When I was growing up, I always knew it was autumn when I started to smell the roasting green chiles.
Usually, I’d get my first whiff while huddled atop a wrecked schoolbus deep in a bleak West Evans junkyard – just out of reach of the froth- mouthed German shepherds snapping below. There I would sit until my father would emerge from the underbelly of some decrepit old Pontiac, waving a freshly scavenged ignition over his head like a trophy.
The bittersweet smoke from the churning chile roasters down the street would cut through the combo-scent of motor oil and Goo-Gone, making me wish Dad would break for lunch already. It was after 3. The kids were hungry.
Poetic? Not really.
But then, my autumns were never the idyllic, turning-leaf, first-squash- of-the-season sort. We never went apple picking, only car-part scavenging. There was never a cup of warm cider steaming on the stove at the end of the day, only a packet of Swiss Miss stirred quickly with water and zapped in the microwave.
A visit to the pumpkin patch? Forget it; we’d still be digging for crabapples in the yard. (Not to eat, but for ammo … nothing stings a harrassing older sibling like a well-launched wormy crab-apple.)
Idyllic or not, that’s how I remember my autumns.
But so what if my own memory lane isn’t paved with fresh-baked lemon squares or splashed with all-day Bolognese sauces or colored with ruby-red lamb chops seasoned and ready for the white-hot charcoals in the Hibachi?
So what if the memories in my bank aren’t all pretty?
At least they’re mine.
Sure, I harbor my share of Hallmark food moments. Like, we always spent a couple of weeks each summer in my grandparents’ tiny village in the mountains of New Hampshire, where we’d gather wild strawberries out back and stop at roadside stands for fresh-off-
the-stalk sweet corn and collect water from the town spring in rinsed-out gallon milk jugs.
I cherish these soft-focus moments, and they grow even more beautiful as they fade.
But for every just-baked birthday cake with perfect peaks of white frosting, there was a now-blackened roasting chicken that spent an extra hour in the oven while whoever was supposed to be minding it was upstairs fighting with a soon-to-be ex.
For every meatloaf served at the dining room table there was a re-heated bowl of mushy day-old spaghetti eaten on the floor in front of a 9 p.m. showing of Fantasy Island after realizing that no one was going to feed me but myself.
For every pop of a cork being liberated from a bottle of lambrusco (hey, it was the ’70s) there was a sharp pffft of a top being pulled from an aluminum can of the Olympia beer that my father kept in the living-room refrigerator.
(Yes, the living-room refrigerator. Appalled? Don’t be. It made sense for Dad, because his apartment kitchen was too small to hold a fridge. And besides, having beer in arms’ reach of the television meant not missing any Orange Crush Defense replays. Long live Randy Gradishar.)
My point: Food inhabits every corner of our histories, not just the parts that happen in the kitchen or dining room. Food memories live in places far outside the rarefied reminiscences of summertime picnics or elegant sauce-filled dinners at restaurants with chez in their names. Food was there in front of the lonely flickering television, in the backseat of the recalled-but-we-kept-it-anyway Pinto, at the greasy junkyard.
It isn’t just there (or not there) on Thanksgiving or Independence Day or Passover. It’s there on the day your dog dies, on the day you break your leg, on the day Dad decides to go live somewhere else.
Food inhabits every memory: happy or desolate, serene or chaotic, beautiful or ugly. It’s a constant, even when it’s absent.
And food has always been my most reliable, generous friend.
So if my first whiff of roasting autumn chiles comes steeped in stale motor oil, it doesn’t make me any less hungry.
Dining critic Tucker Shaw can be reached at 303-954-1958 or dining@denverpost.com.
