(Take a look at my dad in that picture. You can tell how thrilled he is to be marrying Mom. In the 44 years they were together on this earth, and even after she died, he never got over that.)

This article was published in the Boston Globe 10 years ago, and I think it’s my first published piece. I’m tempted to polish it up a bit but I won’t. Better to leave it be.

Delights of a long-running cereal romance

Lately, my husband has been bringing me breakfast in bed. Nothing fancy, no fresh flowers, just coffee, a bowl of Cheerios, and the morning paper folded open to the comics page.

Breakfast in bed is a long-standing tradition in my family. My mother grew up in Ireland, in a house with a cook and a maid but no central heating. The maid brought everyone up a mug of tea in the morning to help face the morning chill. In that house it was more of a necessity than a luxury.

When she got married and moved to this country, Mom didn’t let modern conveniences stand in the way of habit; every morning and evening, she still has tea and toast in bed. On weekdays the ritual was simple, and when I was in grade school I had the morning detail. I was too young to make tea, so I warmed up the previous night’s coffee in a little saucepan, poured it carefully into a mug, and made a single square of toast with margarine. But on the evenings and weekends Dad would make a proper pot of tea and a stack of toast. Sometimes we children would all join them, perched on their double bed, munching companionably. Now that we kids have left home, Dad fixes a tea tray first thing in the morning and last thing every night.

My mother has never led a life of luxury. She had four children, three within two years, and when I was growing up there wasn’t a lot of money to spare. She was far from her family and everything that had been familiar to her. Breakfast in bed was her one little treat, and she liked everything just so—china cups, milk in a pitcher, coarse-cut orange marmalade with the toast. We had different teapots, but they were always silver, and I remember my father scolding me for neglecting to warm the pot with boiling water before adding the tea. “She does so much for you,” he said. “Take the time to do this one thing right.”

After watching my father put together that tea tray for more than 30 years, I resolved never to marry a man who would not do the same for me. I discussed this with George while we were still in the early stages of dating, and he responded by buying a splendid breakfast-in-bed tray, the kind with little legs. The first few weekends after we got married he got up early and made waffles from scratch; but before long we were like everybody else, sitting at the table in our bathrobes with coffee and cold cereal and the morning papers spread in front of us. Breakfast in bed didn’t seem important after all.

Now that I have children of my own, though, I understand why my mother needed that little island of peace at the beginning of her day. I am not a morning person to begin with, and being awakened by two howling girls flinging themselves upon me does nothing to improve my mood. On the other hand, after a cup of coffee and 10 minutes with the funnies I am awake and good-tempered enough to deal calmly with morning squabbles instead of snapping back. George has figured this out. Breakfast in bed is a preemptive strike.

This does entail some sacrifice on his part—he has to make the coffee and feed the girls—but he has always been an early riser, and the payoff is considerable: smiling wife, calmer atmosphere, possibility of uninterrupted shower. In its own way, a bowl of Cheerios is every bit as romantic as a candlelight dinner, or a tray of tea and toast.

Copyright (c) Brigid Alverson 1999.

The very first spread in the book is a little bit off, with its suggestion that we use fruit as a decorative accent all over the house. This is a great idea for the first 30 seconds or so, but what happens when the bananas turn brown, the fruit flies take up residence, or the kids come in and wreck the symmetry of your bowl of fruit by eating it? I might put a bowl of fruit on the table, but not next to my handsome genuine leather editions of The Collector’s Shelf Of Books.

The first round of recipes is pretty normal. The anonymous authors suggest as many ways as possible to put bananas on your cereal—sure, you can go with the classic slices, but you can also sculpt your banana into a daisy, a fan, or even a bunny, or you can score the sides before slicing it to make fluted bananas. You can also fry up your bananas with ham and eggs, or mash a banana into a glass with a raw egg and some nice, cold milk, if you’re the high-protein type. They also have quite an array of banana smoothies.

