Apron Strings Can Double As Family Ties

My childhood memories are fragrant with feasts.

While my Oregon friends ate canned soup and peanut butter sandwiches in our school cafeteria in the ‘50s, my tastebuds were refined in Europe and North Africa.

Decades later, I remember the aroma of crisp pommes frites eaten from little paper bags on the Champs Elysee in Paris. The pungent smell of braised leek and sorrel soup from my third-grade classroom in Brussels. The watered-down red wine our teachers served us at lunch.

When my concerned mother inquired about wine for 9-year-olds and suggested milk instead, the Belgian headmistress sniffed. “Milk, madame, is for cats.”

U.S. Foreign Service families traveled in style in the ‘50s. White-gloved waiters served us from silver chafing dishes on the SS Constitution, the ocean liner that took us to Morocco. The meals ended with rosewater-scented finger bowls.

We plucked fresh grapefruits from the walled yard of our villa in Rabat, where I first smelled the pungent coriander and cumin that our cook Aischa used in her couscous and chicken tagine.

My father entertained us for weeks with his account of a Moroccan state dinner where he, as the senior diplomat, was offered a sheep’s eye on a silver platter.

I can still taste the whole lamb our French friends roasted in a pit when they uncorked their latest wine harvest from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains. And the crispy wienerschnitzel and spaetzle served with dark German beer in Bonn, where we moved after Morocco.

My years as an embassy child finally ended in the ‘60s with college at Stanford, but my interest in mealtime rituals continued.

When my two daughters were born in Spokane, I cooked my own baby food from a French cookbook, shunning Gerber’s. I ordered my heavy French copper pots from Williams-Sonoma in San Francisco because I couldn’t find any here in the ‘70s.

As a young wife, I loved the Northwest’s bounty. I cooked venison from Montana and salmon from Alaska’s Copper River. I made pies with tart huckleberries plucked from the mountains above our Priest Lake, Idaho, land. When my younger daughter, Blythe, was 3, she vied with a brown bear cub for some of those berries before I snatched her away.

As the girls grew, so did our traditions: A big, fresh turkey from Rockwood Market for Thanksgiving. Homemade fudge left for Santa on Christmas Eve. A cardamom-spiced, chocolate streusel-filled sweet bread dough shaped into a duck for Easter breakfast. A Valentine’s confection of meringue, whipped cream and fruit.

When Blythe and Trilby left home in the ‘90s for college and jobs, I made sure those childhood memories went with them. I made them each a binder filled with family recipes.

Its title: “A Fare to Remember.”

It holds our holiday feasts, my mother’s Foreign Service recipes, and meals from our trips to Eastern Europe, Russia and New Orleans, where Trilby went to law school and we feasted on crawfish, Cajun boudin, po’ boys and Creole gumbo.

That family binder holds more than recipes, of course. It’s also filled with memories, of love and good times and the rituals that bind us to each other.

Rituals, says Margot Adler in her book “Drawing Down the Moon,” “have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly at home.”

Despite the glamour of my childhood travels, I’ve never been Martha Stewart. I have dogs that shed, college tuition bills to pay, and a demanding job as a journalist.

But simple mealtime rituals helped keep our balance, even on the busiest of weeks. We’d set the table with the yellow French pottery, light candles, turn on Mozart and turn off the telephone. At that table, we shut out the world and solved its problems.

My husband and I are now an empty-nest couple. Our biggest reunions are limited to major holidays, when we gather in Spokane, Portland or Seattle, the three points of our family triangle.

Now, with their notebooks in hand, it’s up to the girls to continue the culinary tradition — and build their own rituals.

Bon appetit.

environment for The Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5462 or karend@spokesman.com