A Moveable Feast

Every morning as a child, at seven on the dot, I woke to the hum of my mother’s juicer as it extracted juice from organic (such a “hippie” word in the ’70s) oranges. Breakfast for my sister and me included blackberry tea, grapefruit topped with honey and berries, homemade yogurt, or a toasted corn muffi n with melting butter (my favorite)—and doses of her worldly wisdom, which we listened to as well as we could at that early hour.

Sometimes she would take me to a health food store near our apartment for lunch, where I’d chomp on watercress sandwiches and sip carrot juice at the counter as we talked about all the things she wanted me to stop doing—fi ghting with my sister and using profanity included. Every night my father would join the three of us for a dinner of, say, my mother’s free-range roasted rosemary chicken or baked fi llet of sole with white wine and lemon—the kind of food most of my ’tween pals would have winced at. My sister and I would share the highs and lows of our day at school, to which she’d often say, “The Brazilian way is to kill them with kindness.” Definitely her way. We’d talk about things like the hostages in Iran, Saturday Night Fever and the energy crisis.

In the mid-’80s, recovery from the recession brought a slew of new restaurants to the city and we dined out more often—upgrading from the home fries and burgers at JG Melon’s to sushi, Grand Marnier shrimp at Foo’s or Italian at Sette Mezzo. A collection of French chefs in Manhattan had spearheaded the formation of organic cooperative farms Upstate, which provided fresh organic ingredients like mâche, goat cheese and poussin. Down the street from our house was Grace’s, one of the first gourmet markets on the Upper East Side and an outlet for these farms.

By high school I had graduated to a weekly afternoon ritual—4 P.M. high tea with my German grandparents. We would spoon honey into a silver pot of brewing Earl Grey, devour graham cracker-crusted strawberry tarts and listen to stories of my grandmother’s hometown, Berlin, in the ’20s and ’30s. Sometimes, midsentence, there would be the fl ash of a spoon as she swiped my elbow from its perch on her dining table. I’d cower for a moment, but I returned faithfully each week for the stories, tea and tarts, and a chance to play Colonel Mustard in Clue.

I recently took my six-year-old daughter, Bella, to Sweetiepie in the West Village to review it for this food and wine issue of Gotham. We nibbled on bright-pink beet risotto, tiny cakes and tea, and she chatted about the girls who like boys in her class before segueing (thankfully) into talk of her “first hundred days of kindergarten,” as the school refers to them. My mind jumped to Obama’s fi rst 100 days in offi ce, which is about as palatable a topic to a six-year-old as discussing the opposite sex is to the parent of said kindergartner. So I brought up the day we had gone to the voting booth together and she crowed, “I pulled the lever!”

In that moment, I realized we had created a memory that would have a great impact on her future. In that moment, I was my mother, my grandmother. The most profound memories and lessons of life are often shared over a meal (and in my case, over many cups of tea). These have been my moveable feasts—my holiest of days—and they’ve affected the course of my life. What are some of yours?

CHEERS!
Tweet me at twitter.com/CristinaCuomo with your favorite wines (whites and reds), as well as your top NYC restaurant and why.

NEW YORK FAVORITES
Books for Kids: Little Learning’s Top 10 Books (see Power Educator, “Kiddie Whisperer”):
1. Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt
2. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
3. A Family of Poems by Caroline Kennedy
4. Madeline Says Merci: The Always Be Polite Book by John Bemelmans Marciano
5. Babar’s Book of Color by Laurent de Brunhoff
6. My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss
7. Excuse Me!: A Little Book of Manners by Karen Katz
8. I’m Thankful Each Day! by P.K. Hallinan
9. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
10. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

ABOVE: With Dominican model Arlenis Sosa at a dinner for Tomas Maier at La Grenouille. photograph by Patrick McMullan/PatrickMcMullan.com