The DNA of Tarts

As part of my new path I have made and fulfilled a number of changes in my daily life and outlook.  Thanks to Greg Drambour in Sedona, who gave me my list, I am nearly there.  Just a couple more and I will have made my commitments.  Feels very good.

On Saturday I joined the California Writer's Club, formed in 1909 by Jack London, and still active with 1800 members in a dozen or so locations.  At my first meeting we met with a novelist and food writer and she gave us a few writing prompts.  Now that I am putting in three days a week writing, these help to focus and begin the process.  Writing about my food memories from childhood is easy:

The DNA of Tarts

Butter tarts –they sat on a plate in Nana Northey’s oak refractory table in the room that doubled as a living and dining room.  She had chosen to use the adjoining, smaller room as a parlor, a nod to her days as the daughter of a gentleman farmer in Norfolk.  In her childhood home there were servants and most likely a morning room, a grand parlor, a library, a snug, and a dining room that accommodated twenty guests.  Here in her two-bedroom walk-up apartment over a busy, unfashionable Toronto street, noisy with streetcars and vendors, she had raised four girls, cots for each in one bedroom, the other reserved for her and her second husband.  I never went in her room, it was always cloaked in half-shadow stillness, but from the door I could see the fancy spread and collection of dolls she made clothes for.

Pastry tarts were the only dessert she made – and she made them regularly. Butter, jam, and her homemade mince at Christmas. When we all crowded in on these family gatherings, our cheeks red raw from the wind, father left behind to find a parking space in the slushy, slippery cold, we headed straight for her tarts, coats hastily flung on the nearest bed, and devoured them with abandon, for she always made dozens.

They were little bowls of perfection. Flaky pastry cradled a mixture of butter, eggs, cream and brown sugar, cooled and firm as these confections were always served at room temperature.  To try them straight out of the oven was like putting boiling napalm into your mouth and so she made them the day before and stored them in Queen Elizabeth Commemorative tins, layered with wax paper.  Never runny, never adulterated with corn syrup as some did, the filling with its frothy top had a gooey texture stayed in your mouth so you could savor the caramelized sugar mixed with subtle, rich hints of butter and cream. Bits of pastry always stayed on your lips to be licked off later, and after the filling had all been devoured, there was a small crescent of pastry left to savor before all that was left was the memory.

Her tarts were made weekly, waiting for whenever we visited, later as students when we came to see her in her new, modern efficiency model on the 10^th floor of a highrise for seniors.  They sat on a china plate next to a pot of steaming, Red Rose tea, cups and saucers mixed together in a riot of flowery patterns.  These tarts were the conversation starters, opening the way for a landscape of troubles, curiosities (such as the discussion about why our small breasts were so much easier to live with than the kind that flopped about in bed and necessitated a bra for comfort) and stories of England.  Nana’s stories were as exciting as our own lives, filled with WWI romances, punting on the Thames, ardent soldiers returning from battle, the loss of her mother in the Great Flu Epidemic, her father’s humor and playfulness, all a world away from our Canadian lives.  She told us she had run away with our grandfather, a mysterious man who ran an acting school where they landed in Montreal, who was perhaps a Communist, union organizer, flim-flam man, cheater of epic proportions, and long, long gone.  He had disappeared during the Second World War, and we only heard later that perhaps he had not actually gone to fight but to take up with another woman whom he called his wife.  I believe Nana was still a little bit in love with him, certainly she never spoke ill of him, the fuller picture came out in bits and bobs from my mother, who remembered sharp and tender moments all on the same path, but for whom she only came to miss much later in her life when only the softer moments remained. The wounds from a fractured life my mother dismissed more and more as time went on, transformed into legends of her mother’s bravery and stoicism in the face of poverty and disillusionment. Though buried beneath admiration for the parent left behind, the scars remained, bitter tracings through a life fraught with demons and ghosts. What remained though, was my mother’s love of pies, and though nearly blind and without a working oven, she still makes them with the same vigor and purpose as the women before her.

The raspberry jam and butter tarts were my Nana’s welcoming, they spoke of the old country, her roots, which were never nostalgic because she had made her break with her family and seemed more rooted in her new home despite the financial hardships and the loss of a widowed father she clearly adored.  Too proud to let him know he had been right, she never went back to England, and I am left wondering just how much he knew and for how long.  This charismatic and mysterious man she had stolen from her older sister’s embrace, the illegitimate son of a washer woman, a Jewish refugee from the European pogroms, the one who had enticed his bride to abandon everything she knew, bestowing on us unknown remnants of a history we live through the tangled web of DNA that directs our futures, even now. 

We choose the memories that sustain the woman who gave us our start in the wandering world, who gave us her version of chance and pride and resilience.  We are hers, and she was ours.