Things start to get a little weird on the salad page, however. Behold this Springtime Salad. It looks benign enough, until you read the list of ingredients: lime and lemon gelatin, torn chicory, dry mustard, finely diced onion, thinly sliced radishes, and bananas. If bananas, onions, and radishes seem like an infelicitous combination, just imagine what it must be like to put a spoonful of jello salad into your mouth and encounter chicory, which has the texture of cut-up plastic netting. The other salads are mostly fruit salads and don’t sound too terrible, with the exception of the Banana Peanut Butter Salad.

You do get the feeling that the authors were running out of things to say with this snack suggestion:

Quick Snack

For a quick-energy pickup just peel a banana and enjoy its mellow flavor and smooth texture.

But then they rally with some seriously bent Main-Dish Ideas. Does this look like a plate of delicious breaded scallops?

Fooled you! They are Banana Scallops! Bananas also make an appearance in Fillet of Sole Amandine and Shrimp Curry, but the weirdest recipe in the book has to be Steak a la Stanley, “a hearty dish for the men of your house: steak broiled with golden bananas.”

Clearly, the authors of this book were getting desperate. Otherwise, why would they even mention putting mashed bananas in meatloaf? Or the Banana Mixed Grill, which consists of grilled hamburgers, tomatoes, and bananas? And these sauces just look wrong:

It’s like they just took random normal meals—sliced turkey with green beans, lamb chops with carrots and mint jelly—and inserted bananas willy-nilly.

Fortunately, things slide back to normal with the final section of the book, Desserts, because bananas make pretty good desserts. The usual suspects make their appearance—banana split, banana cake, banana cream pie—although oddly a favorite of mine, banana pudding, is nowhere to be seen. And there are creative dishes as well, such as Banana Flambe, Hawaiian Tidbits (bananas coated with coconut and chopped nuts) and Bananas Scheherazade, which appears to be bananas baked with dried fruits, sliced grapes, and chopped nuts. And the section on quick breads makes for a triumphant finish.

It must be said that this cookbook has nice, clean layouts and (mostly) high-quality photography for the era. The vast majority of the recipes are just fine, but in their attempt to introduce bananas into every course of every meal, the creators’ reach far exceeded their grasp, and the result is a collection of truly regrettable recipes. Unless that banana meatloaf is a whole lot better than I think it is.

Edit: Want a copy of your own? Look here!

According to the note on the flyleaf, this little book made its first appearance in our family on Christmas 1978. My mother undoubtedly found it either at a yard sale or at our favorite store, the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Shop, which means she probably paid 19 cents for it.

Each of the stories in this book starts out as your standard, heart-warming Christmas story of magic and good deeds, then takes a sharp U-turn at the end, winding up with exploding lightbulbs, adulterous elves, and Rudolph’s flabby laurels. Unlike almost every other book put out by a greeting card company, it actually is hilarious, and we quickly formed the custom of reading the stories aloud as a family. In later years, we took to ordering Chinese food on Christmas Eve for a hassle-free dinner. After dinner we would open the fortune cookies and read the fortunes aloud, adding the words “in bed” after each one. Then we would repair to the living room for tea and cookies and the oral reading of Topsy-Turvy Tales. Needless to say, this was always a big hit with guests.

My mother died in November 2003, after a short, sharp illness. I stayed with my father for a few weeks after she died, and we kids decided that we would have one last Christmas in the old house. Because Mom went so quickly, we didn’t know where she stashed things, and despite frantic searches all over the house, we couldn’t locate the book in time.

Over the next year, my sister combed the internet looking for a copy of this book. Her search was hampered by the fact that no one could remember the exact title; we had always simply referred to it as “Ed the Light Bulb,” after the protagonist of one of the stories. Eventually she did find our physical copy, in a box of wrapping paper under the bed in the spare room, and the Christmas tradition was restored, although now that we all celebrate the holiday at our own houses, the group reading aspect is gone.

Before writing this post, I went online and did searches on the full title and the author’s name. You can’t find this book for love nor money; it’s simply not for sale anywhere on the internet. And that’s a shame, because it really is a great little book. That Ted Bick, he’s a genius. Enjoy!

