This story aired on NPR’s All Things Considered on March 25, 2013. You can listen to it here.

In the alligator barns at Insta-Gator Ranch and Hatchery, Covington, LA.

Yes, I’m talking about New Orleans.

Baby Dolls dancing in the streets on Mardi Gras. These recently discovered photos are taken from an unidentified film shot about 1931, according to Story Sloane Gallery. Used courtesy of The Sloane Collection.

I was back in NOLA on Mardi Gras this year to report on the Baby Doll masking tradition for NPR’s Weekend Edition… Check out the resulting story here.

… a holiday moment on Cowbird, which you can find here.

Col. Harold Van Heuvelen at the premiere of his symphony, 70 years after he wrote it. Photo by Kevin Gift.

For the story of a symphony, a veteran, and an amazing series of events that had their start back in 1941, check out this recent piece I produced for NPR’s Weekend Edition.

… in a story from me on Cowbird, which you can find here.

… that’s in a new story of mine on Cowbird, which you can find here.

I’ve got a new story of a Sunday afternoon in New Orleans on Cowbird; check it out here.

]]> http://www.tinaantolini.com/2012/08/29/this-is-what-we-do/feed/ 0 http://www.tinaantolini.com/2011/11/23/the-pleasures-of-sameness/ http://www.tinaantolini.com/2011/11/23/the-pleasures-of-sameness/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:45:18 +0000 tina http://www.tinaantolini.com/?p=258 Why don’t we get sick of this?

Every year there are articles reciting the litany of Ways To Make Turkey Taste Good (as Adam Gopnick writes in the New Yorker: “The laboriously basted turkey, which was never quite moist, gave way to the long-brined turkey, which was always too salty, and has, in turn, given way to the deep-fried turkey, which is excellent but demands a large, scary vat of boiling oil…”) National news hosts are forced into kitschy baking-oriented features, which usually involve them moaning with pleasure over some pumpkin-oriented pastry. The relative merits of cooking stuffing in or out of the bird are debated. Ritualistic canned vs. fresh cranberry sauce battles are held, and truces drawn. Gravy worshippers the world over rejoice. And some of us, who tend to be this food-focused all year round, simultaneously welcome the rest of the populace to the fold… and wonder at the sameness of it all.

I was thinking about this over the past week, after having admitted to a friend that I was looking forward to last Wednesday’s edition of the New York Times (Wednesdays are Dining Section days, and, embarrassingly, yes, I keep track of these things, and they actually contribute to Wednesdays being Good Days). It being shortly before Thanksgiving, I was expecting that day’s edition to be especially plush. My friend, who is more the sort of person to a inhale a burrito than read about one (with all due respect), was skeptical: “You mean, they’ll have like a dozen new articles about how to roast a turkey? Sounds fascinating.”

Sarcasm aside, it got me thinking about holiday dishes, and how much of their merit lies in their repetition. Yes, every Thanksgiving there is a New York Times Dining Section chock full of ingenuous ways to prepare your sweet potatoes (here’s the submission this year). And, yes, every year I—and tens of thousands of others—look forward to it.

There is a certain comfort to the sameness of this annual turkey-inspired fervor. In a world that so celebrates and embraces change—an inclination further exaggerated by the immediacy of the internet—these dishes are touchstones. They are a socially approved escapism we all take part in… and, I would argue, we all need to take part in. When so many issues demand our attention—job creation! Hydro-fracking! Herman Cain’s sexual proclivities!—it is a relief to think, even briefly, about turkey.

Beyond that, the seeming sameness of this food year in and year out contains stories within it; these dishes are the bearers of memory as much as any photograph. My mother’s braised onions—which will require that I spend this entire evening weeping as I peel dozens of pearl onions—have accumulated years of family history. I remember the first time we made them after my parent’s divorce, in my mother’s new apartment in an old tobacco factory in Richmond, VA, the trains passing by providing us with a near constant soundtrack. Then there was the year my mom had to leave mid-recipe to tend to a dying neighbor who was in her final hours. Holiday meals are a resting place for things we want to remember—and those we’d rather forget (another memory: the near-break-up conversation in my car with an old boyfriend en route to Thanksgiving, turkey thawing in the back seat.).

Then, for those of us who are slightly obsessive compulsive, the repetition of dishes is an annual opportunity to, once again, attempt perfection. This year, perhaps, you decide to heat the milk for the mashed potatoes, or spike your apple pie with ginger. The fixed points of the Thanksgiving meal are an ideal canvas for minor improvisation, for making even better what was good to begin with.

