Of Childhood, Identity and Sardines
Food for Your Head
My love language is sardines. Any canned fish actually.
Don’t unsubscribe! Let me explain!
When I was a boy, about as old at my daughter is today, my dad would do these little late night snack times with me. He’d pull out just the stinkiest, slimiest roughest snack foods. To him that meant mustard, horseradish, sausage, pumpernickel bread, salami, munster cheese and my favorite, sardines.
At this stage, the ladies of the house would run out of the kitchen holding their noses and there I’d be with my steel-worker father and his oil-stained hands and overalls and he’d slice some of that bread and slather it with mustard and we’d crack open that tin and carefully lay out the pungent fish and cheese, and I’d bite into that sandwich with my dad and it was heaven.
Of all the memories I have of my dad, somehow, those few seconds - me and him and that peasant food are so sharp in my mind that even today, just the sound of a tin of canned fish opening brings me back.
So, my wife knows this. As does Little Bean. And they humor me because, I have to assume, they love me. Often times, they’ll come back from an Asian grocery or European market with a little treat that they would never in a million years eat themselves.
And my wife will pull it out of the grocery bag holding it at arms length between her finger and thumb and say, “Here.” And I know I’m in for a treat!
Black Pepper, White Sardine, Crispy Crackers.
At first, I thought it was just sardine flavored which would have sufficed. But no, these are actual sardine strips, dried and pepperized. They taste exactly how you think they would. They are best best washed down with a Coke.
Dutch writer Louise Fresco once wrote that food is tradition, is something holy. “It’s about identity,” she said. And what clearer identify of who we are, than who we were.
Are my crispy sardines healthy? Well… maybe not for my body, but certainly for my mind. But they are given to me by somebody who loves me and remind me of somebody who loved me. What more could there be to eating? What more could there be to life?
And yes, ok, maybe my identity is stinky sardine and mustard sandwiches. But I’m ok with that. Eat on my friends!
What food takes you back to when you were growing up?
Meat. When I do eat meat I think of one incident. I did not like meat when I was about 9 or 10. I would eat slowly so I was the last one at the table. I found a little space under the table at the top of the hollow chrome table legs, which was a great place to get rid of my meat. Well, after some time, it smelled rotten. My father took the table apart and I hid. The strange thing is, no one ever mentioned anything about it. To this day I still wonder about that. I do not even remember what I did with meat after that. Maybe the old napkin trick.
A not so good food memory: my dad was from Virginia, most everything we ate was fried in lard or pickled. He was big on anything with vinegar, anything pjckled. Consequently I spent a lot of the time at the dinner table refusing to eat pickles, relish etc.. I couldn't get up unless I finished so I spent a long time at the table refusing. To this day anything pickled turns my stomach as well as my memory.