Illustration by Lior Field
Knife-cut chunks of iceberg lettuce, wedges of pale scarlet tomato, cucumber rounds with insolent seeds glaring from their centers, mean slivers of green bell peppers, thin slices of red radishes. The radishes were bitter, as was my mother. The iceberg lettuce showed her dislike of cooking, the tomatoes represented something sweet, yet rarely expressed. The angled slivers of green pepper were an artistic touch, resembling tiny armed soldiers who might leap right out of the bowl unless quickly skewered by a fork. The cucumber slices were her perseverance as a single mother raising a child alone.
She cut these ingredients with a cheap dull knife on the kitchen counter, then threw them into a blue Corelle bowl. From the dining table she took a clear plastic bottle, which always held the exact same thing. This was her culinary magical potion, her secret ingredient. Truthfully, it was far from secret, and any cook could use it. She made a perfect circle around the edges of the salad with this potion, which was so thick and viscous it almost glowed, then with slotted stainless steel spoons she carefully mixed everything together. While doing so, she imagined herself as a gourmet. She’d ruined any potential credibility as a true gourmet the moment she placed her hands on that bottle, but she didn’t know that.
Catalina, to me, is not the beautiful island off the coast of California. Nor is it the woman known as Saint Catalina of Palma. It’s just a salad dressing, a condiment. And it’s a pretty weird one, if you think about it—which I do.
Catalina, when poured over a salad, clings to the ingredients in an incredibly sticky way because of its high sugar content. The orange color is disturbing, like something from a science fiction story. The smell is tangy, ripe. The flavor is sweet and sour, sharp, tomato-y, and fat with umami. Kind of awful and kind of great. Salad with Catalina dressing was the only salad my mother ever made and she made it quite often. This was my Catalina, her Catalina. Was it our Catalina? I don’t know, and she’s not here anymore to ask.
Catalina happens to be my food culture. My birthright, one might say, though it doesn’t have the kind of authenticity or tradition others claim for their respective food cultures. My mother had no food culture of her own to draw upon—nothing in her childhood was reminiscent of delicious times past. Her mother was a maker of burnt roast meats and tuna sandwiches on white bread with butter. Her father served up watery split pea soups that nobody wanted to eat. Surely his soup didn’t resemble the traditional one he knew as a child on the Swedish island of Gotland. Turning to my father’s side of the family is no use, as he’s always been nonexistent in my life.
A quick online search shows that Catalina is a “bright-orange to red and sickly sweet French dressing”, and offers the information that Kraft Foods trademarked the “Catalina” name in 1962. Due to the lack of a solidly framed history for Catalina, they say it has a “murky past.” Catalina might be considered a love child born in the 20th century, when a product called “french dressing” grew up to meet contemporary consumer tastes. Catalina is used in different ways, as we learn that “On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, it is a common practice to dip pizza in Catalina French Dressing”. In the more formal food culture sources I looked at, such as The Penguin Companion to Food, The Oxford Companion to Food, or The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Catalina does not exist.
Should I reveal at this point that the base of Catalina is ketchup? That stuff that gives American french fries their lifeblood? This actually works for me. I fully accept the label of “American Mutt.” If we are what we eat, then the soil that’s grown me—the food that makes my mouth water at times, while at other times makes me want to hide my head in shame—is this food that lives somewhere in the triangulation of white trash, lower-middle class, and solid-middle class. This condiment would never enter the realm of the well-to-do, or at least not without a hell of a lot of re-education.
As I write this, my tastebuds pucker, saliva gathers greedily at the inside corners of my cheeks. In my mind, I see the almost hysterical orange-red color, the slightly greasy surface of Catalina as it oozes out of the little round hole in the white plastic bottle cap. Catalina is a gift my mother gave me before I left home to raise myself at 13 years old and, though it may seem strange, I don’t regret this gift. Longing for the past—even if for a past that may have never really existed—is like that. Some of us take what we can get.
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A single bite of a certain food can carry a person away to a different time. It can conjure people and places, aromas, the colors and textures of clothing, bits of conversations, the edge of a smile, a glance of quick anger. The foods of your culture will fascinate some people and alienate others. Nobody can escape this phenomena. Merely looking at a food, even without tasting it, can reveal your family’s background, a specific region of a faraway country, and whether your family had money or lacked it.
