I was a believer.
Both my dad’s and my mom’s families had deep roots, many generations, in Pierz, reaching who knows how far back into the old country—which included a large part of the butter-loving, German-speaking portions of present-day France, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany itself. The origins of one branch of the family, my grandma Dion’s mother’s side, were a bit more mysterious. They’d emigrated from Silesia and Bohemia, the Czech side of the Hapsburg empire, and arrived in America with decidedly Eastern European tastes, a wicked dry sense of humor, and possibly a dose of mystical powers. My mom always said, “Wherever Great-grandma was from, they treated poppy seeds like gold…,” her voice trailing off dramatically. Sometimes I’d hear her and her sisters saying something about “gypsies,” which when I asked them to expand upon, warranted a swift change of subject.
My grandmother very effectively cultivated this mystery by never saying a single word about it but dressing up in a gypsy costume on regular occasions and lending out her ability to read the palms of the walking public. She wore a fur stole, the fox’s face attached to its tail midbite, a flouncy red skirt, and armfuls of stacked bangles. As she read people’s palms, she spun long convincing stories, made meaningful eye contact, and tightly grabbed both of their hands. She sat in corners doing this at the grand opening of my dad’s car dealership, fiftieth-wedding anniversaries, town festivals, and prom after-parties, never once telling any of us in the family whether or not her powers of intuition were real or fabricated. Sometimes, weeks or even months following one of these readings, a stranger would tap at her door, asking for another consultation. She never read the palms of her family, further deepening her powers.
“Where was Great-grandma from?” I asked Grandma Dion once, leaning forward on the counter.
“She was German!” she spat. “We all spoke German in the house. Plattdeutsch!”
“What did she make, Grandma?” I asked.
“Acchh,” she said, “she made roast beef, you know, and boiled potatoes, and at lunch we made hash from the leftovers of both, nice and crusty in a cast-iron pan. Everything fried until it was very crisp!
“She made poppy-seed coffee cake, of course,” she continued, pointing to the coffee cake sitting on the table, a black gush of rich poppy-seed filling oozing out of its cut sides.
We mixed-European-breed Midwestern mongrels are always outed by our coffee cake. Sour cream—probably Polish. Cardamom with icing—had to be from some part of Scandinavia. Our poppy-seed streusel pointed us to origins somewhere east of Germany. Between the poppy seeds and the stiff lace-edged potato pancakes and the fortune-telling, my best guess was that we hailed from a place somewhere between old Transylvania and the hometown of the Brothers Grimm.
Wherever this homeland was, it gave birth to fermented sour dill pickles, our family dish célèbre. My aunt Renee was the first to give our collective obsession a name. “I don’t have a sweet tooth; I could take or leave desserts. What I have is more like a sour tooth.” More precisely, we’re fermentation fiends. My inner harpsichord trills to the thought of those fizzing sour pickles—their acidity softer and yet more probing than the vinegar kind. Just thinking about them makes everyone in my family, myself included, drop their heads, close their eyes, and softly stamp their feet. We all grew up not only eating them at every family occasion but also drinking the briny juice whenever we needed a little pick-me-up.
“DO NOT cut them!” Grandma Dion would shout. She was not into spears or slices; intact pickles were the only shape allowed. I held my knife stiffly in the air. “Cutting lets all the juices out!” As if they were water balloons.
Grandma always kept rows of her fermented pickles in her basement cellar, but everyone in the family quietly acknowledged that her younger sister Helen really made the best ones. Aunt Helen, the second-born of the seven sisters, spoke with a loud, hoarse swagger and was a fantastic storyteller. She’d spin crazy tales for as long as you had the patience to sit, flipping between true stories, fictional tales, and absurdist fantasy without transition, forcing us to distinguish fact from fiction for ourselves. The hardest hugger I’ve ever known, she squeezed us kids as if to juice us, her sharp rings burrowing into our soft skin.
The pickles she brought to Easter and Thanksgiving were always perfectly fermented—mouthwateringly sour, never too salty. Like her sister, she put them up in glass jars fitted with rubber seals and old zinc lids, and Helen’s were screwed on so tight that we suspected rubber cement. To open a jar, she’d cover the lid with one of those soft rubber can-opening disks (a giveaway imprinted with the church’s seal), crank it hard, and spring the pickles free. Tons of bubbles hopped from the surface of the brine, like baby frogs in wet grass. The carbonation was as strong on the tongue as a sip of pop on a hot day. But the pickled cabbage at the bottom of the jar was the best part, the connoisseur’s reward. Whenever I dug down to it with a fork, Aunt Helen would interrupt whatever story she was telling—her spiel, she’d say—to shake a bejeweled hand at me and nod her endorsement of my cabbage-diving before turning back and continuing on.
Our reverence for butter—used in great quantity—completes the family holy trinity. My mom’s butter dish was always there in the center of the kitchen, a prima donna presiding over all. I remember charting the two sticks’ diminishment through the day: going, going, gone…then miraculously replenished. Even throughout the fat-phobic eighties, never once was an ounce of guilt attached to its use. Just as my grandma did, my mom made a proud “acchh” noise in her throat—automatic dismissal of any imaginary detractors—as she scooped it up in huge, glossy lumps.