gastronomy

The Plague Diner’s Diary

L. John Harris

My memories of Nana, my paternal grandmother, are vivid. She taught me the proper way to place a single slice of lox on top of a bagel smeared with cream cheese. The trick was to spread the lox out so thinly with the back of a fork that you could see the hole of the bagel and the white of the cheese through it. Lox was a true luxury food in the 1950s and not to be eaten lightly. Nana’s emphasis on frugality was, I now understand, the psychological residue of her experience of multiple life crises – immigration from Poland to San Francisco in the early 20th century, the 1906 earthquake, World War I, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, and World War II.

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