Ultimately, whether it’s in our turkey roasting techniques or just our indulgence in the torrent of cooking-related material that forces its way into our blogs, radios and headlines each November, holiday meals give us a consistency that life does not. And I, for one, am grateful for that.

It probably has something to do with the dire European economic news filling the headlines, but, lately, I’ve had Greece on my mind. Fortunately for those of you more interested in things edible and audible than economic, I have little of use to say on the Greek debt crisis here. Nope, all I can offer is the sound of fish. Or, rather, the sound of the selling of fish (minor! economic! connection! made!)…

Early one morning several years ago, I found myself wandering the streets of Athens with a couple of friends, somewhat aimlessly. We stumbled upon a huge market that was like entering an alternate sonic (and aquatic!) universe… and fortunately, I keep a recorder in purse for such moments. Listen for yourself:

We left with wet feet. It was a lovely morning.

(Photos courtesy of my travel companion Mary Clayton Carpenter, who didn’t know what those plump little pink fish were, either.)

It’s far more than just the staging ground for social interaction (traumatic variety), and certainly is beyond just a room to eat in. The cafeteria was a place where the often-embarrassing realities of our lives at home were revealed, the secrets of our extra-school existence. And the vehicles for those revelations were the contents of our lunch bag– most definitely not “box,” because, at age 12 or 13, these are hideously childish. I remember even rejecting the cloth bag my environmentally conscious mother tried to foster on me, preferring, instead, the anonymity of a brown paper bag. I wanted to be another one of those girls with their sack lunches, their ordinary ham and cheese lives. I was not that girl.

Even obscured by a brown paper bag, my lunch immediately marked me as different. I never had a PB & J. Never the “lunchables” I longed for as a smaller girl, with their sterile little wells of cold cuts and geometrically cut cheeses. No. My mother was a food lover and cook with culinary inclinations that seemed radical in the small Maine town we moved to from California when I was 9. They said I was from “away” far more loudly than my lack of accent. For example: years before the ubiquitousness of Taco Bell, I would bring a quesadilla, filled with refried beans, onions and cheese, folded into a half moon and fried, then wrapped in aluminum foil to wait until lunch. When unwrapped hours later, the trapped heat had turned it into a limp, white slug of a parcel that would draw an unfortunate amount of attention from others at my table. (Nevermind that I loved these, even wrinkled and cold, which was, I’m sure, my mother’s aim. All joy evaporated with the skeptical looks on the faces of my friends.)

When, finally, I brought the humiliation of the cold quesadillas to my mother’s attention, she was surprisingly sympathetic. It turns out this lunchtime embarrassment might be hereditary. Her mother had her own creative interpretations of an appropriate lunch for her children to bring to school, but the oddness of hers rested on an overly broad definition of what could be the protein element of a sandwich. As far as my grandmother was concerned, mayonnaise contained eggs, and therefore it could be the substance of the sandwich. And so my mother would open her lunch bag to discover a hollandaise and green pepper sandwich. Or, horror of all horrors: a lettuce, mayonnaise and… peanut butter sandwich. (If you just had that instinctual “wretch” reaction, you’re not alone.)

don't you wish your cafeteria had been a "Hall of Fun?"

No matter how successful we may be in blending in through choosing just the right pair of jeans or sneakers, a mayo, lettuce & PB sandwich could ruin it all. And my lunches, truly, were not as exotic as some children must weather. The Burmese boy resettled in Utica, NY. The girl with hippie vegetarian parents who has to make due in rural Texas, where a meatless meal is no meal at all. The beauty of a communal eating ground is being able to revel in the diversity of one another’s meals and food traditions—but middle school saps that ritual of all its vicarious pleasure. Different is not good in this realm, for most of us. Different is terrifying.

Fortunately, we do not remain on the junior high school social plane our entire lives (well, most of us don’t…). At some point, bringing unfamiliar foods into the lives of my friends became something I was eager to do, instead of something I was hesitant about. And, actually, I do think some seed of that enjoyment was planted during those cafeteria interludes. Once the first wave of skepticism passed, if I could get a friend to taste my lunch—the seeming grossness could morph into a boon, if it tasted good. And so, every so often—at a certain time of autumn, when the back-to-school sales fill stores with discount lunchboxes—I’m grateful for the realization that, in fact, I do love cold, sloppy quesadillas. Whether that’s socially acceptable or not.