IN LAURA'S KITCHEN
FROM OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
“My dad always told me: Don’t let anyone leave your house hungry“
Laura Hänsch, the unofficial mayor of her building, is a mother, poet, survivor and cook– rolling pierogies by the hundreds for her neighbours, who are all her friends, and making sure the pantry is full in case anyone’s running low
Laura Hänsch laughs readily, and though she protests that she’s shy, she talks openly about her life. Her roommate, Leo, is here, and Lois, her friend of 15 years, is visiting. The modest apartment is the social hub for this floor of her building. We are in the West Lodge apartments, two semicircular towers shaped like City Hall. Her neighbours are all her friends and they come here to celebrate birthdays and holidays. Laura will cook cabbage rolls, like she did for Lois’s recent birthday, or make a bean salad for a friend’s memorial. And she loves to make pierogies. Or at least, she did until recently. “I’m tired of making those right now. I made over 500 pierogies in the last month and I never ate a single one.”
There are two framed photos in Laura’s bedroom, one taken at 15 and the other at 16. In the first, a high school portrait, her face is pale white and she looks scared, haunted. It was taken three weeks after she was gang-raped. It is a portrait of a person still in shock. The other photo is a large studio portrait from the following year, and she still looks haunted. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but two professional portraits from the most traumatic time in a person’s life have to reveal something. Not long after that last picture is taken she will run away from home. There are some lost years until she turns 20 and has a baby. Her eyes well up when she remembers the first time she held her daughter. “Unconditional love, that’s what I felt. All the love.”
Laura grew up on Fennings Street. When she had her baby, she made a home for the two of them here in the West End. She learned how to cook so that by the time she had her second child, a few years later, she had a vast repertoire of recipes under her belt. Just like her dad had for her. Now she has eight grandchildren, they call her Grandma Lola, and she writes poems for them, and in memory of her friends and people in the neighbourhood who’ve passed away.
“I’m a poet.”
“I thought you said Polack,” laughs Leo. She is indeed Polish, and a poet too. And today she cooked an enormous corned beef to celebrate, for no reason, because she’s alive and she’s a survivor. Plus, she has a lot of friends to feed. “I’m well-known in Parkdale,” she admits. “We made a big turkey once,” she points to Leo, “and we had too much, so we put it on plates and we brought it to the bar [the Sun Fa on Queen]. Everybody knows my cooking. My dad always told me, ‘Don’t let anyone leave your house hungry.’ I take my dad’s words to heart.”
Thirty-five years ago it was a hot summer night and Laura was just going into Grade 10. She was out with her girlfriend at King and Bathurst when five men started to follow them. “My girlfriend was with me and she took off and left me with those guys and they forced me.” After, the men walked her to the streetcar and put her on. She got off at Dovercourt and saw a police officer and told him. “I said, ‘My mom’s gonna kill me. I’m past my curfew.’ They brought me in to take pictures and everything.” She’s grateful to the Women’s College Hospital and the Rape Crisis Centre. “They supported me through all that.”
There was a big court case. “It was in all the papers.” She didn’t have to testify but the judge read her written statement. “The three young guys got acquitted. They each had to pay the Rape Crisis Centre $150. They got off easy. The two older guys, they were 18 and 21. They got 18 months or 15 months. The judge really screwed up on that one.” She looks at me, her face unguarded. She turned 50 in January but she has a guileless air. There’s an openness to Laura that stayed with her even after what happened that night. Maybe because of it.
“It was hard on my mom. She couldn’t accept it. She was blaming me, yelling at me, so I ran away.”
At 15, Laura was a regular high school kid about to go into Grade 10; at 16 she was living on the streets. “It was really bad,” she remembers. Laura struggled with drugs and alcohol, but she’s clean now. “I try to be good, but I’m fighting everything. It’s hard.” And that brings us back to her passion in life. “I love to cook. It gets me involved and doing something. And when people appreciate my cooking, that helps.”
She is a self-described homebody and she doesn’t like to be out after dark. “I’m scared unless someone’s with me, especially late at night. And I stayed away from King and Bathurst for the longest time, because I used to get threatened by the guys and their friends. Now they’re all grown up and gone.”
“When the sales are on, Laura goes a little overboard,” Leo warns me as Laura opens the door to her industrial stand-up freezer. It is packed with prepped ingredients: chopped zucchini and red peppers (she buys them by the case) and stuffed green peppers, breakfast sausage (for “egg mcmuffins”), bacon, ice cream, strawberries, pork loin in a paprika marinade, cream cheese and lots of mozzarella cheese (“For lasagna. I love lasagna”). Is there any food she doesn’t like? “I hate liver.”
Leo pipes up, “I’m Portuguese so I like liver!”