As an adult, I’ve lived in the world of fine dining as an executive chef, a lover of fine food, a gourmet, a gourmand, a foodie. Catalina is persona non grata in these social circles. But during the pandemic, as everyone on Instagram created wildly decorated layer cakes and learned to bake bread, all I could think about was Catalina. I finally gave in and bought some for the Thanksgiving dinner I was planning, along with the salad ingredients I remembered from my childhood.
The bottle was smaller than I remembered, the color an even more hallucinogenic orange. I made the salad exactly as my mother did, even imitating the cut of the little green pepper soldiers. God, it made me hungry! Lacking a Corelle bowl, I used a glass Pyrex one. I tossed it, using the exact same spoons she’d used, one of the few things she unexpectedly left me when she died alone, in a far distant place. But the hands gripping them were different. Hers: elegant, light, with long tapered fingers that ended in perfectly oval, unpainted nails. Mine: workmanlike, solid, with short square fingers, round solid palms. How did this quiet and angry woman have such an outgoing, exuberant, gregarious child like me? She disliked even the thought of cooking—it was “women’s work,” which made it unimportant. She wanted to do bigger things, important things. But I liked—maybe even loved—food and cooking, regardless of its stature in human enterprise.
There was one essential difference between her recipe and mine. The bitterness of her version was gone, replaced by my own retrospective longing. Once upon a time there was a mother; she belonged to me. I called her Mom and I was her only child. She wasn’t like the other mothers and I knew that. They knew it too. They probably didn’t know how little she talked to me, or how, when I was small and alone after school, she’d finally come home from work and sit in her spot on the royal blue couch next to a black enamel table that held a tarnished, round, brass zodiac ashtray, a cup of instant black coffee in its white china cup with saucer and faux gold spoon, silently staring in front of her until my need to reach her would bring me right up next to her on the couch, then right up onto her lap. Her beautiful hands lay on the couch, inanimate. I’d throw my arms around her neck, pushing her hair out of the way, then I’d hug her and give her a kiss right on the tip of her nose and she’d laugh a light little noncommittal laugh as her blue eyes shifted to some other point in the room. I’d give her a few more kisses then roll off her lap and go to my room to read. This is what my retrospective longing was for, the one I called Mom, sitting there in her spot on the couch.
I was mesmerized by the salad as it sat on the table among the other holiday foods. My eyes were drawn to it, as if someone new was at the table who might need extra attention. I waited to see if anyone would say anything about it, and finally somebody did: “What is this salad?” I responded, nervously, “Something my mother used to make. Do you like it?” I was slightly taken aback when everyone said they loved it.
Things got weird following that dinner. Every day, I woke up hungry for that salad. I coveted that Catalina taste. For a few weeks I made the salad daily. I went through one bottle, two bottles, then three bottles of Catalina. I’d make it at random times of the day then sit around and shovel it into my mouth in overloaded forkfuls as fast as I could, as if I actually needed it to survive.
I wasn’t really starving for the salad, of course. I was starving for times past, and Catalina was a strong memory that felt singularly good. This salad dressing may only be an industrial-complex condiment on the low end of the food spectrum, but at 13 years old it was one of the only consistent and true things in my life. In it, I recognized home.
Back then, my mother and I silently ate dinner together, kitty corner at the table from one another. I always sat on her left. She’d stare at the pale yellow pat of cold, hard butter she’d placed atop the lukewarm canned green beans on our plates. I’d stare at whatever open book I’d brought to the table with me that night. I surmised, years later, that Catalina spoke for her. “I’m trying. I’m doing the best I can. I’m not sure I can do this,” it said, it’s tone unwilling, terse, and proud.
A condiment poured over a salad—no matter how religiously—just can’t make everything better. A day came when I sat next to my mom at a scratched up table in Family Court. I’d been arrested for hitch-hiking. Is there a way to easily explain how that happened? Probably not. She’d given me permission to go to a weekend rock festival some miles away. I was going alone. She was going somewhere else that weekend, leaving me at home to manage myself, which she believed was a good thing. It was the summer of my 13th year. She didn’t ask how I was getting to the festival or how I’d get back home. By this point in time my mother was in many ways simply “missing in action” where I was concerned. I went to the festival, taking a bus with my saved allowance money, the festival turned into more of a drug festival, I met some people I liked there who liked me. At the end of the weekend, rather than go home to where there was nobody to even talk to, I left with them. We hitch-hiked our way to their home together. Who were they? This was the early 70s. They were nice, fun, intelligent people in their early 20s—they were hippies. We all got arrested in Delaware, a state that’s not even a real place, to my mind. The cops didn’t believe I was who my fake ID said I was, a 26-year-old girl who looked entirely different from me. Eventually, I told them who I was, and they called my mother to come get me.
