A Taste of the Past

My father is sobbing. With calloused fingers, he wipes tears from his eyes, which are two different colors, one green and one brown. He's an emotional guy, given to booze-fueled joie de vivre, blistering anger, and when he's telling half yarns about himself, a sort of megalomaniacal glee. But I have never seen him like this. He says hesitantly, and with a slush to his words, "I wanted so badly for you to be able to write that story."

It is Father's Day at the hospital. The land has been sold. The cottage has been cleaned out. And my father, who thought that his blood thinners were bothering his stomach, and so stopped taking them, has had his second stroke.

The story he wanted so badly for me to write was a story about him and about his mother's cooking. It's a story about where he comes from.

Some years ago, I came up with a joke that made my sisters and brother laugh. "Help," I'd say. "Dad is threatening to teach me how to make haluŝky." It was funny because it was true—and because the distress was only partially mocking. Anything my father offered to teach us carried with it his dangerous impatience. It carried with it, too, his self aggrandizement. "Tell me," he would have said, "doesn't your daddy make the best haluŝky ever? Tell me."

The food, though, was the funniest thing in the joke. Four suburban Philadelphia kids with a mother we adored who served us takeout pizza and Chinese food, what did we know from haluŝky? Boiled, hand-fashioned knobs of flour and potato, haluŝky came from another world. And so did my father.

He wore ascots and drove Rolls-Royces. He liked flashy restaurants and cocktail lounges. An enthusiastic cook with gourmet aspirations, he made a show of dinner: bouillabaisse followed by lobsters and crabs; sukiyaki cooked on an electric flattop in the center of the dining room table. He taught me how to drink. "Your daddy's a millionaire," he'd boast, raising a tumbler of Crown Royal. He joined the country club. He flew Pan-Am.

But that was not where my father was from. He was born in 1928 in the Pocono Mountains, the second of five brothers, part of a generation of offspring of Eastern European immigrants who came to northeastern Pennsylvania at the turn of the 20th century to work in the anthracite mines. These folks called themselves Coal Crackers.

His father, Andrew Andrews, née Pacusa, was from the former Czechoslovakia. A schoolteacher, he had mined coal when younger. He died of black lung disease when I was a small child. My father's mother, whom we called Grandma Andrews, was born in the Poconos to Ukranian immigrants. A prodigious talent in the kitchen, she cooked a vast repertoire of delicious, calorie-rich dishes, both Eastern European and American, to fortify the body for hard labor, and to stave off the chill in a place where it snows in April. She was stout of body and heart, a devout Catholic who liked to feed family and neighbors. She dug holes in the ice of Lake Wallenpaupack to fish for striped bass. Her sons—not my father, but the ones who had stayed on the mountain—brought her fresh deer meat, and she turned it into venison kielbasa.

Once a year in summer, we would visit my grandmother on the lake, where she ran a small resort at Ironwood Point: a handful of cabins, some rowboats, and a general store stocked with fishing gear, bug spray, and jars of pickled eggs and penny candy. Once a year in winter, my grandmother would stuff the contents of her pantry into her station wagon and drive down from the mountains to preside over an enormous Christmas dinner at our house: sweet baked ham, roast turkey with all the trimmings, homemade pumpkin pie and whipped cream–laced "pumpkin puffs" made with pâte à choux, blueberry pies filled with the fruit she canned from the bushes that stained the cabin porches purple in summer.

But the best foods she made were Eastern European. My Grandma Andrews' potato pierogies were melt-in-your-mouth; we ate them boiled, topped with caramelized onions. My mother was leery of Grandma Andrews' wild mushroom soup, but we devoured it anyway; it had just a bit of the tang that characterized her kapusta, or sauerkraut soup. My father pan-fried her kielbasa, and we slathered it in spicy, stone-ground mustard. My siblings and I loved her kolaĉki, sweet rolls filled with nutmeat, poppy seed, or prune.