West Side Market

You always remember your first.

Happy Spring!

Spring makes me think of forsythias starting to bloom. Opening the windows and inviting the crisp air in after a long winter.

As a cook and food lover, Spring means it’s time to start visiting farm markets and watch the stalls and bins fill up with their bounty.

I didn’t cook until my thirties, but one of my earliest memories happens to involve food and the West Side Market in Cleveland, Ohio.

The market opened in 1912 in the Ohio City neighborhood just west of downtown and is still there today.

My great-grandmother, Lillian or Grandma Keeley as I called her, lived in a high-rise apartment building near the market. She and her daughter-in-law, my grandmother, didn’t get along so my grandpa would go and visit her on his own. I was three or four at the time and he would take me with him.

I loved my grandpa with my whole heart. He was a gruff, 6’2” truck driver who thought that I was the whole world. We were quite the pair.

Here he is holding my mom:

I looked and found a photo of Grandma Keeley. She was at my grandparents’ house! That had to have been one of the few times my grandma “allowed” her there.

Grandpa and I would stop at the West Side Market so he could buy groceries for his mom.  We’d stroll through the aisles and pick up produce and meat and fritters fresh from the fryer.  We’d drive over to Grandma Keeley’s with our special delivery.  Grandpa would unload the groceries and check on how she was doing and I would run to the window to look out and see the view.  I could see all of Cleveland from that window.  I’d also wait and see if her parakeet would say hello to me.

Then, years went by, years without any interest in food, and at some point there was a school field trip to the West Side Market. My response? A big fat yawn.

I wanted to dig up some memories of that field trip so I sent an SOS to my friend, Cheryl. She and I have been friends since sixth grade. Over the years, we’ve come to realize that I remember nothing and she remembers everything. (Not sure which is the better trait.)

She has been a cook and foodie all her life whereas I was a late bloomer.

“Cheryl, I need your memory brain today. West Side Market. Field trip?”

Her immediate answer: junior high. Cheryl then told me she tried smoked eel, freshly ground peanut butter, and in her words, “a pizza bagel that changed my life”.

God, why didn’t I try the pizza bagel?

More years passed, my discovery of food and cooking took hold, and I found myself turning into a farm market junkie. I was lucky to live near some stellar markets where I could stroll on Saturday mornings. 

When I lived in Michigan and started to cook, I’d walk the halls of Eastern Market in Detroit and take it all in with wide eyes. Hey! I’ve seen that on TV! I know what that is! Or, what the heck is that?

My mom and I decided to take some road trips to Cleveland to make a pilgrimage to our first and favorite farm market. After a long hiatus, I couldn’t wait to return to the West Side Market and atone for my sins.

Mom would drive down to my house in Ann Arbor where we’d load up the trunk with overnight bags and coolers. We would stay a night or two in Cleveland, tour the old haunts and find some new favorites.  Then we’d head to the West Side Market the last morning to shop. We filled up those coolers with green tomatoes, strawberries, fingerling potatoes, strudels, peppered bacon, homemade pasta, Polish sausage, and Mom’s favorite (ew!), Braunschweiger.

Scouting out local farm markets became a pastime.  Not only were the markets a culinary destination, they helped me to remember joyful times with grandpa and mom.

In Ithaca, NY we found artisan breads, bouquets of flowers, berries galore (my first ever gooseberry). I passed a booth and noticed some cherry tomatoes out of the corner of my eye. On a second look, I realized they were sour cherries, the brightest red cherries I’d ever seen.

In San Francisco, I walked along the bay to the Ferry Building, a mecca of produce, flowers, bakery, and coffee. It was like going on a food field trip every weekend. I’d bring my grocery bags and see how much I could possibly carry on the walk back to the apartment.

In Chicago, the local farmers' market set up one block away from the apartment.  Saturdays, I'd crunch through some leaves, walk approximately one hundred steps, and find a small, but mighty market. Those doughnuts!

Market memories with my grandpa and mom, farm-to-table instincts in the kitchen, and wanderlust keep me shopping and exploring farm markets.  Whether it’s pierogis, bratwurst, poppyseed and nut rolls in Cleveland; bunches of arugula and baskets of figs in California; cider and doughnuts and big vats of briny pickles in Michigan; calamondins and key limes in Florida; or socca and lavender in Nice, France.

Now that travel is an option again (fingers crossed!), I can’t wait to explore farm markets again across the globe. Pike Place Market in Seattle, Borough Market in London…

Any recommendations?

Thanks again for reading! I care about you. Please don’t forget to eat your greens.

***Written to Jonatha Brooke’s albums, Careful What You Wish For and Ten Cent Wings.