In Family Court that day, we sat together. We were a family as far as I knew, mother and daughter, a tiny circle of two. As I sat next to her I stared at her hands, motionless on the heavy wood table. A woman with tight white curls cut close to her head sat across from us, then opened a file, looked at my mother, and asked if she was capable of keeping me at home with her. If she could promise to care for me. If she could keep me out of trouble. I didn’t understand when she answered “no” to those questions. I saw her nod “yes” when the woman told her I’d be placed in juvenile detention within the next few days, to be followed by foster care—if a foster family could be found.
We returned home together that day. She headed to her corner of the couch. I retreated to my room with my cat and my books, closing the door behind me. The next morning my mother left for work. I packed a duffel bag with as many clothes as I could carry, a few books, and my Raggedy Ann doll. I pried the rubber stopper off the bottom of my piggy bank, which actually was a pink ceramic pig, and took out all the money inside. I said goodbye to my cat, shoved a curly brunette wig over my easily identifiable strawberry blonde hair and set off for the Greyhound bus station. I believed that was the end of my Catalina. I didn’t think of it, or my mother, for a long time.
After that Thanksgiving during the pandemic, my Catalina binge ended around a month after it began. I sat in the exhaustion of the holiday season that day, skewering yet another chunk of orange-glazed iceberg lettuce onto my fork. The foghorns in the harbor outside my window sounded endlessly on, people rushed by in heavy coats, their faces glittering in the holiday lights. The fork holding the lettuce chunk slowed as it approached my mouth. I wondered what I was doing. The salad suddenly tasted horrible. The flavor, the texture, the color, the overwhelmingly sweet, acrid smell—all of it disgusted me. I realized I’d eaten more than enough of this stuff and threw it all in the trash.
My desire to taste Catalina came about through my desire to travel backward in time. I wanted to see myself as I’d once been; a child with a home she’d never thought to question. I was also curious about my mother—not the mother who decided she didn’t want to be my mother anymore, but the other one, the nurturing one. I wasn’t sure she ever actually existed for more than a few moments at a time, but the game I played with myself worked. I found her in that store-bought condiment.
We add meanings to what we eat and how we eat it, as we gather, create, write and rewrite our stories. Someone makes the rules of measurement for insiders or outsiders, for high or low culture. The ruling class have always been the arbiters of taste, shaping the cultural measurements of our times based on exclusivity. In places where class shifts, we have etiquette books, finishing schools, and of course cookbooks, which teach how to cook high to impress or low to go slumming.
The potato saved the Irish from starving and it remains on the spectrum of poor people’s food as a sufficient answer to hunger. Yet it changes identity when dolled up with caviar and sour cream. Where do you get your coffee—from Devoción or Dunkin’ Donuts? Offal vs. tenderloin, vegan vs. BBQ, rainbow carrots vs. regular orange plastic bagged carrots. It’s never only about how it tastes, it’s about everything that goes along with it.
Isn’t it odd that a condiment—or any other food—would be thought capable of defining who a human being may be? Although we may be what we eat, we’re also so much more. I have no problem with this food being a part of who I am. In making this salad with my estranged mother’s recipe, I explored the contours of my broken family. The taste of Catalina filled me with questions. Why did things happen the way they did? Why did she abandon me? How do we go on after betrayals to become a different person, yet the same? Am I “less than” because of my strange food culture? Eating Catalina over and over, day after day, so many years later, didn’t answer most of my questions.
Yet something transpired during the course of these Catalina salad days, a phenomenon more valuable than finding answers to the same neverending questions I’d had for years, answers that could never truly be verified. As I chewed my way through these salads as if my life depended on it, something was pushing at the edges of my consciousness where Catalina hovered, still not sure if it was welcome. It has a murky past, after all. Yet so do I. During this Catalina experiment, a dream pushed its way into my mind, hinted at, waiting to be fully known, wanting to enter and stay. A dream of the rare evanescent moment in life when the taste of something almost forgotten suffuses both body and soul with the feeling of being safe and loved, of being one with the world right here and now, even if not in the past.