When I was 7, the coolest people I knew — or could imagine — were the assistant teachers in my second-grade classroom. This was the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1970s, and they were graduate students at the nearby Bank Street School of Education. In leotards and wrap skirts, tie-dye tees and denim overalls, these exquisite creatures touched down in our grubby public school a few times a week, transforming it with yarn and Popsicle sticks.
Recipe: Pumpkin-Ginger Mini Muffins
In 2012, having returned to the neighborhood with a preschooler, I was set on enrolling her at Bank Street School for Children, a K-8 program in the teaching college.
Getting used to motherhood had taken me a long time; every step seemed to hurt. I toughened up eventually, but never enough to manage school mornings gracefully. I was always on edge, exhaling only when we arrived at the school and its cozy basement cafeteria, open all day to anyone who worked, studied or dropped off a child there.
Whatever else was on the menu, there were always three kinds of child-size muffins in flavors like blueberry and banana. As muffins, they were not extraordinary, but the comfort of them was. They were lightly sweetened, unlike the thinly disguised cupcakes that pass for muffins at New York delis, so I did not feel like a bad mother for treating them as a meal. Over breakfast, my main maternal responsibility was to reassure her about the end-of-year “hoedown,” which was mentioned on the first day of school and had a scary sound.
Did I worry that the school seemed not to teach spelling? (Eighth-grade art posted on the walls included a watercolor of a “gungeljim.”) I did not. Did I question whether a yearlong multiplatform study of the Mississippi River was the best use of second grade? I did not.
She loved her teachers, and I needed that cafeteria.
“School cafeteria” doesn’t do justice to the chef who ran the Bank Street kitchen, a Louisiana expat who made nearly everything from scratch.
I am still haunted by his pumpkin muffins, which had a tender, springy crumb and reminded me of the flower-child baked goods of my youth, made with ingredients that I loathed at the time, like applesauce, yogurt and wheat germ.
I am still haunted by his pumpkin muffins, which reminded me of the flower-child baked goods of my youth.
Every morning, he’d send out an email including not only the lunch menu but also culinary wisdom: a digression on the origins of jambalaya, or the reasons behind each step of making pulled pork. Sometimes, he’d write that today’s email would be short because he had 600 naan to roll by lunchtime. He told us the history of annatto, how to make pizza in a non-pizza oven and, at one point, delivered more than 1,000 words on the history of American can sizes.
That is, until — and I can’t believe I’m writing this — some parents complained that the emails contained too much information. The lunch menu was incorporated into some other administrative messaging, and the chef left soon after for a corporate job. (Fortunately, I had already requested the muffin recipe.)
I certainly understood parental overwhelm. At the time, stress made me forgetful, losing my car in parking lots and leaving behind bags of ingredients on the subway. There’s a lot I don’t remember from this period, including some articles I produced for The Times.
But I remember writing an indignant note to the chef when his email was canceled, assuring him that food writing mattered. I remember that the Mississippi River rises in Lake Itasca. My daughter, who learned to spell “jungle gym,” just left for college.
Step by step, cushioned by muffin tops, we made it to the hoedown.
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