Sid had
an eye for detail. His wonderful paper on “Pratik: Haitian Personal
Economic Relationships” was where we first met, a couple of years before we met
in person in fall 1982. In a scant ten pages, he’d brought together the organic
qualities of fruits, vegetables, eggs and chickens with patterns of
land-tenure, good and bad roads, and the imponderabilia of social relationships
(Proceedings of the Annual AES Spring Meetings, 1961). I’d met pratik
in Madagascar, where Malagasy women reserved the term for the ambiguities
of give and take in another sector of the market. They used old Nestlé cans
for what they could measure out – battered cans that never acquired the rarity
and value of ti-glòs (“little polish”), the America bottles for shoe
polish that Haitians prized as distinctive, sturdy, and trustworthy measures
for cooking oils when Sid worked in the Fond-des-Nègres market in 1958-59. Sid
figured the ti-glòs probably came into the country with the United
States Occupation (1915-34): “The occupying forces were United States Marines,
who often use a particular liquid shoe polish for their dress shoes”
(“Standards of Value and Units of Measure…,” JRAI 91(1)[1961]:37n8).
Sid’s sharp eye caught the shimmery shadowy contradictions of social
inequalities in small and very large alike.
Sid wrote
in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: “My attitudes toward food, and my
esteem for it, come from my father. . . . My best memories of him are
associated indissolubly with the kitchen.” He was “a great cook [and] a
profoundly sensual man. My mother’s attitude toward food differed entirely from
his. She was a spiritual creature, in her own way.” To me, Sid combined all the
contradictions he saw in his parents. Sid was “a spiritual creature, in [his]
own way.” Often ironic, but ultimately scriptural. We converged on “Grace To Be
Said at the Supermarket” by poet Howard Nemerov, my father’s close friend and
Sid’s contemporary who also served in the Second World War. For me, Sid’s work
about work about food (raising, selling, feeding, sharing, eating, hiding,
denying) was a life-long inquiry into the moral vicissitudes of social
relations and their life and death consequences for individuals and whole
groups of people over centuries, world-wide, and an enduring inspiration for me
as for others preoccupied with those concerns.
Here’s
my recipe for Sid: “Teddie’s Apple Cake,” a flour- and oil-spattered
participant in the academic work place we shared for many years, when a
delicious nearly-one-bowl cake, sprinkled with powdered sugar and passed around
the table, was a blessing. Sid would recognize the vast amount of sugar,
reduced from two cups to one over the years. Sid never saw the annotations for
my kids who acquired “Teddie’s Apple Cake” with other treasures when they
married, including its historical sources as it gained a genealogy of its own,
but Sid would have understood the compulsion to pass on its hard won lessons.
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| Sidney Mintz, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, and Jerome Handler at the Mintz Lecture, 1992 |
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Teddie’s Apple Cake, New York Times, 1 October 1980
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