By The food pantry bag came on Monday afternoon while I was at school. I came home off the bus at three-thirty and there it was on the front porch, a brown paper grocery bag with the top folded down, Mama’s name written on the tag in green marker, no signature, no note. I knew it was from First Baptist Church because First Baptist is the only place in this town that drops a bag like that on a porch without making the person who lives there fill out a form first. I have come to understand that kindness without paperwork is a particular kind of kindness, and I am trying to find words for it.
I want to tell you what was in the bag, because the bag is going to lead me to the recipe today, by way of a route I did not expect. Two cans of green beans. A can of cream of mushroom soup. A box of mac and cheese. A small clear bag of dried lentils, which I had never seen up close in my life. A jar of peanut butter, off-brand. A box of saltines. A package of egg noodles. Three apples. A loaf of plain white bread. A small glass jar of strawberry jam, which struck me almost more than anything else in the bag because nobody buying for a food pantry has to put strawberry jam in the bag, and somebody did.
And there were two papers paperclipped to the inside of the folded-down top of the bag. The first was a hand-written recipe card. Mrs. Tilford’s Pantry Lentil Soup. One bag of lentils, one onion, two cloves of garlic, one can diced tomatoes if you have it, six cups water or broth, a teaspoon of cumin, a teaspoon of salt, simmer forty-five minutes, salt to taste. The card was on a 4-by-6 index card in handwriting I did not recognize, and somebody had drawn a small flower in the corner with a pen. The flower was crooked. I have decided I love that flower.
The second paper was a photocopy of a magazine page. The recipe was Autumn Pear Salad with Maple Balsamic Dressing. And before I tell you about that recipe I want to tell you about the soup, because the soup happened first, and the soup is what made everything else mean what it did.
I made the lentil soup Monday night. I have never cooked lentils. I had never held them in my hand before that day. I cut the onion and minced the garlic and I cooked them in a tablespoon of olive oil from the bottle Mama keeps on the counter, and I poured in the lentils, and I added six cups of water because we do not have broth, and I added the cumin and the salt the way the card said, and I let the whole thing simmer at the back of the stove for forty-five minutes while I sat at the table and did my chemistry homework. The smell that came out of that pot is one I am going to remember for the rest of my life. It smelled like warmth. I do not have a better word.
Mama got home at eight-fifteen. She walked in the door and stopped in the kitchen and breathed in once, deeply, the way she does when she is too tired to even ask what’s for dinner, just hopes there is one. She sat down at the kitchen table and I put a bowl of soup in front of her with three saltines crumbled on top. She ate that bowl. She got up and got herself a second bowl. And halfway through the second bowl, my mama, who works closing shifts at Dollar General and does not let herself sit down all day for fear that if she sits down she might not get back up, started to cry into her soup. Quietly. Not for me to see. But I saw.
She said, I am so tired, baby. I did not say anything. I refilled her water. I sat across from her. I let the soup do its job, which is the job soup is for. I want to write down here that some recipes are not just food. Some recipes are an envelope that another woman, somewhere I do not even know, put a piece of her own life in, and mailed to my mama on a Monday in April through the only mail system that ever delivers reliably to people like us, which is the kindness of strangers attached to a bag of groceries.
That is the soup. Now I want to tell you about the salad.
The Autumn Pear Salad with Maple Balsamic Dressing was the second piece of paper in the bag. I have read it about fourteen times now. The picture on the photocopy was black and white but you could tell, even in black and white, that it was the kind of dish that was photographed for somebody’s magazine cover. Mixed greens. Sliced ripe pears, fanned out on the plate. Crumbled blue cheese. Toasted pecans. A drizzle of dressing made from maple syrup and balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard and olive oil and a little garlic. The kind of recipe where every word in the ingredient list felt like it cost something I do not have.
I want to tell you what I did with that recipe, because what I did with it surprised me. I taped it into the back of my notebook, in the section I have started calling For When I Can, but I did not put it next to the chicken shawarma. I put it on a separate page. And underneath it, I wrote, in pencil: Save for September.
I am writing this in late April. The pears at Walmart right now are old, mealy-looking, six dollars for a bag of four. They are not in season. They are pears that have been in cold storage since last fall, and they are the wrong pears for this salad, and I know it because the recipe says autumn right in the title. The maple balsamic and the toasted pecans and the blue cheese, all of it together would cost me probably fifteen dollars to buy at the right time, and I am not going to spend fifteen dollars on a salad in April when the pears will be terrible.
What I am going to do is wait. I am going to wait until September, when the pears at the Tulsa farmers market are crisp and dripping and the Oklahoma fall is doing the one thing Oklahoma fall does well, which is the smell of the air after the first cold morning. I am going to save up a little bit each week between now and then. I am going to put away one dollar a week, every week, in a coffee can in my closet, and on the last weekend of September I am going to buy real pears at the farmers market, not the storage ones, and a small wedge of blue cheese, and a small bag of pecans, and a bottle of cheap balsamic, and I am going to make this salad exactly the way Mrs. Tilford’s magazine says to.
That is what I have decided. I am writing it down so I do not forget. I am writing it down because, the way I am starting to think about food right now, every meal is a kind of love letter the cook writes either to the people at the table or to herself. The lentil soup was somebody’s love letter to my mama. The pear salad in September is going to be my love letter to my own future, which is a person I have not met yet but whom I am trying to feed in advance.
Here is the Autumn Pear Salad recipe exactly as the magazine page printed it, the same one I am holding in my notebook with masking tape over the corners. Make this in October, when the pears are doing what pears do, when the air is cool enough that you actually want a real lunch, when there is enough in the budget for a wedge of blue cheese and a small bag of pecans. The dressing is the part that surprised me — maple syrup and balsamic and a tiny bit of Dijon mustard, that’s it — and it tastes like the kind of fall that magazines promise and rarely deliver. This one delivers. Save the page for September. I’ll see you there.
Autumn Pear Salad with Maple Balsamic Dressing
Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: None | Total Time: 20 min | Servings: 8
Ingredients
- 1 medium garlic clove, scored (meaning the surface of the clove is lightly cut a few times)
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
- 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
- 3 tablespoons pure maple syrup (not pancake syrup)
- 1/4 cup half-and-half or whole milk (see note)
- Pinch of coarse kosher salt
- 6-8 cups chopped green and red leaf lettuces
- 2 ripe pears, cored and thinly sliced
- 2 ounces Asiago cheese, shaved with a vegetable peeler (or shredded)
- 1/2 - 3/4 cup chopped, toasted cashews
- 1/2 cup pomegranate arils (craisins or dried cherries would be a good substitute)
Instructions
- Make the dressing. Put the scored garlic clove in a jar and add all the other dressing ingredients. Put a lid on the jar and shake like your life depends on it. Refrigerate until ready to serve (this can be made a week or so in advance). Shake to recombine ingredients before using. If the dressing is overly thick out of the fridge, microwave it for 5-10 seconds to help loosen it up.
- Assemble the salad. Add the lettuce to a large bowl. Drizzle some of the dressing over the lettuce until lightly coated. Add the pears, cheese, cashews and pomegranate arils to the top and just lightly toss. Drizzle on extra dressing to taste. Serve immediately.
- Alternate serving option. You can toss all the salad ingredients together and serve the dressing separately for individuals to add as they like.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 337 kcal | Protein: 7g | Fat: 25g | Saturated Fat: 5g | Carbs: 23g | Fiber: 3g | Sugar: 13g | Cholesterol: 8mg | Sodium: 170mg