Read Yuletide Tales

This catalog makes Robertson’s seem much more fancy than it actually was. Certainly the cover line “The store of a million gifts,” was an exaggeration. But I used to linger over each page to deliberate over which item I would choose, given the option. Except the yard of cheese—I got away from that as quickly as possible. Here’s a sample of the delights within.

Look in the upper right. How long has it been since a mantilla was an indispensable element in anyone’s wardrobe? When I was a kid, it was a major sin for any female to go to mass with her head uncovered. Just before we left the house on Sunday, we would all grab mantillas. My mother kept a bunch of them in the drawer of her night table, mostly black lace, some with gold thread woven in. They were awfully fancy and delicate, and I can’t believe we took them so casually. She would secure them with bobby pins and off we’d go.

Here’s something for the guys. Double-breasted pajamas! Kimo-jamas! My favorite is the Red Devil Nightshirt, though, for its understated naughtiness.

One of the hallmarks of this era was the named polyester. It wasn’t just easy-clean, wrinkle-free synthetic fiber, it was Dacron or Orlon or some other varietal. Apparently people wore this as a badge of pride.

Here’s a glimpse into the dream kitchen of the avocado epoch.

To begin with, it’s the sort of story kids love, about a brother and sister living by their wits in an abandoned apartment in New York City. Don’t we all dream of leaving Mom and Dad and the backyards of suburbia and somehow making it on our own? It’s sort of like an urban version of the Boxcar Children. But it was Talbot’s straightforward writing and her eye for the telling detail that really brought this book to life for me.

In the story, Tomás and Fernanda, ages 10 and 14, are motherless children who are left completely alone when their father doesn’t come home from work. After a few days, a kindly neighbor gets involved and arranges for the children to be taken away by Welfare. To avoid this dreadful fate, Tomás and Fernanda make up a story about going to stay with their godmother in Brooklyn but really they just move to an empty apartment on the boarded-up upper floor of a nearby building. Tomás scavenges for food and other items on the street, while Fernanda, who is agoraphobic and won’t go out, takes care of the place.

One of the things that makes this book work is the setting. Tomás and Fernanda live in Washington Market, a wholesale produce district that was razed and displaced shortly after this book was published to make way for the World Trade Center and assorted urban renewal projects. I had never been to New York when I read this book, yet Talbot’s descriptions made the neighborhood seem very real.

My sister points to the food as being a big part of the book’s appeal. Tomás scavenges for fruits and vegetables among the discarded crates of the market, and he turns in bottles to get money to buy rice. Fernanda cooks up exotic (to my Midwestern eyes) dishes on an open fire and later on a cookstove that Tomás finds on the street. Talbot brings bright primary colors into her story a lot: Fernanda’s bright blue nylon dress, the bolt of yellow silk that Tomás finds in his travels. And my favorite description of all, the one that sticks in my head after 40 years, is her picture of the super’s apartment in the building where Tomás and Fernanda start out:

She had brought two boxes from the refrigerator—chocolate ice cream and vanilla. She scooped big spoonfuls into red plastic bowls. Fernanda got more vanilla; Tomás more chocolate. They sat at Mrs. Malloy’s plastic-covered table to eat it.

Almost everything in Mrs. Malloy’s house was plastic. Red roses on the table made every meal like a party. Between the plastic curtains, red plastic geraniums on the window sills never withered, never stopped blooming. Plastic lace doilies on the television and on the end tables made white curlicues against the dark wood. Green plastic ivy curled around the blue television lamp.

Talbot makes some interesting choices as well. There weren’t many books about Puerto Rican New Yorkers in 1967. And while I can’t quite put my finger on it, there’s something about the voice of the book that makes it really sound like the story is being told by a Hispanic narrator—there’s a certain definiteness and directness about it that just rings true.

Tomás is your standard plucky young boy, but Fernanda is another extreme altogether. She is agoraphobic and refuses to leave the house. Instead, she buries herself in scrapbooks, in which she has pasted pictures of houses, clothing, and food from old magazines. Despite being housebound, she reflects the consumer culture of the time, usually in a positive way.

