The Summer of Stranger Things

It was my family's equivalent of zucchini. Not that my brothers and I hadn't had our share of variations on that vegetable: zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, baked zucchini, boiled zucchini, fried zucchini—and on and on. The three of us grew to hate the very site of the indestructible plant slowly taking over my mother's garden. For years afterward I couldn't look at zucchini, never mind eat it, but that summer the speckled green vegetable was impossible to avoid.

Because the phenomenon was bigger than just us. Everybody's mother was forcing their kids through the same Groundhog Day's rotation of recipes. As if that wasn't bad enough, neighbors left forsaken rows of plants out for passersby to take. Visits to friends ended with shakes of our heads in response to the desperate entreaties of parents:

No, we have a garden. No, we don't need any to bring home. Thanks, but we've already got our own little shop of horrors right in the backyard.

As an adult, I circled back around to the vegetable and came to respect its versatility and durability. But back then, it's a wonder the three of us didn't have some kind of plant-induced PTSD. I dream of zucchini.

Looking back, it's hard not to ask why everybody didn't just throw at least some of the excess straight into the trash. But this was the era of kissing ketchup bottles. More than once I bounded into our kitchen to find a glass Heinz bottle precariously balanced atop another so the remaining ounce of ketchup could drain into the bottle on the bottom. Money was tight in those days.

Then came the rhubarb.

I have to admit it took me by surprise, this explosion in late August. For one thing, the bush was in the front yard—not the garden. For another, I'd been so focused on the zucchini I hadn't been tracking the mass of freakishly large triangular leaves spreading across the island at the center of our circular driveway. Yes, the zucchini had gone nuclear but at least we knew what we were up against. The rhubarb, on the other hand, had been in stealth mode since Day 1. How can you prepare for what you don't see?

Day 1, unfortunately, was Mother's Day. And I, unfortunately, was the dupe who convinced my dad to buy the deceptively small plant for my mom. He suggested flowers. I held out for rhubarb, an odd choice for a kid, but then I was an odd kid.

In the end, I got my way. My mom professed to be thrilled and promptly planted my offering. By the end of that summer, all hell broke loose. Decades later, the thing is still alive. True, it has lost some of its luster and its bulk has diminished. But the point is to never underestimate its power: it is immortal.

Here's the thing though. I like rhubarb. I really like it. Whereas most people opt for sweet, sour is my Kryptonite. I cannot resist tart, whether it's the sour taste of green apples or the pucker of unsweetened lemonade or. . . drumroll. . . the tang of raw rhubarb. After my mom gathered an armful of stalks that year, I grabbed one and bit into it. It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all.

Then came the pie.

The most well-known rhubarb pie recipes involve strawberries, mostly because they balance the harsh taste of the stalks. Yet my mother's version didn't include strawberries, or cherries, or any fruit that would soften the sour. There is a lot of sugar, mind you, but it's still a pretty tart pie.

I'm not sure why because the recipe was actually her mother's recipe. And my grandmother's recipe had been passed down from her own mother. Irene Johnson was probably not the first skilled baker in my family, but she is the first whose pastry I had the privilege of tasting. Sadly, the secret of Irene's motive for banishing strawberries from the pie has been lost.

My great grandmother was Swedish to the core and maybe it is for that reason she was the genesis of the rhubarb pie recipe. A little cursory research for this piece revealed that rhubarb was wildly popular in Sweden long before it became known in England and the United States.

I suspect the plant's popularity in Scandinavia had something to do with its hardiness in cold climates. In fact, rhubarb was so apparently so much of a Swedish staple that a student of Linnaeus went so far as to write a dissertation on the plant in 1752. Samuel Ziervogel’s Dissertatio Medico Botanica, Sistens Rhabarbarum, is a 13-part tome, written in Latin no less. Though I have no intention of ever reading Ziervogel's Dissertatio, it apparently emphasizes the vegetable's (yes, it was originally classified as vegetable, not a fruit) medicinal qualities.

