Six on History: Food
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The Romanian specialties of a circus-performing mother who slaughtered chickens in the hotel bathtub for dinner
“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’”
This worked as a seduction technique—a testament either to the popularity of Geek Love or the ease of college hookups.
Today, Geek Love’s portrayal of people with physical disabilities might provoke unease. The main character, Olympia, was “an albino hunchback dwarf,” her brother Arturo the Aqua Boy had flippers for hands and feet, and her daughter Miranda did well as a fetish stripper, thanks to her arousing little tail. Al and Lil had deliberately bred their children so as to enhance their carnival act. But what I remember most about the book is that from Al’s first mythologizing words, Dunn showed that she understood trauma and celebrated difference. She suggested that—no matter how much damage we might sustain—familial love, safety, and acceptance was possible.
That Dunn never wrote another novel was one of my early literary sorrows. (I checked on her for decades. Surely she wanted to write more; she had so many fans.) So I was particularly intrigued when a bookseller at Malvern Books in Austin, Texas, insisted I read Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, by Aglaja Veteranyi (1962–2002), a novel likewise narrated by a daughter of circus performers—with the crucial distinction that Veteranyi’s tale is autobiographical. Born in Romania in 1962, Veteranyi left with her family in 1967 after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. According to an afterword by Vincent Kling, the novel’s translator, they escaped “lethal poverty and a reign of terror” and were granted asylum in Switzerland. They started touring with their circus act; their home began and ended at their trailer door. Kling writes that the family suffered discrimination: though they were not of Romani origin, “their wandering life made them outcasts indistinguishable from Gypsies and subjected them to even greater instability.”
Veteranyi’s novel begins when the unnamed narrator is very young. The mother’s act is to hang by her long, “steel” hair. The father is “a clown, an acrobat and a crook.” The child narrator, who often breaks up the narrative with statements in all caps, writes about how her fragile family is held together by their cultural traditions. Early on she offers a long list of “MY FAVORITE THINGS TO EAT,” most of them Romanian specialties: polenta with salt and butter; chicken soup; cotton candy; pork in garlic-flavored aspic; stuffed peppers with sour cream and polenta; “funeral farina cake decorated with those colorful candies called Smarties”; grape leaves stuffed with meat. She tells us that her mother prefers to buy her chickens live, and that when staying in a hotel she “slaughters the chicken in the bathtub,” while the family makes enough noise to cover the sound. The narrator adds: “CHICKENS HAVE AN INTERNATIONAL SQUAWK WHEN THEY’RE BEING SLAUGHTERED; WE UNDERSTAND THEM WHEREVER WE ARE.”
The family feels fortunate not to be in Romania, where relatives stand in line all night long for basic foodstuffs, and “even the children have rotten teeth, because their bodies suck out all the vitamins.” But their new surroundings are isolating and sometimes dangerous, and things soon deteriorate inside the home as well. The father has an incestuous relationship with the narrator’s older half-sister, and, it’s implied, with the narrator, too. The caring mother who got up early to slaughter chickens now abandons her daughter, then reclaims her when she is thirteen so as to pimp her out in a burlesque cabaret. (To protect her, the mother suggests she wear a merkin, since she’s too young to perform naked. “It looks real. And I feel dressed,” the narrator notes.)
During such traumatic moments, the narrator starts to visualize a child cooking in a pot of polenta, focusing on how much it hurts the child, in order “to calm me down.” These visualizations become “THE STORY OF THE CHILD WHO’S COOKING IN POLENTA,” a ritual shared with her sister—they find relief this way, as traumatized people sometimes can, expressing and working through their real pain via the imaginary pain of the child in the story. For the reader, though, the child cooking in the polenta is the narrator herself, and the polenta—mamaliga, or “mama’s food,” in Romanian—represents both her abusive mother and their lost motherland.
In the book’s later chapters, it becomes clear that the narrator’s upbringing has left her with no way out. The self formed by her family and her trauma is her only self, and she cannot renounce it. Nor can she live with it. Social worker types and relatives who have achieved bourgeois stability approach her with opportunities to join them, and possibly to heal, yet the reader understands that in doing so the narrator would lose the only thing she has. In real life, Veteranyi achieved considerable success as a writer, and her work has received still more posthumous acclaim, but in his afterword, Kling writes that she “felt she could not have remained human if she’d needed to accommodate herself to any typical way of life or career path.” In 2002, Veteranyi drowned herself in Lake Zurich.