These cave adventures take up most of the first half of the book, but eventually the story has to move on; Tomás meets an artist who illustrates children’s books, and we know the jig is going to be up fairly soon. Still, the ending is fairly satisfying and it’s particularly appropriate that Tomás himself comes up with the idea for the children’s permanent living arrangement.

Tomás Takes Charge is one of those books you sink into. I used to read it over and over, just for the descriptions and the exciting feeling Talbot evoked of going off and living on your own, surviving on your wits and some discarded green peppers. There’s something both exciting and reassuring about that, no matter how unrealistic the story really is.

Switzerland was not a direct participant in World War II, of course, but as all the surrounding countries were at war, they experienced shortages and rationing just as their neighbors did. (Also, the Swiss have a bit of a bunker mentality—to this day, residents are required to keep certain food rations on hand at all times, more as a hedge against inflation than to ward off starvation.)

This little book actually packs quite a bit of information into a small space. The author, Madame Helen Guggenbuhl, includes instructions on how to can, dry, and pickle food, remake clothing to accomodate changing sizes as you lose weight, and make soap substitutes out of things like beef trimmings, potato peels, and ashes.

The food section combines solid housekeeping advice with some uniquely Swiss suggestions. Since potatoes weren’t rationed but flour was, Mme. Guggenbuhl suggests using grated potatoes to replace some of the flour in baked goods and to thicken sauces. To conserve cooking fat, she recommends browning flour and other grains in a dry frying pan and making your roux without butter. Other parts will be very familiar to the modern reader: Soups! Salads! Use meat as a flavoring, not the centerpiece of your meal! The back cover of the book shows a day’s worth of rations; this being the Swiss, wine and hard cider are included and there are two types of cheese, low-fat and what I guess we would call fat-free. It looks pretty good until you realze that it’s heavy on the potatoes, and you only get 1/10 of an egg a day.

The section on conserving heating fuel has a familiar look as well. Apparently the draft snake is not an entirely modern invention; Mme. Guggenbuhl recommends it and illustrates its use, and she also reminds people to install double-hung windows and keep clutter off the radiators.

The section on clothing, on the other hand, is like something from a history book, with information on how to do laundry the hard way (pre-soak, then boil everything in a big cauldron and hang it out to dry), how to chip the mud off hob-nail boots, and how to darn socks (alternate title: how to get blisters). Mme. G even explains how to set up a rain barrel in order to have soft water for washing.

MFK Fisher, who lived in Switzerland just before the war, did a much more entertaining take on this same topic in How to Cook a Wolf, which reads almost like a riposte to this little book. Maybe it was.

In happier times, Mme. Guggenbuhl also authored The Swiss Cookery Book: Recipes from all cantons. My copy, which I think I also picked up in that thrift shop, is a charming edition from 1954 with a very 1950s-style cover.

I went looking for information about Helen Guggenbuhl and ran across this obituary of her son, the psychologist and writer Adolf Guggenbuhl, who died just this year. Here’s what it said about Helen:

His mother came from a longstanding Zürich family in Maienfeld. During the pregnancy with Adolf she was studying medicine. Later she worked as an editor at the Schweizer Spiegel publishing company.

The picture painted by his obituary is of parents who were caught up in their professions at the expense of their children:

To his parent’s house, which was strongly marked by the profession of his parents, came writers like Kurt Guggenheim and Friederich Glauser and personalities like the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the philosopher Hartmann. He told us that Glauser had told him especially fanciful bedtime stories.

Adolf Guggenbühl’s childhood was not easy for him. He spent the greatest part of it far away from home in children’s homes and sanatoriums. At home he was cared for by not always much loved housemaids since his parents were both busy with their professions.

From this bit of family history, it sounds like Mme. Guggenbuhl was more interested in writing about boiling laundry than actually doing it. Still, this little manual stands as a useful guide to the homely arts as well as an interesting sociological document.

Below is a link to the whole thing, for the curious. Two warnings: It’s big (10 MB) and it’s in French.

housekeeping-in-difficult-times

Robert W. Service wrote poems about prospectors in the Arctic. Dad always enjoyed tales of manly adventure; his favorite short story, which he read to all of us at one point or another, was Leiningen Versus the Ants. The image of the ants throwing themselves into the gasoline moat, sacrificing themselves to form a bridge for the others, has stuck with me ever since.