As a kid, I didn't know anything about rhubarb's therapeutic value. All I knew was that when my mom cut me a slice of warm pie, it was love at first bite. Pie has always been a specialty of hers, just as it was a specialty of my grandmother's and great grandmother's. My grandmother would often reminisce about whipping up desserts for impromptu dinner parties. To hear her tell it, making multiple pies for half a dozen guests wasn't any more difficult than ordering Chinese takeout.

My great grandmother was at the opposite end of the spectrum when it came to socializing. She was, like me, terribly shy, but they had baking in common. They both used lard to make their pie crusts because it gave them a flakier texture and when my mom learned to bake crusts she used lard as well. Over the years she, too, became an expert baker, and one of her best pies is the heavenly rhubarb creation she served me that summer.

Though there were three generations of bakers ahead of me, I didn't start making recipes until much later in life. Maybe it was rebellion. Maybe it was because times had changed and I didn't have the energy to whip up a bevy of pies after I got home from work. Unlike my great grandmother, my grandmother and my mom, I was divorced.

With a young child and a full-time job, I had a lot on my plate (bad pun intended). If I had any spare time at all, I spent it reading and writing. I still considered myself a creator in the same tradition—the only difference was that instead of a baker's knife I used a pen.

Well, make that a keyboard. I would read Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" and take great comfort in its insistence that tradition could survive as metaphor:

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Eventually, I did end up carrying on the tradition in a less abstract way. One summer, when I was in great need of extra income, I took a night job as a baker's assistant. The position mostly involved making endless baguettes in a deck oven. A few months later, my boss asked if I wanted to train to become a certified baker and I said yes. Despite the burns, the grueling workload, the lousy pay and the vampire hours, I was hooked. There is nothing better than the smell of fresh bread at the end of a long, back-breaking shift. I still don't consider myself half the baker the women in the family were but at least I can count myself among them now.

When I finally left to return to teaching writing, I had no regrets. I don't think I'll ever be able to walk away from my marriage to the written word. On the flip side, in a Chekhovian burst of stubbornness, I refuse to give up baking either. I intend to carry on the family tradition from my kitchen because it ties me to the past.

When I bake I sometimes remember that Stranger Things summer, but I also think of dessert at my grandparents' house at The Cape. I find myself wondering if I've still got the secret recipe for whoopie pies or Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins. If I dig down further, I can just recall my great grandmother's big, gleaming kitchen with the wooden cow jumping over the moon hanging on the wall.

But that's just four generations. Where does the fifth come in? Like me, my child's tool of choice is the pen and she plans to devote her life to teaching. She's also very talented in the kitchen and started at a much earlier age than I did. Her apple pie, which she makes every year with her father, is far better than mine. I've talked mostly about the women in my family but baking is tradition that extends to both sides and is all-inclusive.

The same is true of my niece, an art major living the bohemian-chic life in New York City. In so many ways, she's worlds away from my reticent Swedish great grandmother. In others, not so much. For her final project at Pratt, she collected family recipes and illustrated them in a stunning cookbook called Quirky Desserts from the Lamothe Family Kitchen.

She got many of those desserts from the wooden recipe box we gave her mother after she married into the family. My grandmother, mother and I spent a few hours copying them out by hand and presented them to her as a welcome gift.

I'd like to include them all but for brevity's sake I'll stick to our quirky rhubarb pie. Like so many old recipes, there's not much to it. Back in the day, most women knew their pies by heart and didn't need instructions. I've added a few for clarity's sake and updated a couple of things as well.

Rhubarb Pie

Ingredients:

3 cups rhubarb cut into 1-inch chunks

1 cup sugar

2 heaping tbsp. flour

Instructions:

1. In a large bowl, toss rhubarb with flour to coat and add sugar.

2. Spoon into 9-inch pie crust and cover with a second crust or lattice. Cover edges with aluminum foil.

3. Bake at 425 for 50 approximately minutes, until rhubarb is tender and bubbly.

The Crust

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

2/3 cup lard

6 tablespoons cold water

Instructions:

1. Combine flour and salt

2. Cut in lard with pastry blender

3. Add water, as needed, until dough forms

4. Shape into a ball and refrigerate

5. Roll out and press into a pie plate.

Serve pie warm with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Or add nothing to savor the tart. And the sweetness.