C R E A T I V E R E F L E C T I O N | Nancy Sommers, Harvard University

Dated, Labeled, and Preserved

I T A L L B E G I N S W I T H A N ordinary Maxwell House coffee can.

Nothing unusual, except an oddly shaped piece of masking

tape affixed to the lid: SPRITZ COOKIES 5/19/2003.
It is winter 2014; the cookies have been in this can, in my
mother’s freezer, for eleven years. This is the last batch of cook-
ies she will ever make, having declared herself, at age 88, too
old to bake. I didn’t tell my parents that I took the coffee can
and brought it back to my home in Boston. I knew that my
mother would say “No,” she might need the cookies at some
point, her usual response whenever I ask to take objects from
their home in Indiana. The basement freezer doesn’t contain
much anymore—a few pounds of hazelnuts; some store-bought
cookies from Trader Joe’s, with a 2006 expiration date; a loaf of
Kroger’s rye bread, dated 2001. Something seems awry with
their freezer so empty, as if a family member has gone missing;
for as long as I can remember, my mother has dated, labeled,
and frozen food.
The freezer was my mother’s medium—a series of still-life
foil portraits, beautifully packaged food, arranged and com-
posed by size and weight. A family trip to Indianapolis pro-
vided a perfect opportunity to bring back bagels to preserve
and archive for a future occasion, but most likely never eat. FIGU R E 1:

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PHOTO BY NANCY SOMMERS © 2014
Decades later, I found those bagels with their masking-tape
labels: Five sesame; two poppy bagels; Indianapolis, July 1978.
To my mother, who doesn’t believe in expiration labels, “food and all the Irmintrudes, Gertrudes, Hanses, and Fritzes they
is just safer in the freezer.” And to my father, “frozen food isn’t grew up with—but the past always found ways to intrude.
old; it has historical significance.” When I have suggested that Even in Indiana, they wouldn’t travel without their pass- 95
food actually doesn’t improve with age, they shrug, not per- ports, proof of their American citizenship, documents they
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suaded, insisting: “But it doesn’t get any worse.” feared they might need, especially if before suddenly yielded
Growing up in 1930s Germany, my parents learned that life to a sinister after and our family needed to flee across state
can swiftly divide into before and after. It can happen that and national borders. At home, my mother hid Swiss francs
quickly. Settling in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1950, they wanted in her lingerie drawer and enforced old world rules, espe-
very much to put the past behind them, lose their accents, cially around food: don’t talk when eating fish, we were
establish some kind of toehold in middle-class American life. warned, lest we choke on bones; don’t drink water with cher-
More than anything, they wanted to raise American children ries, lest we swell up with bellyaches. And most of all, never,
with American names—names an ocean away from their own ever open the freezer door, lest what was so carefully preserved
Germanic names, my father’s Walter, my mother’s Liesl-Lotte, might be lost.