“I got tricked at a wedding and ate it,” Laura continues. She makes a face. No liver for her.
Her first poem was for her brother Richard, who died in 2005. She’s lost both her brothers and her parents. Her mom, Theresa, died just last year at Easter. There is roast turkey meat in the freezer from the last meal Laura made for her mother. It is not to be eaten; it is sacred turkey in memory of her mother’s last meal.
“She went into the hospital the next day. My mashed potatoes were gluey. I thought, oh no, it was my mashed potatoes that put her in the hospital!”
When Laura was 21 and living on St. Clair with a new baby, her neighbours came to visit. “I didn’t know how to boil water. When they saw I didn’t know how to cook they showed me how to cook the basics, how to do laundry.” She started off making toast and KD, but soon graduated to cabbage rolls, lasagna and kluski.
“It’s like gnocchi, and you slice it up big and boil it and serve it with steak and onions and peppers.”
She remembers watching her grandmother make kluski. Her mother would make pierogies, but it was her dad who was the real cook. “He was Polish and he did all the cooking in the house. But then he passed on too, so I have no one but myself and my kids now.”
Laura’s eldest, Michelle, has eight children and lives in Bowmanville. Samantha, who lives in Tweed, has none. “There’s Michelle, Todd, Skyler, Owen. There’s the twin girls, Chastity and Trixie, and then there’s little Richie. And the eighth one – the one I haven’t seen yet – Troy.”
“Wait, your daughter named her daughter after herself? I thought only men did that.”
Laura laughs and gives me a wink. A Canadian flag flutters on the balcony that opens to a westward view over the treetops of Parkdale. She shows me her small garden of peppers and tomatoes basking in the late-September sun. Leo joins us on the balcony and points out its attributes. “The air show flies right by here and we get beautiful sunsets.”
There is a large salmon mounted in the hallway, a gift from a neighbour. “Leo tells everyone he caught it,” Laura laughs. Leo, a compact guy with salt and pepper hair poking out from under his ballcap, protests. “I caught one just like it in the Credit River, 40 pounds and it took me 45 minutes to land it.”
The building is rundown but no more than most of Parkdale’s high-rises. The difference lies inside the apartment and is only apparent in what is not there. There is no computer or tablet or smartphone. This is an apartment without Netflix or wifi. But there are plenty of VHS movies and an enormous VCR. Who knew John Candy and Anthony Perkins were once co-stars? Their film, Deadly Companions, is shelved alongside Manhunter, The Godfather, Titanic, The Incredible Journey.
Laura shows me her pantry, floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with cans of soup, rice and cereal. “I have people come and knock on my door asking for a can of soup or something. I’m like, ‘What happened to your money?’ But I give it to them. I don’t want to see anyone go hungry.”
Here are her preserves. She makes chutney and salsa, pickled beets, pickled eggs (“Only Leo likes those!”), mustard beans and corn relish. “I gotta get on the corn relish soon. I’m kind of late on that,” she says. She’s been helping her daughter pack for a move from Bowmanville to Toronto and she’s getting behind on her preserving schedule.
The corned beef is ready and she serves it with spicy mustard. Slow-cooked and tender, it is the perfect fall meal. There are potatoes, carrots and cabbage with sides of tangy pickled beets and tart mustard beans. She pickles her beets without sugar so their vegetal crunch, which is so often lost in syrupy sweetness, shines through. When I leave she presses a jar of them into my hand and takes me down the hall to meet her neighbours and friends.
“My mom always said that if you don’t have salt in your house then you’re the poorest of the poor. I tend to keep salt in the house so I’m rich. I’m rich in friends and family and food to bring people together.”
She’s the social butterfly of West Lodge. These buildings are lucky to have her. She’s the type of person who makes a family wherever she lands, and she does it one communal dish at a time. Just not pierogies, not for a while, at least.
Laura’s corned beef
ingredients
1 vac-packed fresh corned beef in brine
1 head green cabbage
Enough potatoes and carrots to feed a crowd, washed but not peeled
method
Put corned beef in a large pot with plenty of cold water to cover. Quarter the cabbage and cut out the core. Put wedges into pot with beef. Season with pepper but no salt; the beef has plenty. Cover and simmer for 2 hours, until tender. Add carrots and potatoes. Small ones can stay whole; larger potatoes can be halved or quartered. Let simmer 20 to 30 minutes more until the vegetables are easily pierced with a knife. Reserve cooking liquid.
On a platter, assemble the beef in the centre. Surround it with cabbage, potatoes and carrots. Serve with pickles, hot mustard, butter and salt for everyone to season to their own taste. Laura saves leftovers and throws them back into the pot of reserved cooking liquid, along with green and yellow split peas, to make pea soup.