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By the Chef at Worldwide Recipes
As told to the Chef at Worldwide Recipes
Index of Chapters
Chapter 1: I Am Born
Chapter 2: My Brother is Born
Chapter 3: The Early Years
Chapter 4: We Keep On Moving On
Chapter 5: A Strange Boy in a Strange Land
Chapter 6: Traveling on My Belly
Chapter 7: A Tale of Two Lassies
Chapter 8: Back in the USSA
Chapter 9: Freshman Daze
Chapter 10: Living in a War Zone
Chapter 11: The Chef Answers Only to the Ambassador
Chapter 1: I Am Born
[Note: The events described in this chapter are based on the accounts of my parents, and are largely supported by hospital records.]
I was born as a baby in the early hours of August 19th, 1953, in Cleveland, Ohio. I have no recollection of this, which I would count as one of the most important single events of my life, but I have been told that it is so. After a pleasant but thoroughly unmemorable three-day stay in the hospital with my new mother, we were driven home by my new father. I have no recollection of this, either.
My new parents lived in a small house, their first, for which I believe they had paid $4.75 in 1952. That is equivalent to $250,000 in today's dollars. It was one of several identical homes in a small development in the northeastern Cleveland suburb of Willowick. In order to differentiate their house from the long row of homes indistinguishable from their own, and to assure that my parents were able to locate their own house without having to drive around the block several times, my father painted the front door bright red. They later learned that several of their neighbors also used the red door as a landmark, and the number of cars circling the block declined dramatically. I have no recollection of any of this, but it's a good story so I continue to tell it.
The first several weeks of my life were largely uneventful, with most of my limited attention directed towards eating, a habit that I still practice to this day. I was a colicky baby, which made the first six weeks of my existence miserable for both myself and my long-suffering, sleep-deprived parents. I have no recollection of this either, but that doesn't seem to dissuade my parents from making sure that I never forget it.
Chapter 2: My Brother is Born
A mere 16 months after my birth, which seemed like an entire lifetime to me, my brother Bert was born. He was delivered by the same doctor in the same hospital as I was, which is nothing extraordinary in its own right. What is rather unusual is that my father was also delivered by the same doctor in the same hospital 25 years earlier, and this is even more remarkable knowing that my father and his family had moved no less than 19 times in those intervening years. How he came to find himself in Cleveland after all those years, just in time to have two sons, has always been a mystery to me, and I can only guess that the doctor must have owed my grandparents some money and would only return it in the form of services rendered. Or perhaps he offered a volume discount to families. Whatever the reason, I am resigned to the fact that this mystery will never be solved.
While my parents were off seeing to brother Bert's entry into the world, they left me in the care of some neighbor friends. This was a natural thing to do, since a 16-month-old baby has rarely been of much service during such occasions, and up to that point I had not established much of a reputation for being able to take care of myself, much less a newborn brother. In retrospect, I cannot blame my parents for abandoning me during the birth of a sibling, and am prepared to forgive them provided they promise it will never happen again.
During my stay with these kind caretakers I apparently decided to drink a bottle of ink. Whether I did this as a form of protest against my parent's apparently careless treatment of their (up to this point) only child, or whether it was simply that the bottle was within the reach of my chubby little hand and its contents appeared able to fit into my infantile yet ample mouth, will be something for future historians to decide. Regardless of the outcome of their research, I am convinced that this early accident had a profound and lasting effect on my future life; it obviously sparked in me an appreciation for unusual and exotic flavors, and it gave me an everlasting love of the written word. After all, I literally had ink running through my veins.
Chapter 3: The Early Years
Not long after my brother was born, my father took a job with IBM. Back then the company's famous initials stood for "I've been moved," and that is precisely what my parents did for the next twenty years. Unlike the unfortunate episode surrounding my brother's birth, they chose to take me along for most of these.
By the time I had attained the ripe age of seven, our small but extremely young family moved from Cleveland to the Westchester area of Los Angeles. The street we lived on would later become known as the north runway of Los Angeles International Airport, but when we lived there the airplanes came no closer to our house than a couple of hundred feet directly overhead.
We then moved to Dallas, Texas, and then back again to the Los Angeles area, this time to the town of Woodland Hills in the San Fernando valley. Very few memories from these years have survived, other than of some wonderful neighbors and Cub Scout buddies. It seems to be an almost total vacuum regarding persistent memories of food, and this break in the continuity of my food memory has often caused me to wonder if my parents even bothered to feed me at all during this period of my life. I do recall long drives through winding mountain roads to get to the Sea Lion restaurant in Malibu, though. These drives invariably resulted in a delicious meal followed by my brother and me becoming violently carsick on the way home. Was it worth it? I guess it must have been; for all I know that was the only food I was given during those seven years.
Chapter 4: We Keep On Moving On
Not long after my family moved to Woodland Hills, California, my dad was offered a job at IBM World Trade headquarters in New York City. Without so much as consulting my brother or myself, we were once again uprooted and moved, this time taking up residence at 47 Betsy's Lane in New Canaan, Connecticut. I think this took place during the summer of 1962, but I'm not sure. I turned nine that summer, and apparently my mind was occupied by concerns other than keeping an accurate record of my life for the future amusement of thousands of adoring readers. I have no idea what those concerns could have been, so this is only conjecture.
I entered the fourth grade in New Canaan's South School where I had a huge crush on my teacher Mrs. Lucas. I remember being devastated when I learned that she would not be returning to teach me the following year because she and her husband had volunteered for the fledgling Peace Corps, and she was planning on teaching a bunch of kids somewhere in Africa. I was convinced that she would benefit more from my adoration, and the kids in Africa would be no worse for it, so this all seemed extremely illogical to me.