GASTRONOMICA : THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES , VOL . 16, NUMBER 1, PP. 95–98, ISSN 1529-3262, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8622. © 2016 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED . PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR
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FI GUR E 2: Louise and Walter Sommers, 1947.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SOMMERS FAMILY
My mother quickly, although somewhat uneasily, became
a 1950s homemaker, studying Heloise’s hints for taking care
of brooms, ironing handkerchiefs, and cleaning velvet collars,
and religiously clipping recipes from Good Housekeeping for
Campbell’s mushroom-soup tuna-noodle casseroles, and
Mandarin-orange Jello-mold desserts. She wanted to be like
her American-born friends, Sunny and Edna Ruth, who were
so comfortably rooted in Terre Haute. But as a newly arrived
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refugee, she was too insecure to sign her name to their peti-
tions for a sewage treatment plant, or to join their 1960s orga-
nization H.E.L.P.—Housewives Effort for Local Progress—a
group formed to soften the image of Terre Haute and instill
96 civic pride after the Saturday Evening Post dubbed our town
“Sin City of the Midwest.” And much though she tried to be-
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come an American cook, she was more comfortable with the
German recipes in her 1944 edition of The Settlement Cook
Book: The Way to a Man’s Heart, and with her aunt’s familiar
recipes for pickling and brining tongue and corn beef, sauer-
braten, and sauerkraut.
Here’s how it looked in Terre Haute for my mother and her
friends, in the 1950s and ’60s. They were known by their hus-
bands’ names—my mom as Mrs. Walter Sommers; Sunny as
Mrs. Nelson Cohen; and Edna Ruth as Mrs. Irving Gilmore—
their first names almost incidental, as if they were understudies.
To their children, though, they were the axis on which the world
spun, organizing gunny-sack races for birthday parties, and keep-
ing the Cub Scouts busy with macaroni craft projects throughout
the long Indiana winter. They were known by their signature
recipes—my mother for her buttery Spritz cookies, carefully
pushed through a cookie press and shaped into the letter “S”;
Sunny for her Chocolate Ice Box Cake; and Edna for her Sugar
Cream Pie. They never shared these recipes, lest someone else
improve upon them, or somehow make them their own. If
pressed for details about a particular recipe, they would smile
and become vague: “Oh, just use a good amount of flour, a little
sugar, but not too much, and some, just some baking powder.”
More than anything, my mother didn’t want to stand out as
someone who came from elsewhere. We had a ranch house
on 23rd Street, with several neighbors whose daughters were
also named Nancy, as if the street were allowed only one
name. And when my mother was invited to neighbors’ homes,
she studied how they, the Americans, entertained, so that
she, too, could serve cocktails and canapés, stuff celery with
pimento cream cheese, and place cigarettes and ashtrays, con-
veniently and graciously, on end tables. Like many women in
the late 1950s, my mother wanted a new freezer, but our first,
like our first black and white TV, was used, clunky, and reli-
ably unpredictable. And she wanted a fur coat like her friends,
a beaver or raccoon, or even a wool coat with a fox collar to
wear to Hadassah meetings, but instead she wore her aunt’s
hand-me-down Persian lamb coat, which began life knee-
length, and, then, over the decades, as it became faded and
less fashionable, was cut to the hip, and, finally, to the waist.
I have the lamb jacket now and wear it from time to time.
It seems campy and retro, a little shabby, the kind of garment
you might find in a vintage store and wonder about its story,
who wore it and where it was worn. Wearing the lamb jacket
is an uneasy inheritance, as if I’m cloaked in an object full of
my mother’s yearnings and her fears—three locks on the
front door to keep our family safe; and a freezer, which was
not just a place to store Birds Eye vegetables or Swanson TV
dinners, but something darker, a form of self-preservation,
where food was safer, in case it was needed.
As a child, I sensed my mother’s unease about having landed
in Terre Haute. I, too, wasn’t quite of the place. When we stud-
ied Indiana history, I was the only one who could not draw the
state, with its jagged toe of zigs and zags along the Kentucky
border; the only one who couldn’t put a family star on the class-
room map to show where in Indiana our ancestors had come
from; and each December, the designated Jew, who explained
why “my people” didn’t celebrate Christmas, but instead,
claimed a holiday with a funny name, Chanukah. The word
“funny” was always used in those days to describe inexplicable
cultural strangeness and difference, as in “your house smells
funny”; “your parents talk funny”; and “you eat funny food.” In
a Midwestern town such as ours, the strangest part about me,
though, was that I didn’t have a minister, often leading to folksy
asides from parents of my friends—“Just because a cat has kit-
tens in the oven doesn’t mean you can call them biscuits” —a
way of saying that a child like me, not baptized, who didn’t be-
long to a church, and didn’t look, pray, or eat like the locals,
couldn’t lay claim to being a Hoosier.
My own yearning to belong led me to join the “Willing
Workers” chapter of my local 4-H Club, an odd choice, re-
ally. A more obvious choice might have been to join the Girl
Scouts or the Candy Stripers. We weren’t a farming family;
we did not own livestock or live in a farmhouse surrounded
by corn or alfalfa fields. We knew enough to wish for the
corn “to be knee high by the 4th of July,” but more than that,
we didn’t know from farming. Yet some desire to be like the
blonde and blue-eyed girls who exhibited their handiwork at
the Vigo County Fair, and who always seemed to have a great
life story waiting to be written, pulled me forward to the
Wednesday afternoon meetings of the Willing Workers,
where we prepared for the fair by sewing aprons with rickrack
and ribbons, filling mason jars with apple butter and straw-
berry jam, and completing personality inventories to improve
ourselves—to become, in the words of the record book, “all
that our heritage would provide.” When asked what charac-
teristics appear frequently in my family, I wrote: “Dark hair,
