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BY JERRY MILLER PH.D

Food has always been an important part of my emotional life. I’m a psychologist, not a professional writer, so I may not be the best at putting my personal food stories on paper—but I know I’m not alone in having countless food memories that are meaningful to me. What might be unique in my case, though, is I have a simple way of conjuring those happy long-ago times and connecting the past with the present.

I grew up in Chicago, where I shared my childhood bedroom with my Sephardic grandfather. Sometimes he and I would join my mother around the bare dining room table to make borekas, which you might call a spinach pie. Borekas is the word for phyllo pies in Ladino, my grandfather’s first language. My mother would stir together the filling, and we’d help spoon it on to the pastry. Then, we’d fold them up, put the triangles in the oven, and wait expectantly for them to come out hot. Even if my mother was planning to serve them when my extended family came for dinner, my grandfather and I liked to eat them freshly baked with a hard-boiled egg.

We didn’t always eat at home, though. My grandfather was a regular at Chicago’s Greek restaurants: Even though he was born in Turkey, he felt a Mediterranean kinship with the Greeks. Everybody at the restaurants knew him: The owners, the cooks, the busboys, and the other frequent customers. When Morris Benjoya came through the door, a shout of “Morry!” always followed. Then, just before we left, whoever was behind the counter would command me to ‘open wide,’ and stick a fat kalamata olive in my mouth.

When I got a little older, I would venture out alone to restaurants close to our duplex on California Avenue. In the years right after my Bar Mitzvah, I loved going with my friends or by myself for a warm corned beef sandwich at a corner deli, where the meat was piled high and covered with bright yellow mustard. I always ordered mine with thick french fries and a real Chicago chocolate phosphate.

That deli’s gone now, just like Guey Sam’s, the restaurant near my father’s hardware in Chinatown where my favorite dish was the shrimp in dark garlic sauce. My parents and grandfather are gone too. But the warm memories of the meals we shared, and the dining excursions which shaped me, are as accessible as the Kroger on the edge of my Ann Arbor neighborhood. All I need to bring them back is an egg, an olive, or a chocolate phosphate. Sometimes, the way to preserve specialness forever is to connect it to the commonplace.