I had serious reservations about cooking from Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, even though its pages were full of the Romanian foods of the author’s childhood. I share Veteranyi’s sense that food and mothering are inextricable, and this was lethal mamaliga, too sad to re-create. Yet the narrator’s insistence on food seemed like an invitation, and the Austin bookseller, a reader of my column, really wanted me to cook from it. I wondered if I could transform the polenta. The answer (as with any healing project) was, Only incrementally. ... [recipes and more well-crafted prose follow]"
The Romanian specialties of a circus-performing mother who slaughtered chickens in the hotel bathtub for dinner
"MONCKS CORNER, S.C. – Opening a new restaurant during a pandemic might not seem like a great idea, But Celebrity Executive Chef Carlos Brown believes that this is the right time to boost the hospitality economy by serving up traditional Gullah cuisine.
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"One of the first crops to emerge from the ground in New York State is asparagus (scientific name: asparagus officinalis). The vegetable is an integral part of America’s colonial history. It must have been a taste of nostalgia that prompted New Netherland settlers to try and cultivate asparagus in unfamiliar surroundings.
A member of the lily family and related to onions and garlic, asparagus has a distinct history. In Europe, the vegetable had been an exclusive product for centuries, out of reach of the poor, and recommended for medicinal use due to its diuretic properties and its purported role as an aphrodisiac.
Asparagus was commended for its distinctive flavor by such eminent figures as Julius Caesar, Louis XIV, and Thomas Jefferson. The vegetable also inspired some of the greatest European still life painters. They in turn made an impact on a contemporary American artist.
Queen of Vegetables
Enjoyed for its succulent shoots, cultivation of asparagus began in the eastern Mediterranean region. Greeks and Romans praised the vegetable for its flavor and texture. The oldest known recipe for preparing asparagus appeared in the third book (on vegetables) of De re culinaria, a collection of Greek and Roman cooking instructions compiled in the ninth century by the otherwise unknown author Caelius Apicius.
The same plant produces three types: the common all-green spears; the white spears that grow underground preventing the development of chlorophyll; and the lavender-tipped variant (whites that have received some sun to give a slight coloring). The last two are fibrous and must be peeled, but have a more delicate flavor than green ones. The cultivation of white asparagus is restricted to France and the Low Countries – few people in these regions would ever touch a green spear.
Asparagus was re-introduced into Europe in the fifteenth century by French monks who had preserved the expertise of its cultivation. A trend was set when Louis XIV ordered Royal gardeners to grow asparagus in his Versailles hothouses. It became the ‘Queen of Vegetables.’
Herbalists at the time studied plants for their ‘properties’ and pharmaceutical use. They lauded asparagus for its medical virtues. It was used as a laxative and said to expel gravel and stone from the kidneys. Asparagus was taken to ease urination (in spite of the bad odor which, according to French novelist Marcel Proust, turned his “chamber-pot into a vase of perfume”).
Some hailed its power to stir up “bodily lust in man or women.” The theory of shape analogy (“correspondences”) was developed in the sixteenth century by the Swiss physician Paracelsus. It states that plants resembling certain parts of the body can be applied to treat ailment or used to enhance passion. To Madame de Pompadour asparagus was her favorite erotic stimulant. Members of the nobility hosted banquets where women gobbled spears of asparagus and men indulged in oysters. Casanova apparently sucked fifty raw oysters when sharing a bath with the lady of his fancy.
Asparagus sprouted first in the Paris region, where it remained a luxury product accessible only to the clergy and wealthy. From France passion for the spear moved to the Low Countries, Germany, England, and America.
Battersea Bundles
Asparagus were first introduced in England by the Romans and then forgotten. They returned during the reign of Henry VIII and became a “Royal” delicacy. To those who could afford to eat meat, vegetables always took second place. Only seasonal rarities such as asparagus were worthy of being placed on a rich man’s dining table.
Modena-born humanist Giacomo Castelvetro was arrested in Venice in 1611 by the Inquisition for his Protestant beliefs, but released after intervention of the English ambassador Dudley Carleton. He was offered safety in Greenwich. Appalled by the English cuisine, he composed A Brief Account of the Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy in order to improve the nation’s diet. Instead of meat, he advised his readers to eat spinach, broccoli, artichokes, peas – and asparagus.
The arrival of refugees from France and the Low Countries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries gave rise to market gardening. They were the first to grow root plants on a commercial scale, introducing many vegetables to the marketplace: carrots, parsley, lettuce, watercress, pumpkins, and cucumbers.
In Battersea, on the south bank of the Thames, there is to this day a tavern named The Asparagus. The name reflects an intriguing phase of local history. Many French and Flemish refugees had settled as market gardeners in Battersea where their plots covered the district. They played a crucial part in feeding the capital. They also democratized the availability of asparagus. Sold in a bunch, these were known as “Battersea Bundles.”
