http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/dining/08left.html


July 8, 2009

The Question of Leftovers, Ever Fresh

By HENRY ALFORD

"LIKE many things located at the intersection of obligation and potential
pleasure - music recitals, family outings, the theater - leftovers are a
source of complicated emotion. Just ask Diana Abu-Jaber, a novelist who once
wrote a memoir told through food, "The Language of Baklava."

At a party she held at her house in Portland, Ore., in 2001 to celebrate her
marriage, two of her neighbors brought her a gift: a Mason jar with a jaunty
red bow on it. "It seemed to contain chunks of some sort of appalling turgid
brownish oozing cake," Ms. Abu-Jaber said. It came with a note of
explanation that read: "This half loaf of zucchini chocolate bread was a
(failed) experiment. But maybe you will like it. Happy marriage!"

"To this day, we marvel at whatever might have possessed them to pass that
on to us," Ms. Abu-Jaber said.

We think of leftovers with special frequency during a recession because they
represent our efforts to be economical. Frugality may be a virtue, but there
is no denying that when it comes to leftovers, people get a little nutty.

That some foods, but not all foods, are more flavorsome the day after they'
re made doesn't seem to simplify matters. As Ms. Abu-Jaber put it: "Lots of
dishes improve with time, and leftovers can be the sweetest sort of
offering. They imply that you share a home-style friendship, that you aren't
company, but family. But sometimes leftovers are just that - the stuff no
one wanted to eat the first time around."

The complicated emotions can persist even when there's no cooking involved.

Annabelle Gurwitch, a host of the eco-living show "Wa$ted" on the cable
network Planet Green, got a call from a neighbor in early May asking for the
rest of the Irish cheese from Costco that the neighbor had left at the
Gurwitches' house in Los Angeles four nights earlier. So the next morning
Ms. Gurwitch's husband drove to the neighbor's house, dutifully returning
custody of the eight ounces of cheese.

"I did feel odd giving it back," Ms. Gurwitch said. "I felt like it was ours
now." But revenge was soon hers: a week later, dining at the cheese-revoking
neighbor's house, Ms. Gurwitch absconded with a loaf of bread that she hadn'
t even brought.

In some instances, the inherent virtuousness of dispensing the world's
uneaten foods seems to fuel, if not provide rationalization for, some odd
behavior.

Natasha Lehrer, an editor and writer, explained that when her mother and
aunt were studying at, respectively, Oxford and Cambridge, their father,
George Webber, a law professor at University College London, regularly
mailed his two daughters the legs from his and his wife's roast chicken. On
Friday nights, he would wrap the legs in aluminum foil, put them in
envelopes, and then pop them into the mail on his way to synagogue on
Saturday morning.

"He was the Jewish mother of the family, my grandmother failing to fulfill
the role," Ms. Lehrer wrote in an e-mail message. She added that her mother
ate the contents of her strange and bulbous care packages but that her aunt
did not. "There is some truth to the notion that my mother was the obedient
daughter (ate the leg), and her sister the rebel (threw it away)."

In other instances, the unusual leftovers-inspired behavior is motivated
less by a neurotic compulsion to dispense than by a dogged attempt to
deplete.

Clément Gaujal, a customer quality representative for Nissan who grew up in
Paris, recalled that his mother had a tenuous grasp of batch size when it
came to lentils, and often ended up serving their leftovers for three or
four days in a row. So, after buying a small notebook filled with graph
paper, Mrs. Gaujal started a lentils diary: she and her husband and four
sons would chronicle how the lentils were prepared at each meal, how much
was eaten by various members of the family, what was discussed during the
meal, and, of course, what percentage of the offerings were left uneaten.
Any family member not in attendance at any given meal was the subject of
mild, legume-based ridicule.

Whether it takes the form of harassing (Ms. Abu-Jaber's neighbors), stealing
(Ms. Gurwitch), smothering (Mr. Webber) or snickering (the Gaujals), the way
we deal with leftovers can say a lot about who we are.

As Marvalene Hughes, now the president of Dillard University, wrote in her
essay, "Soul, Black Women, and Food," one reason leftovers are so prominent
in black American culture is because most of the foods that are labeled soul
food, from chicken backs to ham hocks to oxtails, were once foods that white
slaveholders deemed undesirable and gave to their slaves. "The
survival-oriented black woman trusts her creative skills to 'make something
out of nothing,' " Dr. Hughes wrote. "She acquired the unique survival
ability to cook (and therefore use) all parts of everything."

Which may help to explain the presence of a phenomenon that Steven Thrasher,
a freelance writer, has noticed. Mr. Thrasher, whose mother was white and
whose father was black, finds it curious that in black American culture,
"you're kind of expected to not only send people home with food, but be
stockpiled with industrial-grade take-home containers."

Readers of Patti LaBelle's cookbook, "LaBelle Cuisine," may remember one of
that book's more fraught passages: "It's not rational I know, but I have a
serious thing about my plastic containers. I will give you the food off my
stove and shirt off my back, but not my Tupperware! That I want back!" And
she went on: "People think I'm kidding when I tell them they have to return
it within a week, but I'm not. Just ask my niece Stayce. A month after I'd
sent her home with several containers of food, she still hadn't brought them
back. I called her up and had a hissy fit. I must have fussed at Stayce a
good 10 minutes before I realized she was crying."

Where, in the leftovers department, are we headed as a culture? The past may
shed a light on the future of this culinary idiom. As an article in Time
magazine last fall pointed out, ancient humans stored foodstuffs in cool,
dark caves; the Greeks and Romans collected snow and ice from mountains. By
the 19th century, deliveries of ice for iceboxes were common in America; in
the 1920's and 1930's refrigerators started showing up in American homes in
large numbers. The '40's brought Tupperware; the '50's, Saran Wrap; the '60'
s, Ziploc storage bags; the '70's, the first affordable home microwave
ovens.

From damp caves, all the way to microwave ovens: the progression is one of
increasingly rarefied and manufactured innovation. This trajectory was
encapsulated in a dinner that the novelist Heidi Julavits attended in Maine
a few summers ago. A friend and artist named Jetsun Penkalski invited Ms.
Julavits - along with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and another writer
named Oisín Curran - to his house in Surry for a dinner whose theme was to
be guessed by the three guests.

"What followed was a lot of very strange food with strange stuff done to
it," Ms. Julavits wrote in an e-mail message. "For example, one course was
served with little toasts mangled with the scalloped edge of a cookie
cutter." For another course, Mr. Penkalski fried shrimp coated in egg white,
arrowroot and sesame seeds, and then mashed it up with a reduction made of
the shrimp shells, and smeared the whole thing across his guests' plates.

Ms. Julavits guessed the theme about a half-hour into the proceedings:
"Turns out the concept was that the whole meal was supposed to have appeared
to have been made with leftovers."

Far more labor-intensive than a regular meal would have been, Mr. Penkalski'
s dinner, he said, was "deconstructed," in honor of the fact that all three
writers at his table were practitioners and enthusiasts of deconstruction in
literature. The tension usually present when leftovers are served to
guests - not to mention the harassing, the stealing, the smothering and the
snickering - was neatly dodged by virtue of the meal's utter
unpredictability and painstaking preparation. Best of all, the smeary,
mangled repast earned that highest form of praise: there were no
leftovers..."

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