A friend reminds me that I haven't talked much about food this holiday season. That's because I haven't been responsible for the food. I spent Christmas week eating my mother-in-law's excellent cooking and then returned home to regular fare spiked with leftover Christmas gifts: toast with black-olive tapenade, followed by strawberry Pop Rocks; that sort of thing. On New Year's Eve, however, I will be hosting a small un-fancy party, which will feature my friend Steve's kielbasa and sauerkraut.

If you've read Tracing Paradise, you've met Steve and know that he might conceivably have killed this kielbasa himself. But for Thursday's occasion he hasn't: this will be genuine from-the-store sausage, just like the kielbasa of my childhood, half of which took place in the same region as Steve's childhood: western Pennsylvania. This regional bond is, among other things, why I love Steve and his wife so much. There is something comforting about being with people who have mucked around in the hills and cricks of one's childhood.

Also, they know about the food. At the turn of the twentieth century, the southwest corner of Pennsylvania was invaded by a swarm of immigrants, many from eastern Europe, some from Italy, even some from Syria. These newcomers settled among the resident Scotch-Irish and Germans, and their food was quickly absorbed into the generalized Appalachian diet known as trashy. When I was a child, my Polish great-aunts served kielbasa and pierogi alongside Chex party mix and that green-Jello-with-marshmallows dish they called "salad." As far as I knew, everything on the menu was more or less the same kind of food: that is, the kind of food my mother allowed us to eat only when we were in Pennsylvania. At home in Rhode Island, we were brown-rice vegetarians. In the summer, at my grandparents', we ate kielbasa and powdered doughnuts; and for my sister and me, this dietary switch was a prime charm of our three months in Westmoreland County.

One peculiarity of kielbasa was the pronunciation of the word. Although my mother was a native Appalachian, she had carefully erased the mountain accent from her speech, except for a few isolated words. This was one of them. Like her parents and aunts and uncles, she called this food "kah-BOSSY." I have no idea if this pronunciation bears any relation to the original Polish or if it's a mountain-ism. All I know is that, if you want to buy this meat in Maine, you have to ask the store clerk for "keel-BAHSS-a."

Another peculiarity was how much my mother herself loved our summer dietary switch to trash food. At the time it didn't occur to me how difficult it must have been for her to be a half-year brown-rice vegetarian. As with her speech, she had purposefully erased her food habits. But the kielbasa still, now and then, on a summer night, managed to sneak through.