pole beans, from Peacock Modern's flickr stream

My grandmother died on Sunday. It’s ok, she was ninety-four. She was the last of her generation in my family. In her long life, she massacred food as no other before or since. Her signature dish was a chicken thigh that had been frozen, reheated, frozen, reheated, frozen, coated with paprika, and reheated again. She was stingier with food than anyone I have ever met. My parents are generous with food. My other grandmother was generous with food. I am generous with food. I have traveled among people who had nothing, and they were generous with their food. She was not like them. She stole the desserts from my bar mitzvah, directing the caterer to load them into her car, and doled them out to me until I was eighteen. She once offered my dad a roll left over from his own mother’s memorial, more than a year after the event. It was overgrown with mold. Whether or not he made this up, I don’t know, but it is emblematic.

Once, my grandmother took my sister and me to the Disney park in Florida. One morning, she took us to a diner for breakfast. It was the first time I ate beneath a velvet Elvis. She took her toast, wrapped it in a napkin, and stuffed it in her pocketbook, with a singsong cry: “Toast for later! Toast for later! If you don’t take some, you’ll be sorry.” Not that there was any more toast. At lunch, strung out with child-hunger, I watched her pause in her gathering of cuttings from the gardens to peck at a piece of the toast.

Her name was Yemema. Yemema was the second daughter of Job, which gives you a sense of how happy she was. Somewhere way back, it also means dove, as in pigeon. She was nothing like a pigeon. Pigeons have a much larger appetite.

There were times when her stomach contracted until it was smaller than her eyes. That is when she would stuff herself to the gills. Once, she ate so many hors d’oeuvres that she made herself sick. She then moved directly to the table, and started in on the next course. She remained ideally mean throughout.

She diluted the coffee from McDonald’s, because it was too strong. She drank Red Rose tea, using each bag at least three times, then drying it in the saucer of a flowerpot, and feeding it to her wan roses. This is no insult to her roses, which were excellent. She was a green thumb and a trained botanist, who could grow nearly anything. I only mean that she liked them pale. Sometimes she put a little rum in her tea. That was pale, too.

My first memory of a kitchen garden is of hers. She had pole beans along the wood fence. I remember picking them, kneeling among the marigolds, which were there to keep the insects away. That remains my one gardening trick. She kept mint, but no tomatoes that I remember. In her backyard still stands a pear tree, from which she canned the fruit. They were hard when she canned them, and they were hard in a dish. With only a thin layer of softness, and with their pallid flesh and visible veins, eating them was unsettlingly like biting a pear in the face. They were sour with lemon, used to keep the botulism at bay. She would joke about this every time she opened a jar, as if in acknowledgment of a suicide pact. She knew the world could be grim. Her food always said so.

She had a potato baker from W.H. Macy’s. A potato baker is a thin, inverted tin pot with a tin lid. You place the tin lid on the stove, place a potato on that, turn on the burner, and clap the pot on top. Hers was lined with a piece of aluminum foil that she put on slightly after I was born. A potato baked in this contrivance could be quartered to serve to company. To the best of my knowledge, the baker was never washed, and its foil was never changed. My uncle brought it back to his home in Kentucky, foil and all.

The doctors said that the reason she lived so long was that she was stingy with food. Being stingy with food, apparently, is very healthy. A great many health problems can be laid at the doorstep of overindulgence in the rich, plentiful food that we so often take for granted. It’s a fair bet that humans did not evolve to sit down and eat three squares a day. We evolved to do harder stuff, like cross hundreds of miles of wilderness with barely a scrap to eat or a swallow to drink. In this way, my grandmother’s eating habits connected her to what is essential in humanity. She consumed little, and wasted nothing. She would have looked on $50/week as an incredible extravagance. Yet there was no joy in her food. When I think of unhappy food, it is her cooking that I think of. When I hear of someone eating on a dollar a day, it is her cooking that I think of. My grandmother’s early experience is proof that life is plenty hard. Her reaction was to reduce her intake to a voluntary subsistence. With her life as a lesson, I think I would prefer to eat as well as I can.

At the shiva — the memorial period — following her burial, there were platters of roast and corned beef, tongue, and salami; hummus, falafel, and baba ghanouj; breads, rolls, and loaves of pita; and plates of cookies and cakes. It was surely the most food ever displayed at an occasion related to my grandmother. I felt as though I did nothing but eat, sandwich after salty sandwich, cookie after sugary cookie. It all tasted extraordinarily good.