Group Living and Other Recipes: a Memoir by Lola Milholland

Review by Kristina Sepetys

 

 

Communal living, co-housing, and inter-generational households aren’t exactly new concepts, especially not in the Bay Area. From McGee’s Farm* to the storied Karl Marx’s Magic Bus, the East Bay has long been fertile ground for experimental group housing. Berkeley Moshav, the first Jewish urban co-housing complex in the United States, plans to break ground this spring in West Berkeley.

Across the country, interest in shared living is growing, driven by both a longing for community and the need for affordable housing. My own curiosity about multi-generational living drew me to Group Living and Other Recipes by Lola Milholland (Spiegel & Grau, 2024), a warm and enjoyable new memoir about a life spent in communal households.

Milholland, former editor of Edible Portland and now head of noodle company Umi Organic, grew up in Holman House, a four-bedroom Craftsman in Portland, Oregon. Her parents opened their home to a rotating cast of colorful housemates—family, friends, exchange students, and strangers who became something in between. “There was always room at our table,” Milholland writes. After college, she returned home to live again in community, this time with her brother, Zak, and a new mix of housemates. They continue to live communally today.

 

 

The book is mostly personal: a warm, lively account of life under one roof with many others. But Milholland also reflects on the broader value of shared living: the emotional bonds, the creative possibilities, and the economic benefits. The book is structured as a blend of memoir and practical reflection, with each chapter offering snapshots of different housemates, challenges, and descriptions of Milholland’s own experience on a life-long communal housing journey. The Butter Sculpture chapter (below) provides a good example of life lessons new housemates might bring.

 

Not surprisingly, meals are a centerpiece of Milholland’s group living experience. The book includes a dozen or so recipes that reflect the spirit of Holman House: meals born from generosity, flexibility, and eclectic influences. Think spicy ground pork and tofu (aka Corey’s Usual Bullshit), alongside Japanese, Thai, and Mexican-inflected dishes, nods to Milholland’s Filipino heritage, and her father’s beloved Seedy Granola. Interestingly, the recipes serve a modest 2–8 people, smaller than one might expect from a book about communal eating. That detail is telling: Not all communal households are large, and Milholland reminds us that even small shared meals can nourish connection.

 

 

“How we structure our homes isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation,” Milholland writes. “There’s no single authoritative recipe. Now is always the right time to re-imagine home and family, and group living represents a galaxy of approaches.” Her memoir is more than a nostalgic recollection. It’s a gentle but intriguing invitation to rethink what home could look like now, in a time when isolation and housing costs are pushing many to reconsider old assumptions about the challenges and rewards in group living.

 

BUTTER SCULPTURE

Excerpt and recipe from Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir
By Lola Milholland
Used with permission Spiegel & Grau, 2024

One spring day in 1992, I came home from second grade and learned my parents had given my bedroom to three Tibetan monks from Dharamsala, India. My parents’ friend Rhonda had called just a few hours earlier, asking if the monks could stay at our house starting that night. Every bedroom in our house was already filled, but that didn’t discourage my parents, who love singular experiences. Since my uncle Paul was staying in our spare room and my brother, Zak, had been displaced by guests in the past, my parents offered my small room for Tenzins Dudhul, Norgay, and Norbu to share. During their three-month visit, I slept on the couch in the living room.

Every day, the monks would go to the Portland Art Museum and work on a sand mandala in public view, piping colorful sand into intricate geometries on a felted table. It looked to me like a map of a temple, filled with secret corridors and flower gardens. Each monk started from the center and worked in silence toward the edge. Building the mandala was part of a festival that Rhonda was organizing to raise awareness of China’s occupation of Tibet.

Tenzin Dudhul was the youngest of the three monks. He was unbelievably handsome, in his early twenties, strong and agile, always grinning with luminescent teeth and mischievous eyes, his black hair shaved close to the scalp, his forehead a perfect postcard. I had the crush of a happy-go-lucky seven-year-old who wants nothing more than to be in the presence of her objective. I called him “doo doo,” which made his grin stretch even wider. Aside from Dudhul’s smiling face, I have few vivid memories of their visit, only a sensory collage: I recall the softness of the gauzy white cloth they tied to doorknobs as blessings. I can smell butter everywhere—melting into their astringent Lipton tea, sizzling in a pan to fry the gritty wheat noodles they made by hand, and being mixed with mineral pigments to fashion tiny ceremonial butter sculptures. I can see the red and gold of their robes, which mirrored the red and yellow tulips that bloomed along our sidewalk in April, and how those robes flew akimbo as they learned to ride bikes on our street.

I came along the day the monks swept up the mandala they’d constructed so carefully, storing it in an urn they wrapped in silk and carried in their arms. We took a motorboat onto the Willamette River under a gray, overcast sky. As I watched them dump the colorful sand into the slate water beneath the Hawthorne Bridge, I felt moody and annoyed. No one explained anything to me, but I understood very simply that this, like the creation of the mandala, was supposed to be important and beautiful. I found it sorrowful. They’d spent three months making something I thought was amazing and then willingly dumped it in a river. Flush, gone. Next, they’d leave, Dudhul would stop grinning at me, and I’d have my bedroom back, because all things are fleeting.

