MY FATHER'S JAR OF CLOVES
“He loved cloves and bought them in bulk for the line of spices he packaged and sold in his stores.”
In 1966 I backpacked through Europe after college, trying unsuccessfully to move on from a long relationship that had ended badly. On returning home I kept to myself, but after a few days, when my father suggested we take his boat out on Jamaica Bay, I didn’t refuse. Early the next morning, after anchoring in the bay, before casting his reel, he handed me his thermos. He took his coffee unsweetened and dark, but that morning he’d made it sweet and light, the way he knew I liked it. He also tossed a ham sandwich my way, made with the ham he’d baked the night before. I could still smell the cloves.
He was an anxious, urgently inventive man, an insomniac who drank too much and took too many pills. Though the son of Lower East Side Jewish immigrants, by adolescence he was loosely modeling himself on Ernest Hemingway. He dropped out of high school to go west to Wyoming, learned to fish, hunt and box, then returned to Manhattan and took up acting. In 1940, he married my mother, a fellow actor. A year later, at 36, he enlisted in the army and went off to France. When he came home, he opened the first of three stores he called The House of Cutlery but stocked mostly with tableware and occasional imported foodstuffs.
He was 40 when I was born. “Don’t stew! Do!” was one of his classic pronouncements. It was a funny piece of advice coming from him, because along with roasting and steaming, stewing was one of his preferred forms of cooking. He was a foodie before the word existed. My mother, who needed little more than Swanson TV dinners, salt, pepper and instant coffee, gave him free rein in the kitchen day and night.
He wanted to eat what no one else had eaten. One morning I came into the kitchen and, through a swirling noxious mist, was met by the spiky foot-and-a-half-long tail of a horseshoe crab he was steaming, the tail extending well beyond the pot. He caught eels and hacked them into pieces to smoke in the smoker he’d designed and kept in the garage; eventually they emerged with a hickory flavor. He was drawn to offal none of us would eat: sweetbreads, tongue, tripe and oxtails he used in soup. Once he brought home from one of his stores a jar of pickled hens’ combs. Even he had to admit that particular offal was awful.
But not all his cooking was eccentric. When my sister and I were growing up, there was often a hot, well-spiced meal waiting for us before we went to school. Our favorites were potato pancakes, hulled barley he called groats and Chinese spareribs he marinated himself. One morning there were green eggs and ham. Ham, always baked with cloves, was one of his signature dishes. He loved cloves and bought them in bulk for the “Bon-Ton Brand” line of spices he packaged and sold in his stores.
I don't know how many people he employed at his stores, but I know he hired ex-cons, recovering addicts and temporarily-out-of-work relatives. He was always attuned to vulnerability. He never probed, but he always knew more than he let on.
That long-ago morning on Jamaica Bay, he hoped being in the boat, on the water at dawn with hot coffee and a ham sandwich, would be a balm to me. It was. I suppose that’s why, when he died, 50 years ago, I took this half-used jar of cloves from his kitchen cabinet. Even now when I unscrew the cap, the smell is as intense as he was, and as soothing as only he could be.
—Elizabeth Stone
Elizabeth Stone, an English professor at Fordham University who teaches creative writing and literature, is the author of four books and many articles. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate and elsewhere.
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Wonderful!
What sweet, wonderful memories.