I have a September birthday, middle of the month in fact. I feel a bit lucky every time it rolls around, not only because that means I made it another year, but that I get to choose my birthday dinner, no ifs ands or buts.
That doesn’t happen very often, maybe an anniversary or sometimes a holiday, but going back as far as I can remember each person in my family, parents included got one day when they could eat what they wanted, and everyone else got to join in. in a strange twist of luck, four out of the seven members of my family celebrated birthdays in consecutive summer weeks starting with July 20 and ending on August 10.
Those dinners celebrated summer, with burgers and dogs, corn on the cob and watermelon, lots of grilled steaks and occasionally a lobster or two shipped from my father’s native state of Maine.
My mother would sometimes opt for the adventurous menu, and that’s where I first taste cashew chicken. One of my other siblings had a February birthday, not a great month for food choices, and the other celebrated her birthday the day after Christmas, the equivalent of the birthday dinner jackpot.
Invariably she would ask for prime rib and as required, get prime rib. It was a glorious end to holiday feasting which always started in our household around Thanksgiving. That left me, on the back door of summer and the front step of fall.
Bear in mind that I’m a New York boy so by September in western New York you could have snow on the ground. The garden was long put to bed, and the A&P was not in the habit of having local or even seasonal food available.
Looking back, I marvel at my mother’s ability to put great food on the table without dipping too much into the processed well. We did have the occasional fast food, convenience style meals that some people ate every day, but she made it a point to cook and bake.
She also taught each of her children the importance and the therapeutic value of cooking so that later in life we could fend very well for ourselves. But it was the birthday dinners and holiday meals when you could count on foods simmering on the stove and roasting in the oven, filling my house with the greatest smells. I would sniff the air first before I came in from school just to see if I could guess dinner that night.
Frying bacon could be breakfast for dinner, but it could also hideously morph into liver and onions, the bacon just a concession to the non-liver eating among us.
It was that type of anticipation that would amp up tenfold around your birthday. You would get a couple of days to come up with your choices, pick a birthday cake (and it was almost always a cake from the local bakery, long since gone), and of course somewhere in there you’d ask for some birthday presents. Honestly, I can name very few presents that were lasting in their effect; a football, a football jersey, a football helmet, a transistor radio.
But the food, that could take me several columns to write about, it was personal, made for me and deliciously unforgettable. I can almost make the case that with each passing birthday, and its celebratory dinner my mother was giving me a gift that I use and give to others each day. I’m sure without realizing it, (no one could be that prescient) my mother was setting me on a path to love and respect food not just to fuel an engine, but a gathering place of family and community that is essential to the fabric of a balanced society.
But let’s just dispense with the philosophy for a while and I’ll tell you a food story, rooted in one of my many birthdays. It involves a retired boxer, apples and a can of tomatoes.
It was a wonderful fall afternoon and I had gone to my neighbors to play football after school. I could see my house across the fall pasture, and behind it was a sea of fall colors, one of the many benefits of living in the country. I had asked for spaghetti with meat sauce for my birthday, garlic bread and an apple pie for dessert.
The apple pie was always a favorite although I must have had a huge hankering for one as you usually went with cake for your birthday. I don’t recall that anything was on the stove when I came home from school so sometime between then and the bell that called me to dinner my mother must have gotten busy (the first lesson of mis en place; make it look easy).
When I came into the house it was warm and busy, things bubbling on the stove and in the oven. A mixture of ripe red sauce spiked with Italian sausage, cinnamon and sugar and garlic, lots of it and not the powdered kind that most kids had, this was the real thing. The sausage was from a small regional producer, one I’ve never found anywhere else.
He had gotten a retired boxer named Carmen Basilio to front the label (Carmen was Rocky before there was Rocky) so his smiling mug adorned every package of mild, sweet and hot Italian sausage. The sausage was some of the best I’ve ever had and was a family favorite. Mom’s meat sauce simmered on the back stove in the big cast iron pot while the garlic sputtered in the melting butter ready to apply to the bread split open on the counter.
I can remember every smell it seems, food memories being one of our strongest connections to good and bad times. But the clincher was the pie, just out of the oven, sitting on its cooling rack on the side counter.
The crust was golden brown, with just a thin trail of caramelized juices around the edge. I don’t know how my mother ever mastered pie crust, she was the farthest thing from “Grandma” that I can imagine, but she spent enough time in the kitchen to make one of the best I’ve had.
Finally, the apples, soft with a bite, full of flavor and richness (a dot of butter on top before baking helped) and with the crust a perfect ending to my birthday meal.
I don’t recall what I got for presents that day but the food has stayed with me for all these years. I can never replicate that meal, but I can still draw warmth and comfort from not only the food but the company and even the time and place. Food, it is the gift that truly keeps giving.
John Foster is an executive chef who heads the culinary program at Sullivan University’s Lexington campus. A New York native, Foster has been active in the Lexington culinary scene and a promoter of local and seasonal foods for more than 20 years. The French Culinary Institute-trained chef has been the executive chef of his former restaurant, Harvest, and now his Chevy Chase eatery, The Sage Rabbit.
To read more from Chef John Foster, including his recipes, click here.