big noses, and good eaters.”
As much as I yearned to belong, though, I also wanted to
see life beyond the county fair—to travel beyond the zigs and
zags of the Indiana border—hopping on one of the long slow
freight trains that criss-crossed through our town, and ending
up in a place where I imagined people lived sophisticated and
colorful lives. Some notions of elsewhere came from relatives
who traveled to exotic places of buffet tables groaning with
shrimp and lobster, children staying in roadside Arizona mo-
tels and sampling Howard Johnson’s twenty-eight flavors of ice
cream, even viewing the home of Liberace, and sending post-
cards punctuated with exclamation marks: “I’m here! Having
a great time!” What kind of great time they were having,
I could only imagine, but the serendipity of staying at an
Arizona roadside hotel and eating Howard Johnson’s pepper-
mint stick ice cream seemed, at that time, to sum up the
essence of a great life story.
But to my parents, there was no such thing as a fortunate
surprise; the unexpected was always unwelcome. We had
enough surprises in Germany, my mother liked to remind us.
On my father’s desk, where I sat nightly doing homework, the
object lesson from his laminated wood desk sign—NO
SURPRISES!—needed little commentary. Decades later,
I, too, would learn that some surprises don’t bring delights,
some discoveries don’t yield happiness, but at that point,
I yearned for a life story shaped less by my parents’ narrative
of before or after and more by the colorful—and hopeful—
possibilities of the unexpected. Yet how I might get from
there to here—to a future that was too far away to see—I
didn’t know.
***
It is summer 2015; I am back in Indiana. Time dissolves in
summer—it is like that—mixing and melting, leaving you
uncertain about past and present tense. One day you imagine
a future for yourself—a life lived elsewhere, full of exclama-
tion marks; the next day you take comfort in your home-
town’s steady predictability, believing that exclamation
marks can be overused. One day you are the child mocking
your mother’s freezer and her old world ways; the next you
are the mother and your own children are amused that you
freeze cookies, clip hints from Oprah, and use expiration
dates as object lessons about life’s lurking dangers.
Each summer I return to Indiana for an extended stay. My
daughters want to know if Terre Haute still feels like home.
Yes, I say, surprisingly so. The Vigo County Fair is in full
swing; the 4-H Pavilion buzzes with great stories still to write.
The Willing Workers show off their prize-winning green
beans, vinegar pies, and mason jars filled with preserves. The
long slow freight train still calls to me.
My parents are elderly now, senior citizens as they proudly
declare when they go to the Cineplex and ask for discounts.
They are amazed by their own longevity, yet sad that they
have outlived all their friends. They depend upon neighbors
to shovel their snow, rake their leaves, bake pumpkin bread in
the fall and peach cobbler in summer. Nothing is pickling or
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brining anymore; they make do with a can of Healthy Choice
soup. The past hovers over everything, but they have become
philosophical. Most conversational topics end with a shrug,
“but things—things—could always be worse.”
Finally, it is time to ask why their freezer is so empty, and, 97
perhaps, time to confess that I made their freezer even emptier
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by taking the Maxwell House coffee can, dated 5/19/2003, and
storing it in my freezer back in Boston. I want to know what
happened to the decades of food they dated and labeled, the
bagels and bread, chicken breasts and thighs, but my father
hesitates, uncertain where this conversation might go. He steers
us back to safe topics, the weather, and the plight of Indiana
farmers, the corn withering in the sweltering summer heat.
The freezer, though, what happened to the food from
the freezer? My mother doesn’t remember, her memory not
 cooperating. She stalls somewhere between “is” and “was,”
mixing tenses, uncertain about what has happened and is
happening. Finally, she shrugs with a confused look: “Who
knows what happened; it was just food after all.” My father,
though, weeps, as he recounts a freak electrical storm that
wiped out their power for an entire week. Decades of care-
fully wrapped and preserved food, suddenly spoiled and use-
less, dumped and discarded into Hefty garbage bags.
At that moment, I want to reverse time, for my parents to be
impossibly young again, for the freezer to be full, my mother to
own a full-length beaver or raccoon coat. I suggest that FDA
guidelines would have argued against their eating food from the
1980s or ’90s, but, I see, it wasn’t about eating the food anyway.
After all, I didn’t take the coffee can to eat the cookies. Food is
never just food; it is fear, anxiety, memory, sometimes love; and
when it is dated, labeled, and preserved, it is full of hope, too. To
my parents, the freezer had totemic significance and held their
deepest aspirations; if they had food, they had a future. As long
as food was preserved, they had security—and hope— that their
life in America would not have an expiration date.
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98
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The freezer has never really been my medium. These days
I make do freezing some store-bought cookies, a few pounds
of coffee beans, my daughters’ favorite ice creams, and a cou-
ple of ice packs for sore joints. Sitting on the freezer’s top
shelf, hidden behind the ice cream, is the Maxwell House
coffee can with its own historical significance, and with its
promise—“good to the last drop.” Four cookies remain in the
can, carefully pressed and preserved.
But something seems awry—the can is becoming rusty
around the edges, its masking-tape label stained and discol-
ored, my mother’s evocative handwriting blurred and deterio-
rating. I took the can to stop time—a kind of magical
thinking that objects often evoke—as if they stand in for a
person we love, as if I could shift tenses—preserve my moth-
er’s memory—as if I could hold on to the person she was in
the face of who she is and has become. But I have written
about this coffee can, and now the writing itself has become
its own object. Writing is like that—letting us hold on to the
“as ifs”—holding on to what otherwise might blur and deteri-
orate, and offering hope in the form of a narrative.