Diane and me with our Nana

Nana

by Leo Racicot

I liked few things better than being with my Nana, sitting beside her in her kitchen, waiting for everything to cook. I can still hear the good heat bubbling up from aromatic casseroles, my whole boyhood exoticized by almonds, the scent of sesame, strong licorice, black and running out of the corners of my mouth. Nana is teaching me how to make tissue paper carnations, pink ones. I’m not a very good student. Her chatter is punctuated by delightful Malapropisms, mangling the names of favorite entertainers: Florence Welch (Lawrence Welk), Furry Como (Perry Como), Pranky Pontoon (Frank Fontaine), Alfred Pitchfork (He was a bit of a devil!)

We crack each other up; she, correcting my Arabic, I, correcting her English. Nana was petite, her white hair pulled up into a donut at the crown of her head, very Marseille market. Her eyeglasses shielded the searing intelligence of her wise, olive-toned eyes. Raised as an Ottoman Jew in Alexandria, Egypt, she became something of an anomaly in the sleepy mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Along with an uncanny mastery of seven languages perfected at L’’Universite de Paris and a crystalline singing voice that gained her entrée to one of the finest church choirs in Europe, my Nana brought with her to the United States the Egyptian/Syrian cooking she learned as a girl. Sudden love for a fellow Egyptian émigré in Paris, a barber named Ralph, spirited Adele away from whatever academic and musical aspirations she might have had. Ralph had the idea that opening his own shop in America, the land of opportunity, would put him and his new bride on roads paved in silver and gold. Before she knew what hit her, Adele (called by everyone Lena) found herself transplanted to a blue collar town with a blue collar man.

Life and the barbershop landed the couple if not on Easy Street at least on This is Okay Way until Ralph died suddenly of a massive heart attack. He left behind four children, each born two years apart: Mariam (Marie), Helen, George and my mother, Edna, nicknamed Topsy who was just six months old. Unable to work full-time and raise four, small children alone, Nana took a job doing piecework In Hub Hosiery, one of the city’s many sweatshops, and reluctantly put her kids in the Franco American Orphanage where they would remain until they came of age. This was in the years of The Great Depression.

By the time I knew her, Nana had left her dashed aspirations and heartbreak and gone about the business of getting on with it. Perhaps to make a second stab at rearing children she, herself, had been unable to raise, she and Marie, who stayed single and made a home for her mother and herself, became co-parents to my sister, Diane, and me. We, too, had become fatherless at a very young age, leaving our mother in the exact same mess her mother had known. I grew up then with all women: my mother, my sister, my aunt, my Nana. I witnessed firsthand the power of females, banding together when Fate has removed all men from the picture, to step in and nurture. I loved my women but Nana I adored. The love that Life denied her giving to her own children she heaped on Diane and me.

More than anything, I loved being with Nana in her kitchen, watching her cook. An almost pastoral calm would come over her as her small, old hands deftly tucked the Mahshi (Malfouf) mixture into cabbage leaves. In a flash, the stuffed wonders would layer up to the brim of the kettle – Nana pronounced it “cuttle” – then to be doused with homemade tomato sauce, fresh tomatoes from the backyard garden, and a splash of faucet water. Even more fun to watch was the way she would quickly fashion a crisscross design using only two turkey needles into the top of a baked Kibbeh loaf. With the greatest care, too, she placed snooba, pine nuts, strategically throughout the neat cake – not too many, not too few!

Compare this to the fare our French aunts on our father’s side of the family prepared (Papa was Quebecois and his siblings and their wives lived just across the driveway from us in the family homestead). For variety, my sister and I would be marched next door where Tante Marguerite and Tante Yvonne presented us with a different kind of eating, one filled with heavy sauces and butter butter butter. Emphasis was placed on cold sandwiches filled with whole meals: spaghetti sandwiches, Canadian Chop Suey sandwiches, mashed potatoes and peas sandwiches, potato chip sandwiches. I remember Quiches Lorraine so heavy they could double for a door and mousses so sweet they’d have sent even Willy Wonka running to the dentist. “Il met cheveux sur poitrine!” “It’ll grow hair on your chest!” proclaimed Aunt Yvonne as she made me eat a baguette soaked in cold pan drippings. Diane and I would leave their house each five pounds fatter.

