in the Pantry (2 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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Preface

Part Two

The cookbook my mother made for my wedding in 2004 made me think about the patterns of immigration (and emigration—my husband and I moved first to Israel, and then Prague, after we were married) in families. With my father as the associate editor, my mother collected family recipes, sought out additional ones from relatives and friends, and drafted and edited a 212-page cookbook, making the local copy shop very happy. I remember sitting on my husband’s family’s 1980s-era sofa in Prague and opening the heavy book with delight, knowing what it was, as we unwrapped wedding gifts. A week after our wedding, when we moved to Israel, it was the only thing in our narrow stone kitchen that seemed familiar. Yet some of the recipes suddenly looked exotic: anything involving Cheddar cheese was out. Chicken Cordon Bleu was, too, until I found the Russian supermarket and its impressively long pork counter. Two years later, the book was stuffed with more recipes and notes from friends I'd made in Israel.

The move from Israel to Prague meant another chance to dive into a culture and its food. Christmas dinner in the Czech Republic was something wholly different than in the U.S.: brown-edged fried croutons floating on carp soup, a mountain of potato salad (with carrots and ham) in an orange mixing bowl, and shockingly light-tasting breaded, fried carp. I sat at the table, awestruck, in my in-laws’ kitchen.

Next Christmas, in Colorado, I stood at the counter of a Denver fish market and asked for carp. The fish man blinked. “I don’t think we have any of that on hand,” he ventured. Halibut for seven was my Christmas gift to my family and three family friends.

In place after place, and now in New York, I can stand somewhere new, amidst a surge of excitement at fresh surroundings, and be calmed by feeling part of a tradition—even when I feel disconnected from the new place itself. Access to the family tree through a means other than familiar photos and legends signifies something, even if I can’t put a finger on exactly what that is. Does it reveal a new side of old faces? Explain some aspect of food or culture? Maybe. In any case, the farther up and out in the family tree I go, the quieter it is. The stories fade; the photos dissolve. Who are they? What part of the puzzle do they fit into? How to bring them back?

With my husband’s family, recipes were, and are, a way of unlocking the culture, one bite at a time. When we moved to Prague in 2004, I spent summer evenings before dinner glued to the television for Kluci v akci, a Czech cooking show à la Jamie Oliver’s “The Naked Chef.” The title translates to “Boys in Action,” and the show featured two young Czech chefs passionate about fresh ingredients, world-class cooking ideas, and classic Czech food. Watching them was a half-hour vocabulary lesson, and even though the rest of the language buzzed around my head, I could walk into a butcher’s or a bakery and do more than pantomime.

When we arrived in Prague, the kitchen was a place people passed through. My father-in-law and I took turns cooking lunch (the main meal in the Czech Republic) on the weekends, desperately trying to create something out of heat, and steam, and the smell of chicken roasting that would distract from the steady and irretrievable loss of one family member to terminal illness. Whistling in the apartment’s long hallway, tucking his wife’s arm through his own, cradling his glass of red wine at the end of the day, laughing even as the furrows on his forehead grew deeper, my father-in-law rarely seemed exhausted in front of us. Jakub’s mother’s sister, Dana, came to visit from Austria occasionally, and, after dropping off her luggage and stashing her car in a garage for the weekend, she would head to her favorite butcher in the neighborhood, one tram stop east, near Olšanské náměstí, and stock up to cook for everyone. It was a means of survival, and of coping.

The ghost in the pantry is this book.

A few notes:

Most of these recipes are at least fifty years old; some are much older. As such, they often call for shortening and other ingredients at which modern-day cooks might balk. If you dislike vegetable shortening or lard, you can substitute margarine or butter in an almost 1:1 ratio (1 cup shortening = 1 cup butter/margarine plus 2 tablespoons). Substituting with margarine may make crusts tougher and cookies less crispy; substituting with butter will give you crispier crusts and, as with margarine, chewier cookies.

Many of the Czech cake recipes originally call for vanilla sugar, which you can find readily in Europe. The recipes are adjusted for vanilla extract, but if you have vanilla sugar lying around, feel free to use it.

I translated the Czech recipes fairly faithfully from the originals, which came from my husband’s mother’s store of recipes. (Many of these may have come from a cookbook Mila worked on at the Kalich publishing house in Prague, though it’s not clear whether—or when—the book was printed.) You’ll notice that the methodology of the Czech recipes is freer than the American recipes: some ingredient amounts are left unspecified, and a recommendation to “bake until done” involves some guesswork on the part of the cook. But these are not delicate recipes: they hold up to peeks in the oven and extended simmering. There are no sauces here that will break and ruin your evening. Like family, these are flexible.

Finally…this is not a complete Czech cookbook. It’s not a complete American, Irish, or Italian cookbook. But that wasn't the intent. It’s a blend of caraway and basil, paprika and garlic, apple dumplings and bábovka.

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

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