Likewise, Service’s two poems The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew are also part of my permanent mental canon. Dad would adopt an aw-shucks attitude when he talked about Service, remarking that he wasn’t fashionable because his poems rhymed. They do stick in your head, though, thanks to a galloping anapestic meter that takes over your brain, and Dad could recite big chunks of both poems from memory. When he got stuck on a line, he would take down his red and yellow paperback anthology and look it up. We had several editions of Robert Service’s poetry, including a deluxe illustrated version of The Shooting of Dan McGrew, but this paperback is the one I associate with Dad.

As for St. Faustina, Dad discovered her when she was still just a Blessed, and he was very taken by her message. Just as Dad was the more indulgent parent in our family, Faustina was all about the Divine Mercy, so they were soul-mates of a sort. He had a special wooden rosary on which he said the chaplet of St. Faustina, which is a quicker version of the rosary that substitutes single verses for the Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

There is actually a store in South Bend that specializes in Faustinaiana, and Dad liked to go there to stock up on pamphlets. I took him there shortly after my mother died. I thought the place was kind of droll—they had posted e-mails of the Blessed Virgin’s latest messages from Medugorje—but the guy behind the counter was friendly and listened with apparent interest as Dad told him all about how he met and married my mother.

A few months later, Dad had a subdural hematoma and needed emergency brain surgery. After that episode he lost his long-term memory and never really got it back. I tried saying a rosary with him a few times, figuring that the familiar, repetitive prayers might touch a chord, but it didn’t work. He just looked puzzled, as he did when the priest came to give him Communion. So I gave it up.

As he was dying, though, I dug out the St. Faustina book and found his wooden rosary. I closed the curtain around his bed and said the chaplet with him. The prayers were unfamiliar to me, and I stumbled a bit at first, but eventually I got into the rhythm. Repeating the same short verses over and over again was calming and consoling for me, although I don’t know if they reached Dad or not. Over the course of the next few days, my sisters and brother and I said the chaplet with him several more times, singly and together. We said it one last time with him shortly before he died, and we buried him with his wooden rosary twined around his fingers.

So we’re doing it again this week, more by default than declaration: After lunch, everyone fell into a book. I took the oppportunity to attack the stack of old New Yorkers and read two really nice articles. I expected All the Answers, by Charles Van Doren, to be a straightforward narrative of his experiences as America’s most famous quiz-show cheater; instead, it was a really touching story of family solidarity, forgiveness, and redemption. Van Doren presents himself as surprisingly diffident in the story, never really admitting to knowingly doing anything wrong and not particularly tortured about it, either. But he is surrounded by people who are much wiser than he is, chiefly his father and his wife, who set him straight. The other article, Hungry Minds, is Ian Frazier’s account of his work running a writer’s workshop in a soup kitchen in Chelsea’s Church of the Holy Apostles. I usually hate these writers’ workshop stories, but this was less about the workshop and more about the soup kitchen, and how it affected the church’s evolution, so it was actually pretty interesting. And the article is chock-full of great anecdotes; my favorite is when he runs into a soup-kitchen guest who is not impressed by the writers’ workshop because he attended one run by John Cheever when he was in Ossining. Good stuff.

When I was 12 or 13, I was fascinated by all things Irish, and I read a lot of Irish literature. At some point, my parents decided that James Joyce was Not Suitable, and I was forbidden to read his works. So every morning I would set my alarm clock for the unspeakably early hour of 6:30 a.m. and sneak downstairs before anyone else was up so I could read a short story from this copy of Dubliners, jumping every time the stairs creaked for fear of being caught. When I had read the story, I would carefully insinuate the book back into its place in the living room bookcase so no one would notice it had been disturbed. Whether because of the anxiety or the passing of time, I can’t remember a single word of this book.

Ironically, if they had caught me they probably wouldn’t have cared. Most likely they were worried about Joyce’s later works, not Dubliners. But I did get that thrill of the forbidden.