Growing up, my family was very serious about Christmas rituals

Almost all of them were about food, or drink, or both. There was our sanctioned annual cookie line-up: Nutty Nougats (Uncle Clint always ate them all), unnamed chocolate cookies with chocolate frosting (no one can get them quite right since my grandma passed), Jane Filmore’s sugar cookies (I never met Jane, but her cookies endeared her to me). Grandma also made fruit cakes, that I did not like, and nobody seemed to eat, but every year the dense bricks were baked, wrapped in foil, and given as presents. 

And, the best meal of the year, Christmas brunch, enjoyed after the orgy of unwrapping. The perfection of its flavors is cut into my cells like a sense tattoo: the sacred Christmas Strata (Strata is Americana’s answer to quiche, but so under-appreciated) layered with extra hot Jimmy Dean sausage, green chiles, sharp cheddar, white bread left to soak overnight in an annually debated ratio of eggs, milk and Coleman’s mustard.

Grandma’s yeasty, sweet-tart apricot kolaches (Ruth Anne Ball’s recipe, she wrote at the top of the lined paper in her scrawling hand, like an academic citing her sources)—one of the seven wonders of the baking world that WE ONLY HAD ONCE A YEAR. And then there were croissants (the only store-bought part) with jam and butter. And always a ginormous fruit plate, which the ladies in my family could cut and arrange like no one else, an exquisite pinwheel of color, bright acid counterpoint to all the richness, along with Aunt Judy’s avocado and grapefruit salad with slivered almonds and poppyseed dressing (Judy made this because her Aunt Phyllis did). 

My mom and dad made egg nog every year before his office Christmas party, when the weather was cold enough for the milky boozy punch—frothy with whipped egg whites that had to be occasionally shaken into submission—to stay cold outside, because the tub they made it in was too big to fit in the fridge. They gave be-ribboned bottles of it to friends—which became a much-anticipated holiday medicinal. One year my dad and grandma made the nog, and they accidentally added four times as much brandy because an errant spill on the page made ½ pint look like 2 pints (just FYI, that’s a small fraction of the larger proportion of pints of whisky, and then there is also rum). For years afterward my grandma retold the story, finishing with “that was the smoothest egg nog.” It became a kind of family chorus. My sister makes it that way on purpose now. And my mom still has the dog-eared green piece of paper with the slightly smudged nog recipe. On the back she had written the names and flight numbers and arrival times of all the family coming for Christmas.

Even my mom googles recipes now—as do I. We judge their quality by reviews from strangers. But old family recipes remain the most precious. They are artifacts of time, and its iterations. They are flawed and changed and marked—a dialogue, not a prescription. As imperfect as memory. Memory is a catalog of itself, sometimes blurry, sometimes clear, layered like strata, getting denser and studded as we age, like fruitcake. Not categorical, but allusive.  

Memory has been my muse in restaurants. I am forever chasing down remembered tastes, sense-memories, and emotions that were intensified by food, and trying to recreate them for customers. Because food is one way we remember. For some reason, it is better at holding time, and helping us hold on to one another, than any other thing I can think of. Meals are how humans have bracketed time, and marked occasions, for millennia. Meals are to life what a stanza or meter is to a poem, what beat is to a song. They are the form that makes the content sing, the structure that makes a poem a poem, and not just a jumble of words on a page. They are where you put life, and memories, and emotions, so you can understand it all when you look back. Maybe that sounds grandiose. But I think it’s true.

The holidays, especially, are about food. Food traditions renewed and reaffirmed yearly, hopefully together—the process as important as the cathartic moment of consumption. Restaurants, similarly, are about the food, but also all the emotions that food catalyzes, and the moments and people that food helps us remember. The rituals and traditions that my mom created I know now came from her imagination and her insistence. But they felt as real as rocks to me then. And they became the pillars on which I could hang so much of my life’s meaning.

People leave us. My grandmas are gone, so is Aunt Judy, and Aunt Phyllis. My parents are divorced; my dad and I on the rocks. We can’t all be together this holiday—not like that year captured on the back of the egg nog recipe, when family flew from all over the country to gather for Xmas. But I have and make their recipes (except for the fruit cake—sorry, Gma). And I have the memories of making and debating them, and the stories we told about them, and retold, always over food.

Traditions on the Menu

We will be making my Grandma’s Christmas Kolaches (which are actually Ruth Ann Ball’s) this week at Modern in Santa Fe. We are also serving Pork Posole—an awesome New Mexico Christmas tradition, likely started by a weeded mother—at all the restaurants this week.  

Nana. Nana. Boo. Boo.

Some dudes from what I call the Austin Sausage Factory (the fairly boys-clubby, meat-centric, male-dommy restaurant and dev. scene in ATX) tried to buy the Vinaigrette Austin property from our (former) landlords, with plans to kick us out when our lease came up in under a year, rendering obsolete the blood, sweat, tears and, um, money we have poured into the space and the community we have created. (Ask me about Jeff and I chipping out the asphalt under The Tree BY HAND, in August, with nothing more than picks and persistence). Lame. So we said nah nah. And came up with our own plan. With a team of badass investors, indomitable legal eagles (Zach, Emma, I see you), and a small local bank, we bought the property. Stand by for updates on all the cool stuff we gonna do now that we own this sh#$t. (And, to the guys who tried to buy our spot out from under us: nice try. Hell hath no fury like a woman about to be scooped.)

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