I had the pleasure of interacting with Elizabeth at a recent workshop I conducted at USF. Her story of  Nunu’s Pear Salad is powerful and relatable, perhaps to many of us who have grown up with working parents. It’s so true – food doesn’t need to be fancy or complex to leave a lasting impression. More often than not, it’s our memories and associations with food that make it so damn good.

There is very little that my family has consistently eaten over the years. Both my parents were busy with full-time work; so the “DDP” (Dreaded Dinner Plan) was usually a last-minute assembly of meat and rice or takeout. We almost exclusively shared full-fledged, sit-down-and-enjoy meals with extended family at gatherings. It’s through these meals with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins that I truly experienced the feeling of home. Present in all these memories was a quiet, constant dinner guest: my grandfather’s favourite pear salad. Pear salad is not an ancestral recipe for us; it came to the family via my Aunt Shirley in 1995. She got the recipe from Adelina, a friend in San Francisco, whose family gatherings she took part in a lot. Adelina called this “Steve’s Salad” after the man who had passed the recipe on to her

Looking Back

The ingredients include, of course, pears. My grandfather, Nunu (nonno in Italian, spelled differently), particularly liked Bosc pears; so when she made it for him, Aunt Shirley would use those. Two pears to a big bowl, sliced just before serving. As for nuts, Aunt Shirley recommended a handful (½ to 1 cup) of chopped nuts: toasted pecans or walnuts, which didn’t need to be toasted. For salad greens, she bought a plastic container of pre-mixed greens from the store and further chopped them so they would be easier to eat. Cheese is the final non-dressing component of the salad. Aunt Shirley specified to get a “really good Roquefort or blue cheese,” noting that Gorgonzola was my grandfather’s favourite. One cup, crumbled.

The salad dressing is what brings this all together. It’s as simple as mixing together ¼ cup of white wine vinegar; a tablespoon (or two) of Trader Joe’s Dijon mustard, and 1 (or 2) garlic cloves to be removed before serving. Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste are given ingredients as well. Then, slowly drizzle in ½ cup of extra virgin olive oil. Aunt Shirley says this is best made the night before using, but fine any time. This is the index card dressing recipe that my grandmother gave my mother before her marriage to my father:

This dish is very easy to make, requiring minimal sensitivity or skills to make. If you swap out a few ingredients or are slightly off with the ratios, the elegance and simplicity of the salad won’t be compromised. This aspect, combined with the accessibility of its ingredients, is probably why my family felt comfortable making pear salad over and over again. Rather than threaten the fibre of their fast-paced lives, it fit neatly into the flow of things, and was relatively healthy to boot. Yet our quick pear salad was ironically an invitation to slow down. Although the recipe itself is mundane, the memories I have of enjoying it with light-hearted loved ones are magical.

Looking Forward

Life isn’t quite as fast as it used to be. The pandemic changed my family and food life in a very interrelated way. With no place to go, my mother took up the patient hobby of home gardening, just last week planting watermelon seeds in the soil. The watermelon is for Nunu. Though his breath became air this past spring, his spirit still lives on through our hearts and his favourite foods, pear salad being one of them. Once something of a party-only delicacy, pear salad has even entered the fringe of our daily lives as a new plan for dinner. When I taste it, I feel at home; and when I make it, I feel honoured to be continuing a family tradition, however ordinary.

Written by Elizabeth Strout and edited by  Jashan Sippy.

‘Food, the Feeling of Home’: A series of stories exploring nostalgia, the power of food, our memories and stories of ‘home’.

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