{"id":109,"date":"2012-09-05T02:45:14","date_gmt":"2012-09-05T02:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/?p=109"},"modified":"2012-09-15T11:50:44","modified_gmt":"2012-09-15T11:50:44","slug":"my-food-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/?p=109","title":{"rendered":"My Food Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Rumiano (my grandfather) and Alice Monroe (John Rumiano’s niece)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My food journey started with cheese and the food culture I learned from my grandfather and great-grandmother.\u00a0 I can never talk about the cheese without telling the story of my grandfather and his brothers, who became cheese makers in California after emigrating from Italy in the early 1900\u2019s.\u00a0 I\u2019ve told the story hundreds of times, yet while doing research for this piece I found out that my terrific story was wrong.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know where I acquired my version of the story.\u00a0 I even thought I remembered my mom telling it to me.\u00a0 Fortunately the real story is even better than the spurious version.\u00a0 It makes me wish more than ever that I could hear them talk about their early years in this country.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u00a0knew that they entered the country through Ellis Island and made their way to California, but then I had them buying a winery in Northern California.\u00a0 The way my story went, they were about to start making wine when prohibition happened, necessitating either a change in plans or legal outlook.\u00a0 Deciding that legal was better, they bought a dairy and became cheese makers.<\/p>\n

What really happened is that they went first to Amador County, California, where they worked in the gold mines at the end of the gold rush.\u00a0 The heyday of gold had already passed so they moved on to San Francisco, where one brother worked as a machinist and my grandfather and another brother worked in a wine shop.\u00a0 My grandfather then served in the armed forces during World War I.\u00a0 After my grandfather returned from the war they pooled their resources to buy a dairy farm in Northern California so they could go into business for themselves.<\/p>\n

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Richard Rumiano (grandfather’s brother) and Son Monroe (one of their employees)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They were good dairymen and soon found that they had excess milk, so they started to make and sell butter.\u00a0 They still had milk to spare, so they took classes in cheese making and started making cheese.\u00a0 This was how I wound up in a family of artisanal cheese makers long before the term artisanal was generally applied to food.\u00a0 One of the cheeses the brothers created was a dry aged Monterey Jack.\u00a0 There was no importation of cheese into this country at that time so this dry Jack would act as a substitute for Parmigiano and be a grating cheese especially appealing to the Italians in California.\u00a0 I have early memories of being in the cool cheese-scented aging rooms with their big racks of cheeses that were hand formed and rubbed on the outside with a pepper-cocoa mixture.\u00a0 For us, cheese came in eight pound wheels, and we had gift packs at holiday time, with lovely exotic things like cheese with caraway seeds.\u00a0 My grandmother made the best grilled cheese sandwiches in the history of the world.\u00a0 Every December I still have to clear a whole shelf in my refrigerator for the arrival of the holiday cheese.<\/p>\n

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My grandfather with the RV made out of a milk delivery truck<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My grandfather made his own RV out of an old milk delivery truck and it always smelled like anise cookies.\u00a0 He built a big outdoor entertaining center and kitchen area in his yard, and the Fourth of July parties were legendary, with my grandfather beaming behind the bar and great platters of food loaded on the big table.\u00a0 My Bohemian great-grandmother lived next door to my grandparents, maintaining a giant garden and being head family celebration cook until very late in her long life.\u00a0 Over the years her perfect pork roast with sauerkraut and dumplings was one of my very favorite holiday dinners.\u00a0 I remember her special dishes like childhood was yesterday.\u00a0 She made amazing fried chicken, sweet Listy (crispy delicate pastry triangles coated with a sprinkling of powdered sugar), perfect buttermilk pancakes and countless bohemian specialties.\u00a0 I remember helping her grind poppy seeds and being fascinated by the meat grinder and other tools she used to create our meals.<\/p>\n

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My grandfather cooking at the outdoor fireplace<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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My grandfather John, my mom Naomi, my grandmother Rose, my aunt Ruth<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While my great-grandmother Buby had cooked for us for our whole lives, as she grew older we realized that none of us had any written recipes for our classic family dishes. Buby was never fluent in written English, so we started a project to cook alongside her and quantify her culinary magic so we wouldn\u2019t lose the thread of our traditional family meals.\u00a0 We each learned different dishes and among other things I became the guardian of the dumplings.\u00a0 When Buby could no longer make the dumplings, I made them for her for Christmas dinner.\u00a0 It was a huge deal.\u00a0 Handle the flour mixture too much, and the dumplings would be heavy and inedible (they were called \u201csinkers\u201d if that happened) and I would let everybody down.\u00a0 To my relief the dumpling making went off without a hitch and the dumplings floated light and perfect.\u00a0 After she tasted them she said, \u201cGood, you can make dumplings.\u00a0 Now you can get married!\u00a0 But you have to marry a good Bohemian.\u201d\u00a0 Apparently dumplings were the board exams of growing up and once you qualified on dumplings you had everything you needed to start your own family.\u00a0 I was seventeen.<\/p>\n

This was how a child of the fifties and sixties learned food in the era of TV dinners and an ever proliferating array of convenience foods.\u00a0 Not that I didn\u2019t love Swanson\u2019s TV dinners, with the cunning divided metal tray imparting its metallic tang to the Salisbury Steak, fried chicken, potatoes, vegetables and apple crisp contained so delightfully in its little food corrals.\u00a0 And not that I didn\u2019t plague my mom to buy me Spaghetti-Os.\u00a0 She never would, as she made ever so much better pasta and sauce at a fraction of the cost.\u00a0 When I ate at friends\u2019 houses it was my guilty pleasure to enjoy the forbidden canned pasta in overly sweet tomato sauce.<\/p>\n

Despite these moments of assimilation, I always knew that real whipped cream didn\u2019t come out of a can, great bread was not white and flimsy, and made from scratch mostly ruled.\u00a0 For me fresh, locally produced food is just a return home. The cheese has kept up with the times.\u00a0 The company has seen four generations of Rumianos, and they are the first in the world to receive a Non-GMO Project Verification for their organic butter and cheese.\u00a0 Instead of waiting for special occasions for family cheese I can stop by my local Whole Foods for Monterey Jack and Mozzarella bearing my grandfather\u2019s name.\u00a0 As I tell the story of my grandfather and the cheese to the checkout clerk, I think about how proud my grandfather would be that the cheese goes on.<\/p>\n

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Seated: L-R: Jenny Rumiano, Richard Rumiano
Standing: L-R: John, Albert and Fred Rumiano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My food journey started with cheese and the food culture I learned from my grandfather and great-grandmother.\u00a0 I can never talk about the cheese without telling the story of my grandfather and his brothers, who became cheese makers in California Continue reading My Food Journey<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[86,85,83,80,84,87,79,81,82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/844"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foodietales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}