On Love and Pork

Monday is my father's birthday, and as my parents are visiting us in Connecticut this weekend, and because I haven't been with my father this close to his actual birthday in many years, I decided to make a special lunch and his traditional cake from my childhood in order to properly celebrate.

Although I'd planned to do the cake all week, the lunch was a more recent idea, and after a somewhat hectic day I was forced to turn not to a lovely gourmet market but to the depths of my freezer for a main course. Fortunately, there was a pork loin right in the front, saving us from some sort of casserole (or puff-pastry crusted tart) combining half-melted and refrozen lime popsicles, Trader Joe's eggrolls and a plastic baggie full of sesame seeds.

There was one small problem with the pork loin, however, being that one of the vestiges of my father's Orthodox Jewish upbringing is a very conflicted relationship to pork. Now while I have embraced most of the cultural and some of the spiritual practices of my father's religion, my own relationship to all things porcine is free and clear. In fact, just last night at a restaurant near our apartment, I found myself eating roast Berkshire pork served with steamed buns, stuffed pork ribs, and sticky rice with Chinese sausage. "Wow," said the waitress, after I'd ordered.

"Kimchee cuts grease," I offered, weakly, referring to one of the entree's side dishes.

My father would not have ordered these dishes, but if I gave him a bite of any of them in a darkened dining room, he would have said, "Delicious," and asked for another bite. It is the idea of pork (now that's a subject for philosophers and kings) that upsets him, not the taste. In fact, when pork is not called pork, and is called, say, bacon, or hot dog, he eats it with relish (pun not intended but allowed to stay). If it is called pork, or worse, ham--which I think for his mother was one of those words whispered if children were around so as not to upset the natural order of the universe--he politely declines. Or not so politely, actually, as the declining is always followed by the only partly true explanation: No thank you. I don't eat pork.

When I realized that pork loin was really our only potentially edible option, I expressed my concern to my mother. I must have been having a micro stroke at the time because my mother's sympathies to my father's convoluted pork policies are nonexistent at best. Once, in a deserved yet immensely passive aggressive display circa 1978 she actually cooked a ham on an evening my grandmother was coming over for dinner. This would be the modern-day equivalent of inviting one's strictly Catholic relation over for a big gay wedding, followed by a pro-choice rally and a rigorous denouncement of pedophilic priests. My mother's response was utterly predictable. "He'll love it," she said. "Just don't even think about telling him what it is."

Nice. It must be said on my mother's behalf, that my father often eats foods he claims to detest having been tricked into doing so. After being called out on it he promptly expresses disbelief, then manages to forget the entire episode ever happened 24 hours later and will deny it ever happened the following week. This happened once with his so-called most-loathed food: the beet. I had roasted a pan full of little baby beets and made an arugula salad with beets, goat cheese, caramelized nuts and a sherry vinegar dressing, and my father singlehandedly polished off about a half-pound of beets. When told what he had eaten he tried to argue they had not actually been beets, at which point I felt like telling him they'd been cooked in pork fat. Or melted ham.

Anyway. Once I'd come to terms with the centerpiece, the rest of the meal took shape, enabled by my knowledge that my father--and my mother, who will object to being portrayed as an underground pork pusher--won't be reading this until Monday. The pork loin is to be glazed with maple syrup and wrapped in bacon. There will be Thanksgiving stuffing, because I won't have any on actual Thanksgiving, with just a little sprinkling--or chopped two pounds--of bacon, too. And a vegetable, because some people like that sort of thing. If my father asks what we're eating, which he usually doesn't, I will say: chicken. I won't have to explain why the chicken is long and thick and in the impossible shape of a pork loin because that's not the sort of thing that interests my father. He will be distracted by mentally noting all of the sports events he's missing by virtue of the fact that we no longer have cable TV.

Happy birthday, Dad. The cake was clean. Not so much as a droplet of pork juice.