Don’t get me wrong – the food my French aunts doled out could be darned tasty. But compared to the lighter, vegetable-infused Midde-Eastern cuisine Nana gave us, their Quebecois fare was ponderous, solid even. Nana schooled us in healthier, more natural attitudes toward eating. Six decades back, she realized inherently that olive and other oils were better for weight control and that sensible, unsaturated fats were key in staving off cardiovascular disease. Statistics show heart ailments among Middle Eastern populations to be impressively low. We now know this is due to the fact that Middle Eastern cuisine incorporates lean proteins, healthy fats, vegetables, grains into almost every recipe, helps regenerate immune system cells. Even Syrian bread (which I still eat religiously) is one of the most nutritious breads around.

Doused with generous portions of olive oil and always served with triangles of Syrian bread fresh out of the oven, the delights to be had in Nana’s kitchen were never-ending. There was Gusa, stuffed zucchini, though any squash could be used, with its aromatic garden flavors, and Baba Ganoush, the tangy, smoky eggplant dip perfect for bread or eating plain. There were always Makdous, tiny, marinated eggplants sprinkled with walnuts. Fatoush, a fresh lettuce and tomato salad splashed with lemon juice and sumac, was a regular visitor to Nana’s table. Halami, Halwah (pronounced ‘Ha-lay-wee’), Baklawa, Hummus, Tabouleh, M’jadara (lentil porridge), Za’atar (the best!). How could anyone not leave the table fat and happy?

Special Sunday trips were to nearby Lawrence for a meal at Bishop’s and extra olive oil, extra mint and extra bread from our friend and favorite waiter, Al.  After feasting, we would go tramping unsavory neighborhoods in search of Melia A’asi, a girlhood friend of Nana’s in Alexandria, whom Nana knew lived “somewhere in Lawrence”. Despite many attempts, we never did find her. Melia became somewhat of a legend in family lore. At least Aggie Michael, Nana’s Lowell friend, existed. Nana and I would regularly visit her home peopled with life-sized statues of every saint in the canon. I liked Aggie, a funny, fat, little lady with Orphan Annie hair, but I always heeded Marie’s warning, “Don’t ever eat anything there; she cooks spaghetti in the same pan she washes her feet in.”

Nana’s desserts were my favorite. I could eat Ma’moul, the anise-and-date-scented pastries ‘til they came out of my ears. When my best friend, Anthony, and I brought along a paper bag full of them on our choirboys’ trip to Boston’s Museum of Science, all the other kids wanted to be our friend that day. My most-loved sweets were Ka’ak, Proustian in its fragrance and its tastes, Turkish Delights, plump with pistachios, and – heaven in a cup – the Egyptian delicacy, Umm Ali, its circus-y colors beckoning you to become a professional glutton.

Diane and I, per order of our very Catholic dad, were raised in his faith but Nana’s singing repertoire consisted primarily of, of all things, Baptist hymns. So Nana and I would alternate dueling music genres: myself trilling The Angelus, The Kyrie and she, in her sweet, clear soprano intoning the old hymns: In the Garden, The Old, Rugged Cross, Abide with Me. Our singing and our laughter lifted the kitchen curtains high while the food cooked and heaven hovered quiet over in a corner. I never saw her put on airs. She was plain, without make-up or pretensions. I never heard her speak an unkind word against anyone. She did like to thumb her nose behind Marie’s back whenever Marie criticized her about spoiling Diane and me. “Next thing, they’ll want us to build them their own Taj Mahal.”

If there were times when whole oceans rose up in her old eyes, well, we knew why: thoughts about a life that might have been, But she never let tears distract her for long; she moved on in acceptance, in grace, loving her life, her family, her kitchen.

The kitchen and her heart went dark in the year of The Bicentennial. Broken by grief, I ran away to avoid the wake. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye and still stave that final adieu every day by firing up the stove for cooking up a cauldron of Koshari, frying up a mess of onions in good olive oil for M’jadara. In my own home, I close my eyes and conjure up Nana in her kitchen, persimmons in ceramic bowls, hard candies and oranges and apples for anyone who might drop by. We learn so much from watching. We celebrate the women who nurtured us by nurturing ourselves and others. We nourish ourselves. We eat.