Pear Salad
Comforts come in all different flavors (and salads).
A few years ago, I was back home in Mississippi, flitting around my mother’s kitchen when I saw her constructing what looked like a culinary atrocity. On a small plate, she rested a few sheets of iceberg lettuce. An inauspicious start but no cause for serious alarm. On top of the lettuce, she placed half of a canned pear, still viscous with syrup. Unclear how these two things go together, but I’m willing to find out. On top of that, she dropped a dollop of mayonnaise. Ummm… She sprinkled some shredded cheddar cheese atop the pear. Dear Lord. And finished it with a maraschino cherry. WHAT. THE. HELL. Red, wet cherry juice ran down the plop of mayo on which it rested. Truly a dish only southerners and season ticket holders to Flavortown could be proud of.
“I’m sorry,” I said, personally offended. “What is that?”
My mother looked up, eyes wide, and shrieked, “Have I never made you pear salad?” She licked mayonnaise from her thumb. “Your dad and I just love pear salad.”
Salad is a generous term. This outright abomination of flavor and texture is apparently something my parents have been eating all their lives, and it appears to have not yet caused permanent damage to their stomach linings, taste buds, or cognitive skills.
I don’t know the exact origin of pear salad. It could be from the 1899 entry from The American Salad Book by Maximillian de Loup, though his recommendation is to use a “fresh pear, fine sugar, and cream.” Or perhaps it evolved from Candle Salad, made popular between the 1920s to the 1950s, in which a banana stands erect like a phallus in the center of a canned pineapple ring, and is then dribbled with, um, whipped cream.
Though casseroles, aspics, and nonsense disguised as salad are mainstays in other parts of the country, southerners, in particular, are authorities on all sorts of creative salads and gelatin molds. In a 1983 issue of Southern Living magazine, there is a submission for Tomato Ranch Aspic. (Online, this recipe has one review and one star.) It’s a gelatin mold made from tomato soup, tomato and lemon juice, buttermilk ranch dressing, mayonnaise, and bell peppers. Hold on, I need to throw up.
Among other southern favorites are Strawberry and Pretzel “Salad,” which also contains Cool Whip and Jell-O. To really stretch the meaning of recognizable definitions of “salad,” there’s something called Pink Arctic Frozen Fruit Salad, which is made of cream cheese, sugar, cranberry sauce, pineapple, pecans, and Dream Whip.
What’s remarkable is that there is no end to this culinary fuckery. In my mind, there is only one explanation for the creation of such horrific epicurean experiments: bored mid century housewives. My theory is that with no creative outlets to speak of, artistically repressed women of the homes used the kitchen as their canvas, ingredients as their paint brushes, and fashioned all sorts of whimsical creations. They dumped whole pantries into bundt pans and called it dessert. Or worse, “salad.”
Food, however fanciful (or not), is baked into southern culture, where women have traditionally taken their role in the kitchen very seriously. Though my dad is known to make a mean omelet, it was my mother who took the helm of the stove each night of my childhood.
Though the food we ate was not elaborate or fussy, I was in college before I discovered not everyone’s mom makes homemade dinners each night. Hamburger steaks with lemony potatoes, poppy seed chicken casseroles, and spaghetti dashed with cinnamon, which is the Lebanese way. It’s not necessarily that my mother loved cooking. It’s that she loved feeding her family, and this was the example that was set by her mother.
After marrying into a first-generation Lebanese family in the 1940s, my grandmother must have felt the pressure to find her way, culinarily speaking, back to “the Old World,” as they called it. My grandmother, of Dutch-Polish descent, was disowned by her family for a period of time for marrying the son of Middle Eastern immigrants. A brown man. So she lived with my grandfather’s family in McComb, Mississippi, where her sister-in-laws spent hours teaching her the laborious art of rolling cigar-shaped grape leaves stuffed with herbed, minced meat, and other Middle Eastern staples like kibbeh, baklava, and stuffed squash.
As modern conveniences gained popularity and my grandparents struck out on their own, my grandmother took to canned green beans over fresh ones, and chose pre-packaged gravy powders over homemade. I don’t know if my grandmother cooked because she enjoyed it. Perhaps she, too, was a bored, mid-century housewife. I think she saw it as her obligation as the lady of the house. But she loved hosting, which was a trait they chemically injected into all women born at hospitals in the South in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Every Sunday, my family would gather at my grandmother’s after church for lunch. Though it was eight or nine of us who’d gather around her dark wood table in the formal dining room, she would have prepared enough food to feed the cast and crew of Dynasty.
She’d make a pot roast with carrots in jus, but send my grandfather out for a bucket of fried chicken. God Forbid we wouldn’t have at least three options as our Main. Other dishes displayed atop her elegant white tablecloth were mashed potatoes with gravy, green bean casserole, dinner rolls, cucumber and tomato salad (which is kind of like a real salad), and a smattering of Lebanese dishes like stuffed grape leaves and kibbeh. Even pear salad would make appearances. Littered between place settings were glasses of water, sweet tea, unsweet tea, and cans of Tab, its carbonation dancing at the rim.
Regardless of whether the green beans were dumped from a can or the potatoes whipped at Popeyes, the food that hit the table always had one thing in common: My grandmother’s and mother’s joy in serving and dining with the people they loved. As a result, food has equated comfort all my life, and this was never more evident than during my pregnancy.
