Proustian memory: Steamed windows and chop suey

A Proustian memory is the sudden, involuntary recall of a forgotten moment or experience, triggered by an aroma, taste or touch. It was a madeleine dipped in tea that sent Marcel Proust back in time. My latest Proustian memory — I’ve had many — occurred during a search for a recipe for French cassoulet.

I opened a Julia Child cookbook and a letter from my mother fell out. She wrote it on a winter day in 2001, probably while sitting at the kitchen table in our house in a small Massachusetts town. She wrote it on the lined white note paper she always used. It was a recipe for chop suey.

My mother, the late Rose Popolo Rodricks, collected hundreds of recipes, most of them Italian, but many of them classic New England dishes — Boston baked beans, Lobster Newberg, Yankee Pot Roast and Jordan Marsh’s Blueberry Muffins.

The odd piece was chop suey — that American idea of Chinese food after World War II.

What’s this Italian-American woman doing making chop suey?

Quick story: In downtown Brockton, among all the now-departed department stores, was the Brockton Public Market. People used to gather outside and stare through a steamed-up window at a man of Asian origin stirring a large vat of chop suey. It was diced pork, celery, onion and bean sprouts, maybe green pepper — a relatively healthy treat you could buy by the quart from the BPM.

My mother got the recipe from her sister, Grace Popolo Pecci, who lived in Brockton and was married to Big Frank Pecci, a man with — shall we say — connections. My hunch is that Big Frank knew somebody who knew somebody at the BPM and got the recipe through his connections.

It’s just as possible, however, that Aunt Grace, an excellent cook, did an autopsy on a quart of chop suey and easily figured out how to make it.

Then she wrote the recipe down and shared it with her many sisters — all except Aunt Minnie, who married a Seventh Day Adventist and, thus, did not eat meat.

So, something like 70 years later, this letter with the recipe fell out of my Julia Child cookbook, and almost immediately I could smell chop suey, and I could see Rose standing at the stove cooking up that exotic dish on a winter day, steaming up the windows in our kitchen.