You’re probably knee deep in presentations, answering emails, or Zoom presenting to clients right now. Memorial Day is already a memory.
The three-day holiday weekend (whether Memorial or Labor Day or Fourth of July) in Chicago feels like the city has loosened its belt a little. A lot of people visit friends, family, or monuments elsewhere. The bursting seams of the city contract. There’s no traffic. Stores are empty. Restaurants have availability. Langour is requisite.
So is lager. Though I like to joke my future band name is Rare Intense Hops, I avoid them on weekends like these. I have no tolerance for the ghost-reaper-infused-forty-eight-hour-hopped IPA-ification of our culture anymore. Pretty soon we’ll be dressing salads with blue mold, no cheese in sight. Yes, I’m an old man. Get you, and your dog, off my urban astroturf.
I am thinking of Memorial Day and beer, because of #swedengate. When I first saw the hashtag, I assumed some writer had finally called bullshit on the IKEA food court, its relatively healthy fro-yo, cardboard pizza, and powdered reconstituted gravy-slathered meatballs. Yes, the lingonberry preserves are the jam, but y’all can GTFO with your ironic, performant love of mass-produced-furniture-store-Swedish food. If you’re planning at coming at me, please take a long walk off a short pier into a vat of Dunkin Donuts coffee
My second thought is someone had questioned the name of Trader Joe’s gummy treats, aka Scandinavian Swimmers. I probably don’t need to explain why this is weird, but just in case, let’s just say, for me, it conjures the illegal shenanigans of fertility doctors who look like Bjorn Borg.
But, alas, Swedengate was much stranger. Someone exposed the fact that Swedish families back in the day did not serve food to their house guests. If you had a playdate with Sven, and his family set the table to tuck into some boss pickled herring, you were not invited. You had to sit in Sven’s room and figure out how to solve a Rubik’s cube, while he and his family broke brown loaves of Limpa.
Eventually, as they do on the internet, all of Sweden was villainized. The refusal to serve houseguests suggested why the country is racist and contains pedophile rings run by Tom Cruise from the back of a pizza parlor.
Swedish folks defended the practice with some sensibility, suggesting that the reason they did not serve kids is that the visiting child’s family had likely made their own plans for dinner and they didn’t want to interfere. As the father of a peanut-allergic son, I appreciate that. One of my great terrors is when my son visits someone else’s house where he could potentially eat something that sends him in to anaphylaxis.
Ultimately, people were angry, mostly because we live in the time of “I”, as in “I do it this way”, “I think this is right”, and if you don’t do it “I” way, then you can hit the highway. Given that, I suppose it’s not a leap to believe the practice of food-deserting your guests could indeed hide the roots of intolerance.
In America, we do feed our guests. But, we often do it with Domino’s and Doritos. Aren’t we committing greater atrocities than the Swedish?
My mother was a scratch cook, which, I never truly appreciated until this moment. Of course, I housed Fruit Loops, Golden Grahams, Count Chocula, and the undisputed king of cereals, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. But, when I wasn’t nose deep in the bottom of a cardboard box looking for a temporary tattoo or whatever chintzy prize lay below a layer of sugar-smacked grain, my mom delivered breakfast hot and fresh: western omelettes, golden waffles, and hot cinnamon-sugar-dusted buttered toast.
I thought that’s how everyone’s mom was, until I slept over at Rick Keslowkis’s house. After staying up all night chucking metal Chinese throwing stars into his basement timber columns, we were famished. Rick’s mom also stayed up late, chain-smoking on the couch, her blue-quilted-housecoat bathed in the flickering light of female combat. Rick’s mom loved Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (the original G.L.O.W. that inspired the Netflix series) which was often broadcast at midnight in Detroit, and she wasn’t awake yet.
Rick’s mom had not abandoned her duty. She plied him with a stash of Swanson breakfast treats, and a microwave, and he knew how to use them. Opening the Keslowski-family chest freezer was like sliding the boulder away from the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The incandescent glow of a small bulb threw a spectral light across stacks of processed spongy pancakes and crenulated-sausage links. Rick’s line, every morning I slept over – it was about a five-year run- was “Would you like the pancakes, or the pancakes, my good sir?” Weird? Worse or better than Swedish-friend famine? Not really. Just different.
What I don’t understand about the Swedish guest thing is why someone would intentionally forgo the opportunity to bring joy through sharing food with others.
Despite their engineered provenance, those Swanson dinners are part of the fabric of who I am.
And so is scratch cooking from others. He doesn’t know it, but every time I slow scramble an egg now, I think of my friend Aamir. Generally, I read three cookbooks, scour the internet, click through a bunch of forums, and watch at least seven cooking videos before I cook anything the first time. But, when I scramble an egg for the millionth time, I inexplicably don’t take the Jiro Dreams of Sushi approach. Though repetition is often the rare opportunity to be better every day, even if only incrementally, it usually degenerates into an exercise in drudgery. Crack an egg, fork it hard, and crank the BTUs.
But, a few years ago, I had an early morning work brainstorming session at Aamir’s place. We were “working from home” before it was all the rage. Aamir asked me if I’d eaten breakfast. I had not. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned ten minutes later with a cloud of custard, a coddled and slow pan-swaddled scramble. I relished the texture and hated myself for making scrambled eggs so badly. You might say Aamir cooked with love. I’m too jaded for that, but I do accept it as a moment of kindness, an unintentional act of bromantic inspiration. Each time I scramble an egg now, I do it with the goal of recapturing that memory.
And it is now that I find myself, this last Memorial Day, in Aamir’s backyard, surrounded by friends, some I’ve known for almost two decades, a group who, not only wouldn’t ban my kids to the basement at dinner time, but who would probably raise them better than my wife and I, should something happen to us.
In the early days as our food-obsessed clique would gather, one of us would usually make everything. Maybe someone else would bring a dessert. We were always relatively enthusiastic cooks, and the dishes were often ambitious, even if not perfectly executed. Sometimes, like one New Year’s where drunk on 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle (easily findable then) we cooked whole lobsters, did Thomas Keller’s egg custard with chive potato chips, and sous-vided dry aged ribeye, it was epic.
This year all four families in attendance made a dish. Aamir shouldered the burden with a rotisserie-chicken-thigh-schwarma – he killed it, though I joked I was mad he didn’t have a dedicated ceremonial sword to slice the meat. Bryan made green-goddess-level herb potato salad, each starchy cube al dente and redolent with dill and sweet grassy notes. There was Moroccan cauliflower dip from Tracy, which I sprinkled chaat snack mix on to add a contrasting sweet crunch. I made limey ahi tuna ceviche. I used a Rick Bayless recipe, but I skipped the olives called for because I now know pursuing authenticity isn’t always more important than hewing toward personal joy.
Three lagers in (Old-Style – the beer that also hydrates), belly full, I realized this is what the kids, and some Swedish don’t know, the true pleasure of shared communal eating. After two decades, this is what we’d earned. We had all hit our stride. We gave as much, or more than we took, and we do it very well.
Thank you for sharing