Realizing that my relationship with Mrs. Lucas was doomed, I turned my amorous attention in a more age-appropriate direction. My parents had made friends with another IBM couple, Wade and Lois Cannon, and I made friends with their beautiful oldest daughter Cathy. We were, at such a young age, totally ignorant of how boyfriend and girlfriend were supposed to act, and our relationship never even got to the hand-holding stage, but we each liked the other, and we each knew it. My romantic ambitions were torn asunder for the second time when I learned that the Cannons were moving to Mexico City. I wondered how life (and the heartless management at IBM) could be so cruel, and I was sure that I would never recover from the heartbreak.
A few weeks later, my broken heart completely mended, my father brought home the news that he had accepted a job in Montevideo, Uruguay. This news seemed, at the time, to have little bearing on me. Outside of the facts that I would be moving to a foreign country half a world away, learning a new language, and attending a British school, I didn't think that this move would have any more impact on my life than any of the previous moves had. It took me more than twenty years to realize how wrong I was.
This change in our lives suddenly took on personal implications when my parents announced that we would stop in Mexico City to visit the Cannons on our way to Montevideo. I would get to see Cathy, and I realized that the management at IBM was possessed of much more wisdom than I had previously given them credit for. All seemed right with the world, and with IBM World Trade Corporation as well.
[Note from the Chef: If any of my adoring readers know the whereabouts of Cathy Cannon, or her sisters Donna and Carol, please let me know. And please let them know that the Chef still thinks about them.]
Chapter 5: A Strange Boy in a Strange Land
My family arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay in November of 1963, a few weeks after my tenth birthday. On our way there we had stopped in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, adding three notches in my previously unblemished country belt. At every stop I was intrigued by the differences I found there, my ten-year-old mind incapable of anticipating that different people in different countries could possibly live under circumstances so different from those I had grown up in because I had no idea that such differences existed.
I learned, both through wide-eyed observation and the careful tutoring of my parents, that people in other countries manage to communicate in languages that were completely unintelligible to me, and that most of these people actually spoke no English at all. I learned that in some remote corners of the world there were kids my age who had never tasted a hamburger or peanut butter, and that papaya was not only edible but delicious (and the seeds were neither). I discovered that in Brazil there was a soft drink called Guarana that was better than any soft drink available in the USA, and that they made ice cream from fruits that were not only new to me, but for which there were no English names.
I was fascinated by the ancient history of the Mexicans, so different from the history of my country which until then I had assumed to be the only history around. I admired the beauty of the Brazilian people, so tall and slender and fluid and graceful, and seemingly indifferent to the many hues of their skin. I admired the Argentine way of life, and their custom of closing certain downtown streets at night so that pedestrians could walk them, shopping and dining well into the early hours of the next day. "Why don't they do this in New York City?" we all wondered.
My initial impression of my new home town of Montevideo was filled with the same wonder at the differences between this and my former life, and excitement at the prospect of exploring these differences. We took up residence in the small Hotel Cottage in the suburb of Carrasco and began a five-year total immersion course in cross- cultural living, begun by forging a fast and lasting friendship with a Dutch family staying in the hotel at the same time. Who would have guessed that I, an average narrow-minded ten-year-old American boy, would one day enjoy the company of playmates with names like Jeroen, Stella, Daan, and Renata? And the adventure was just beginning!
Chapter 6: Traveling on My Belly
I believe that the ages from 10 to 15 are the most impressionable, and therefore among the most significant, in almost everybody's life. Mine was no exception. During these years we are still open to new ideas and experiences and we are still willing to concede, at least occasionally and usually grudgingly, that our elders might possibly know a thing or two that we don't. Then we all hit that magic age of 16 when we are suddenly possessed of the sum total of mankind's knowledge, and every adult becomes nothing more than a walking, talking blob of idiotic protoplasm. My life was no exception in this regard either.
I was immersed in what psychologists call a "stimulus rich environment" during this very formative period. I was living in a foreign culture in a foreign country, learning foreign languages, eating foreign foods, and making foreign friends. It was during this period of my life that I discovered the pleasures of travel, food, and girls, in chronological order. The first two are inextricably linked to each another, and the latter seems to be inextricably linked to absolutely everything.
Thanks to IBM's very generous policy of paying for a trip home every year, and my parents' very generous policy of expanding this trip to include tours through Europe, I was afforded the opportunity of sampling first hand the local delicacies of many nations. I had osso buco and veal Marsala in Rome, escargots and onion soup in Les Halles in Paris, gravlax in Copenhagen, pickled herring in Oslo, and reindeer in Stockholm. I had tasted Wienerschnitzel and the famous Sacher torte in Vienna, had fondue in Zurich and raclette in Geneva and mussels in Brussels. Once I had a lunch of split-pea soup in Amsterdam and dined on steak and kidney pie in London on the very same day. I had tried haggis in Edinburgh and discovered calzoni in Venice, had my first moussaka in Athens, my first paella in Madrid, and my first couscous in Cairo. All of this before my fifteenth birthday.
I don't want to give the impression that all we did was eat during our travels. My parents did a commendable job of making sure that my brother and I were taken to all the museums and points of cultural and historic interest, but to this day food remains, in my mind, the single best reason to travel, and traveling remains the best way to seek out new dishes and exciting flavors. I recommend you fit in a museum or two between meals if at all possible.
For more of the Chef's unauthorized autobiography, click here.
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