THE COOKER
“When I moved into my first apartment, he was eager to flex his frugality muscles….”
My grandfather Joe was frugal in the way that people born in the ‘20s usually were. He had lots of pitiful memories about how broke his family was when he was a kid. (He often told the story of how for Christmas one year he got a single present: an orange.) Because he grew up in a small mining town in Pennsylvania, he also had some truly awful stories, like the time he and a classmate ran to the mine after the accident alarm went off, and saw a man’s body covered with a white sheet, only his feet sticking out, and his friend said, “Those are my daddy’s boots.”
But instead of being resentful, my grandpa was appreciative, like a gratitude exercise on legs. He always called my grandmother “my girl,” even when she was well into her 80s. (It was usually said reverently as he watched her walk across a room: “Would you look at my girl?”) Whenever we gathered for some bountiful dinner, he would gaze around the table, beaming, and say, "Aren’t we the damn luckiest people?"
When I moved into my first apartment, he was eager to flex his frugality muscles and gave me a bunch of household hand-me-downs: a set of silverware, a set of cloth napkins, some mildly wobbly picture frames, and this behemoth of a “controlled heat” cooker/fryer. He seemed especially delighted to pass on the appliance, despite the fact that it was probably manufactured during the Carter administration. Seeing it for what it was—thoughtful gift and potential fire hazard—I brought it home and immediately turned it into a plant holder.
My grandpa was plenty of other things besides thrifty. He was warm and mischievous, with a low, rolling voice. He’d been a code-cracker in World War II, and then a superintendent of schools, and he got his doctorate in education. He gave amazing, Old Spice-scented hugs and, in an affectionate way, called all of my boyfriends “son of a gun.”
After he retired, he got super into cooking—tons of rosemary-olive-oil breads, minestrone soups, pasta e fagioli. But in the last 15 years of his life, he developed increasingly ominous heart trouble, which meant a pacemaker and frequent doctor visits. It also meant a “heart-healthy” diet, which involved cutting his salt intake to almost nothing. He hated that. He died in January 2012, after enduring too many years of bland meals.
Now his ashes are scattered behind the house in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where my grandmother still lives, in a shady spot next to a small creek near where he used to grow mushrooms. And the cooker sits in a place of honor in my house, cradling a small dumb cane plant. It’s an artifact from culinary history, and the vessel that held so many of my grandfather’s foodie creations—before the doctors and the surgeries and the sodium-free bread. I hope wherever he is, he’s feasting on the saltiest food imaginable.