William III of Orange is said to have taught Jonathan Swift and William Temple how to eat asparagus in the Dutch manner (that is, with a sauce of melted butter poured into a hard-boiled egg sprinkled with ground pepper and nutmeg). By the eighteenth century, vegetables such as artichokes and asparagus had lost their exclusive connotations and were being prepared in English kitchens as if they had been native cauliflowers or cabbages.
New Netherland
Asparagus roots were brought to America by European settlers in the early 1650s. The plant adapted to the new conditions and has been grown in North American gardens ever since.
Cultivation goes back to the New Netherlands era. Adriaen van der Donck, a graduate of Leiden University, was appointed law enforcement officer for the Patroonship of Rensselaerswyck, located along the upper Hudson River. He arrived in New Netherland in 1642. His position demanded extensive interaction with Dutch colonists and the local Indigenous People.
An astute observer and detailed recorder, he took it upon himself to describe the economic development of the settlement and relate his (positive) experience of the natural and cultural new world around him. His motivation was to encourage newcomers to help develop the colony.
Though his Beschryvinge van Nieuw-Nederlant (Description of New Netherland) was finished and copyrighted by July 1653, the First Anglo-Dutch War delayed its publication until 1655. Published by Evert Nieuwenhof in Amsterdam the book proved popular, going into a second enlarged edition the very next year. Poorly translated, it was not made available in English until 1841.
From his description of Dutch farming practices in the colony, it is clear that seeds and cuttings of all sorts of plants had been introduced by the first settlers and were shipped back and forth between the colony and the homeland. Van der Donck lists asparagus amongst the vegetables being grown in local herb gardens.
English settlers grew asparagus as well. In 1685, one of William Penn’s advertisements for Pennsylvania included asparagus in a record of crops that had adapted well to the American climate. Even here there is a Dutch context. In 1677, Penn had visited Leiden and The Hague. It is likely that he was introduced there to asparagus that were cultivated in the nearby Westland region with its reputation for horticulture.
Van der Donck was eventually granted a tract of land north of Manhattan and, as an influential figure in New Amsterdam, he became a rival to Peter Stuyvesant. With his landholdings and political clout, he maintained the (minor) Dutch title of “Jonkheer” which evolved into the name of the city of Yonkers, Westchester County, where his estate was located.
Spear of Tradition
Argenteuil, a Parisian suburb on the banks of the Seine, stands out as a center of excellence in the history of French asparagus. A range of dishes was named after the place, including a tasty “Crème à l’Argenteuil,” a cream of asparagus soup.
Argenteuil also was the chosen retreat of Impressionist painters. Offering a variety of open-country motifs and spectacular views of the river, it became a hub of artistic activity. Claude Monet was the first to settle there in December 1871. When Édouard Manet visited him in the summer of 1874, he was tempted to adopt his friend’s preference for painting en plein air. Exhibited at the Salon of 1875, Argentueil is the artist’s first painting to be labelled an Impressionist work.
Manet was an admirer and student of Flemish and Dutch still life painting. His trip to the asparagus region would have reminded him of the peculiar ability of painters in that tradition to include a range of vegetables in their compositions.
The image of asparagus as the sole element of still life depiction was set by Adriaen Coorte, a relatively unknown Dutch master (active in Middelburg between about 1683 and 1707) who created a series of fine pictures in which the vegetable is given prominence. That memory may have inspired Manet. A few years after his visit to Argenteuil, he painted “A Bunch of Asparagus” (1880).
The chain continues to this day. John Morra works from a studio in Stuyvesant, New York. Trained at the New York Academy of Art, he is a modern master of tasteful still life painting, continuing in the footsteps of Dutch, Spanish, and French masters. His 2008 painting “Asparagus” highlights the transatlantic connection and confirms our shared gustatory and artistic heritage."
Illustrations, from above: the Apicius manuscript (ca. 900 AD) acquired in 1929 by the New York Academy of Medicine; a Roman floor mosaic with asparagus dating to between 350 and 375 CE. (Vatican Museums, Rome); title page of A Brief Account of the Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy, 1614 (manuscript held at Trinity College, Cambridge); the Asparagus tavern, Battersea, London; A bundle of Asparagus, 1703 by Adriaen Coorte (The Fitzwilliam, Cambridge); A Bunch of Asparagus, 1880 by Édouard Manet (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne); and Asparagus, 2008 by John Morra (John Morra Fine Art).
