Free Stuffed by Patricia Volk Page A

our way down to the dugout, and she’d find a way to introduce me, then tell him my good points. I didn’t push for it. He was too old. I preferred angry boys who hated their mothers.
    Every Thursday, on her day off, Mattie took the subway to Flushing, Queens, to get her hair done. When I first met her, she had braids wound into a crown. As she got older, she blued her hair and wore it in an even roll around her head. Her favorite hairdo was a showstopper—three rows of purple hair snails held rigid in a silver net. She’d sit on a bridge chair while I poked my finger in their perfect coiled centers, row by row, three times around her head. Everything about Mattie said “neat.” She was so meticulous, she could train raisins. Half of us hated them, half loved them. Mattie could make a rice pudding in a four-quart bowl and discipline the raisins to stay on the raisin side. She put peas in mashed-potato nests for the sake of beauty alone. She never served bread. Bread was “filler.” There was too much other stuff to eat. The exception was Mattie’s biscuits. They tanned on the edges and had a texture like dry snow. She made biscuits only when she made fried chicken. We split them steaming, buttered each side to the edge, then covered the melted salt butter with a thick layer of Welch’s grape jelly decanted to a crystal jar. (Bottles products came in were verboten on the table.) You could argue that Welch’s grape jelly doesn’t go with fried chicken. That wasn’t the point. We treated the biscuits as an entity unto themselves, the best way to eat a biscuit. We maximized the pleasure of each bite. Old friends who come for dinner still say, “Remember Mattie’s steak?” Their eyes glaze. Always I give them the recipe.
    MATTIE’S STEAK
    Prime Grade-A 14-ounce sirloin
Cross sections of garlic sliced so thin you could
read the
New York Times
through them
Morgen’s seasoning salt
Worcestershire sauce
Peanut oil
A little salt butter
     
    Dot the meat on both sides with the garlic.
     
    Coat that with Morgen’s seasoning salt.
     
    Coat that with Worcestershire sauce mixed with
a little peanut oil.
     
    Turn and baste several times during the day.
     
    Sear, then pan-sauté it in a cast-iron skillet
rubbed with the butter.
     
    Slice at a forty-five-degree angle.
     
    “What’s Morgen’s seasoning salt?” they ask. Their steaks never come out the same. The last store closed twelve years ago. Except for half a Heinz chili jar of it on my spice shelf, Morgen’s seasoning salt no longer exists. Every few years I’ll make a steak with my endangered supply, just to keep the taste alive. The closest I can get to a recipe is Dad’s vague recollection.
    MORGEN’S SEASONING SALT
    Salt
Onion salt
Garlic salt
A lot of paprika, to give the steak a good
brown color
     
    I could have it analyzed by a lab
    Mattie was a perfectionist. She sliced a sandwich on the diagonal, squinting to make sure there was no big half. When she cut leftover roast beef to make hash, each square was the same size. Every quarter-inch cube of beef and potato was browned on six sides. Roast beef was the Sahara of meat, a wasteland of flesh, each mouthful the same except for a paring of crisp garlicky fat crust on the edge. Roast beef was boring. Eating it, a sentence: Twenty bites of hard chewing. The only reason to make roast beef was leftovers for Mattie’s hash.
    I was five at the height of the New York polio epidemic. No one was sure how you got it. “Never touch a banister!” teachers warned. “Don’t wipe your eyes if you wiped your nose first!” “Never swim in a pool!” Kids went to bed fine one night, then woke up unable to move their legs. Our neighbor Susan Brody got it. When we jumped rope in front of the building, Susan sat in her wheelchair with metal braces on her legs and watched. She sang “Fudge, Fudge, Tell the Judge” with us and “I Won’t Go to Macy’s Any More, More, More.” Then a nurse would come down and