 

 

Most of the people who stayed with us didn’t make such a memorable exit, but impermanence was a strong theme of our household. Over and over again, my parents welcomed visitors and we made a life together—over days, weeks, months, years. Then the visitors would leave, and we’d start again, somehow never from scratch but always anew, with nothing to show for our time except what was patterned inside us. I became accustomed to the entrances and exits, which gave the house a lively syncopation.

As mainstream U.S. culture shifted into the “my-own-private-bathroom” era, my parents flung the doors of our house open and invited people in. In addition to Zak, nearly eleven years older than me; my Filipino grandpa, Goyo; and my on-again, off-again Scientologist uncle Paul, my parents always said yes to exchange students. We hosted more than twenty while I was growing up. I can see Joachim, a French high schooler who dressed in oversized, ratty clothing and sported dark, floppy hair like a labradoodle’s, splashing chaotically in the Deschutes River at the Warm Springs Reservation, where we’d camp every summer under larch trees barely shading us from the blazing sun. I remember trying to walk side by side on a narrow trail with Ellen, from Holland, who’d slathered herself in sunscreen and wore sunglasses, a hat, and long sleeves so no sun touched her skin as we climbed to the top of Angel’s Rest, a promontory overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.

When a delegation of indigenous Tairona from Colombia came to tell their story and seek markets for their fair-trade coffee, my mom coordinated buyer meetings, and my dad translated from Spanish. And when a larger group of Tibetan monks came through town with the Lollapalooza music festival, my dad unearthed a dozen cheap foam mattresses and set up our living room for a sleepover party.

It was also common for my parents’ friends to appear just before dinner, uninvited but always welcome, with a partial bottle of wine in hand. Both my parents loved to cook, and though their lives were hectic, we ate dinner with whomever was with us. It might sound like chaos, but it felt like security. There was always room at our table.

My mom, Theresa, has a purposeful way of moving through space, with punchy pitter-patter steps like a hummingbird in human disguise. She’s small and strong, half-Filipina, half-Polish, with black hair, wispy eyebrows over smiling eyes, a stoner’s faintly stained teeth, weathered hands, and knobby finger joints from working at a laundromat as a teen and a lifetime of digging in garden dirt.

Born in 1946 and raised in Schenectady, New York, my mom dropped out of college in 1965, moving first to Miami and then, on a whim and with five dollars in her pocket, across the country to Los Angeles. There, under the unrelenting sun, she survived her twenties: she waited tables at a strip club, finished her college degree, took a lot of drugs, married a poet-cum-acrobat, became a preschool teacher, and had a son, Zak. When her marriage ruptured in 1975, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she loved the cover of the wet, towering temperate rainforest. She joined the natural-foods industry early by managing a Portland co-op called Food Front.

 

Zak’s Chili Oil with Fermented Black Beans

Recipe by Zak Margolis, adapted from Barbara Tropp’s China Moon Cookbook

Makes 3 pints

The glue that holds my household together is this complex, addictive chili oil. Zak first encountered it in college when his then girlfriend, Emi Takahara, made it. The first key ingredient is douchi—black soybeans fermented with a mold culture similar to the one used to make miso. You can often find douchi in East Asian markets in tightly vacuum-sealed bags or in cardboard tubes. Without the beans, this chili oil would still be tasty, but it would be less complex.

The second key ingredient is homemade chili flakes, which are smoky, aromatic, and spicy. Our roommate Chris taught us how to make fresh chili flakes—prik pon in Thai—and we’ve never gone back. As Chris says, “Chili flakes are crucial to the Thai pantry. My mom made them from scratch because when you buy chili flakes, they’re not toasted the way she likes. Toasting the chilis before you flake them brings out a whole other level of aroma and flavor.”

Homemade chili flakes are incredibly simple to make, but if you aren’t on your game, you can turn your kitchen into a mace chamber, so it’s important to be attentive. We use dried Thai chilies for their spiciness, but the same process will work with any dried chilies, and each will have a distinct flavor and heat level. Zak’s notable changes to Barbara Tropp’s original recipe were to increase the garlic five fold and decrease the volume of peanut oil. My favorite thing about eating this oil is scooping up the plentiful goop on the bottom, including those whole garlic cloves that mysteriously become both shriveled and plump. I like to make a lot with friends and divide it. I’ve included proportions for a small amount, but this recipe is easily scaled up—I often quadruple all the ingredients to make six quarts—and the steps remain the same.

• 2 cups peanut oil
• 1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
• 2/3 cup dried red chili flakes (recipe follows)
• 20 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
• 1/3 cup Chinese fermented black beans (douchi), roughly chopped
• 4 tablespoons fresh ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks

In a large heavy saucepan over low heat, bring all the ingredients to a gentle simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, checking occasionally to make sure the oil doesn’t bubble aggressively. Remove from heat and let come to room temperature. Wash 3 glass pint jars and let them air-dry. Scoop the precious goop from the oil and carefully distribute among the jars. Then pour the remaining oil over the top. Put the lids on and store in a cool dark place for up to 3 months.

 

*Editor’s note: We were delighted that were were able to learn a little about McGee Farm and Berkeley’s group living history in the following posts:

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/everybody-got-together-in-berkeley-commune-days

mcgeespauldingexhibit.org