Spam Chop Suey Reveals Genetic Code!
SEVEN INHERITED RECIPE BOXES make up my collection. I’ve had them with me now for so many years that I can remember at least four different places they’ve resided in my office, each for long periods of time. Amulets, icons–call them what you may–I always work with them in view; they are that important. And then recently, I discovered that they contain the code to life itself.
These boxes are part of my story, as much a part of my lineage as the looks that I inherited. That’s because these boxes contain the story of the women in my life, and link my husband’s and my ancestral nourishment from South Dakota to Indiana, back to England, Scotland and Germany. In that they reveal who we are, I guess, lacking, as they do, any recipes from Africa or from Asia. That is, unless you consider my mother-in-law’s Spam Chop Suey in any way Eastern, which would be seriously stretching this recipe. Its four basic ingredients are Spam, fat, rice, and a can of cream-of-mushroom soup. Each recipe in her box, in fact, includes some combination of these four.
If you consider their ingredients alone, you can see each of the recipe boxes I’ve collected as a steady diet for nourishment, disease, or some uneven prandial existence in between. They are also a handy way to explain genetics.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s say that the genome is my mother-in-law’s recipe box. If there are 23 little colored tabs sticking up within it—beef, poultry, cheese, casseroles, hors d’oeuvres, etc.—they are the 23 chromosomes in the human body. Within each of these are genes—or, in this case, the recipes—including, of course, the Chop Suey with its four basic ingredients. The human genome equivalent of these ingredients are adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, written in genetic transcription as A, C, G, and T, and just like Lillian’s four staple ingredients, these four are always present in every gene.
The idea of recipe exchange as an explanation for genetics also extends to the frequent emails sent to my dear friend Elizabeth. Both of us inherited an uneasy sense of dinnertime being catch-as-catch-can. We both hoped to not pass this on to our daughters. Back and forth between us travels a fluent battery of recipes cadged off the Internet. Ready to go with the touch of a file-attachment button, these recipes are simply cloned.
By contrast, my mother-in-law’s recipes are written by hand, transcribed over and over for her children and friends and therefore prone to typos and changes, but always have the same basic ingredients. This process is pretty much what goes on in replication, where the gene is copied and passed along. I have the box she made for her youngest child, my husband, in which she adapted the chop suey recipe to a serving for one; in her large-box version it’s adapted for twenty.
When we married, my husband brought his mother’s recipe boxes into our home and I brought mine. For holidays, we undergo genetic recombination, uniting our two families’ inherited recipes and laying them out as a single feast before our unsuspecting child, who will grow up thinking that this is the food— including the Spam Chop Suey—of her ancestors. Which is particularly piquant, since she was adopted in China.
As I wrote in a previous post, from time to time I’ll run the text of pieces I’ve read on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. This post is adapted from one of those.
Ah yes, those four ingredients of the spam chop suey genetic code! I know them well. Your topic is perfectly timed for me as I explore my own genetic code via a memoir chapter entitled “Seven Sweets and Seven Sours.” I too have a multi-generational recipe collection.
Thanks for underscoring my belief that recipes, stories, and songs are the three strands that, woven together, make up family identity.
Marion, you suggested I use the comments section to offer a brief food memoir. This one is about the sensuous nature of food, a subject I’ve heard referred to as “food porn,” but you will see that my version is G-rated. A version of this essay appeared in the Canadian journal Rhubarb:
And the food, oh the food! First, there were giant red beefsteak tomatoes, no kin to any of the pasteboard orange items called tomatoes in supermarkets today. These dense crimson beauties weighed up to one pound each, and were so juicy that one could not eat a sandwich featuring thick slabs of this tomato without crimson surplus squirting out everywhere.
One of our favorite summer suppers was a plate of sliced tomatoes, a loaf of Roman Meal bread, and a platter of steaming Silver Queen sweet corn ears. After our prayer, and the passing of the two main dishes, we added the few condiments—butter and salt to the corn, mayonnaise or vinegar and sugar to the tomatoes. The corn was so fresh that the slightest contact with a tooth would puncture the skin, sending a stream of sweet, hot juices into the mouth.
There were five of us children and occasionally my grandfather or a hired man or hired girl at the table for every meal. Some chewed “roastin’ ears” by the row; others encircled the cob, which then began to emerge as a round rod under the kernels. The first corn of the season was especially conducive to ecstasy. We seldom talked when we ate it. Instead, we listened to the sounds of satisfaction all around us, the symphony of jaws, teeth, and mouth all moving in some kind of rhythm.
The littlest children needed help, so Mother would take a very sharp knife and slice off the kernels, then, moving against the grain, she would press against the cob all the way down the shaft, leaving a little pool of sweet corn milk at the bottom of the plate. When we cleaned the table after this meal, my mother would sometimes be amazed to find six large clean cobs on my plate.
My birthday is July 30, the very peak of garden season. The meal I asked for every year came right off our land: coleslaw made with a new cabbage, green beans cooked with huge chunks of ham and new potatoes all in one pot. I loved the way the crunch and sour of the coleslaw contrasted with the salty ham, plump potatoes and soft green beans soaked in the smoky ham juices.
By the time I got to the freshly-baked cherry pie and ice cream, I was sated but still eager for one more set of sweet-sour explosions in my mouth.
When in college I read the scene in Fielding’s Tom Jones wherein food is seduction, I recognized that I knew something about sex after all! Later, I read that food and sex are physically linked in the limbic system of the brain, which controls emotional activity generally, and I smiled to think of how carnal knowledge grew right out of the earth unto our plates.
One of my favorite wedding gifts was a hand-painted pie plate in the manner of Pennsylvania Dutch fractur full of bright primary colors, birds and flowers. Punning on the name of my husband, Stuart, known to some of his friends as “Stu,” one of my professors wrote: Guut Frau Guut Schtew in beautiful calligraphy in the middle of the plate. Good wife, good stew. Passion flows where the channels are open, and for this farmer’s daughter, the earliest and most open channels were the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and throat.
As an avid listener to NPR, (WAMC locally) I’m surprised that I haven’t heard you read your essays. I have listened to your husband’s chats with Shartock, sometimes twice a week! What station are you on in the Capital Region?
Miriam
Oh, Shirley: Thank you for the piece. It’s delightful, as is the comment above about the power of story.
Miriam: So sorry you have not heard them. They’ve been broadcast on any public radio station that provides All Things Considered, including WAMC. Thanks for listening to Rex and Alan Chartock. They do mix it up each week.
Wonderful, thank you Marion!
I will be visiting often to read, learn, and smile.
R
Las Vegas, Nevada