I was pregnant, hungry, and exhausted for nearly all of 2020. When I wasn’t dozing off, drooling mouth ajar, in any given corner of our home, I studied up on the impending end of my social life (as if a pandemic didn’t take care of that for me) and prepared for the fourth trimester with books like The First Forty Days: The Essential Art of Nourishing the New Mother. It explains the tradition of zuo yuezi in Chinese culture, in which family and community support the new mother so that she does nothing except sleep and feed her baby for the first 40 days. Mother the mother, if you will. Some form of this practice is customary in nearly every culture in the world except America.
For six weeks, the new mother does not clean her home. She does not address the piles of laundry or answer emails. She reserves the right to turn down all social interactions and she sure as hell doesn’t cook. Friends and family cook hearty, nourishing meals for her. The book includes a variety of recipes like Quinoa, Lentils & Green Soup; Shiitake Immune-Boost Broth; and Adzuki & Sweet Potato Congee. Even the sweets are made from whole grains and high-fat, all-natural nut butters.
While Sunday lunch around my grandmother’s table introduced me to the joys of flavor, my years as a dancer forced me into a complicated relationship with food and my body. I have subsequently spent the rest of my life unlearning harmful behaviors and attitudes. The thought of using food to do something good for my body—and my baby—felt like radically reclaiming a once-tumultuous topic for myself and my future.
Brainwashed by all that Los Angeles sun and hopped up on the idea of zuo yuezi, I imagined my weak and weary postpartum self curled up in bed with my baby, being sustained by warm and nourishing whole foods made thoughtfully by my community. Between naps, I’d spoon up ginger rice with beef and sip mint, mango, and kale smoothies. I would sleep and regain my strength. Through love and organic produce thoughtfully sold by LA.’s most esteemed Moon Juice-hawking salespeople, I would step into my new role revived, glowing from an abundance of nutrition with glowing skin to boot.
Our first night home from the hospital, my husband made an Israeli pie, this one a New York Times recipe that he followed meticulously. Being that it was both a casserole and of Middle Eastern origin, my husband thought it might make my mother feel at home. And if we’re going by the understanding that Jell-o molds and aspics are “salads,” then we’ll call this a meat salad for all intents and purposes. We each quietly devoured our servings, our forks cutting softly through filo dough while my four-day-old dozed off in a boppy next to us.
My mother raved about the pie and how impressed she was at my husband’s ability to acutely replicate a meal that looked exactly, if not better, than its picture online. Unlike my detail-oriented husband, she is a creative, manic cook, often foregoing recipes for intuition, adding salt or sugar on a whim, wildly beating cake mixes within an inch of their life. When we moved out of our Los Angeles rental a year later, there was still chocolate on my ceiling from the time she made us brownies.
The next few nights, gobsmacked by the new realities of parenthood, my husband and I bounced and shushed our newborn to sleep for 200 hours, and mom took her post in the kitchen.
“You know me,” she’d say. “I just make good ole comfort food.” She sounded uncertain, out of her element in the land of matcha lattes and organic bee pollen maca-infused açaí bowls—and in the company of those who believed in following recipes as they were written.
It became clear that my requests for spinach smoothies and sautéed kale were out of her repertoire, and that if I wanted them, I’d need to enlist my husband. There would be no actual salads of any kind. She made homemade spaghetti the way she’d made it for me as a child—the cinnamon-y kind. She cooked pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy from a jar. I couldn’t resist the urge to request green bean casserole (with canned green beans, of course).
Instead of waking up to hearty bowls of oatmeal topped with fruit, flax, and chia seeds, I ate crumpets and English muffins smothered in butter and honey. When dad came to visit, I gladly ate his signature omelet—jalapeño, red onion, and American cheese—with a side of bacon. I relished creamy potato soup packed with half and half and a “soup” swimming with cheese tortellini (it’s really just pasta). At our request, she whipped up multiple batches of Rice Krispie treats. As it turned out, all I really wanted were the recipes from my youth. The proverbial equivalent of pear salad.
The day we arrived home, mom was eagerly waiting on the front porch. We gingerly ushered our seven-pound daughter, named Ruby after my grandmother, into the house. We laid her on the couch in a boppy and covered her with a blanket, allowing our curious Golden Retriever to give her some sniffs. Still recovering from a C-section, I immediately sat down, too. Mom whisked herself into the kitchen. She’d spent the days we were in the hospital making and freezing food, and had prepared muffins for this very moment.
When she returned to the living room, before giving her new granddaughter her undivided attention, she set down a bowl next to me. It was a freshly baked banana nut muffin, a special recipe she’d found during her nine months of recipe research, this one with Brewer’s yeast to promote lactation. The muffin was warm, slightly toasted with a sugary char from the stovetop, and smothered in butter, exactly the way I wanted it.
Over the next five weeks, mom cleaned up after us and tended to our new family thoughtfully, patiently, and with all the love a kitchen can muster. The first 40 days at home wouldn’t look like the zuo yuezi I’d imagined. But I was a mother being mothered, and no salad on earth could compete with that.
I LOVE this!! So many memories!! 💕