Mom's Home Cooking
October 20, 1999
My mom was a great cook—as long as you were company.
One of my parents’ chief concerns was that we would be spoiled and one of the ways we were saved from this moral crisis was simple food.
Take for example, our school lunches, the very model of efficiency.
Mom made school lunch sandwiches for the four of us—Betty (my nickname), Mary, Bill and Emmett, in September and January. She bought 12 loaves of thin-sliced sandwich bread and lined it up on the long, tin-topped table in our large, very old-fashioned kitchen. She’d make eight loaves of peanut butter and grape jelly and four of our favorite, cream cheese and chopped olive, a cocktail hors d’oeuvre popular at the time. She wrapped them in wax paper sandwich bags, stacked them thirty deep in brown paper grocery bags and put them in the freezer chest.
A chest style freezer looks like a big trunk. To get to the bottom sandwiches, we’d have to jump up and hang over the edge. The peanut butter ones were purple on both sides from the jelly.
That was my lunch from third grade through ninth where I went to a school with a hot lunch. And butter from government subsidies.
My Catholic family’s other two interesting meal choices centered around fish on Fridays: tuna casserole, the kind with soda crackers on top, or shrimp Creole with loads of giant shrimp nestled amid the green peppers and onions and tomatoes. Pretty great except for the okra.
If you’ve ever heard of okra, you’ve probably had it pickled, or fried in corn meal. Boiled okra is the culinary equivalent of boogers. It’s green and ridged on the outside with slippery little seeds inside. The outside has this thick snail-trail stuff on it that was originally a warning from heaven that you weren’t supposed to eat okra. But people in the South are either too dumb or too hungry to listen and they eat it all the time. (I believe deep in my heart that they have all been driven crazy by the heat and the bugs.)
Once every six months, my parents took us to the Louts Room, a Chinese restaurant run by the VFW. For some reason, we had the reputation in our mostly Protestant family of being a huge family, one or two kids being more the norm. So our eating out was viewed as a daring expedition involving the transport logistics of a cavalry charge of thousands. My father would wait outside while my mom got everyone ready—honk, honk, honk, being his contribution. Then he would say how my mother was well worth the wait.
We’d all stuff together in our Chrysler New Yorker—four kids in the back, my father and his cigar, my mom and her Winston, in the front. We were never allowed to open the window because that was rude and only spoiled children were rude. Literally breathless, we’d speed through the darkened city to our exotic oriental destination.
Once there, we’d be shown to a special table for massive parties and order, at the least, the chow mein dinner for 12 and the egg foo yong for eight. My father would make lots of jokes about Chinese food going right through you and being hungry an hour later. He’d also see how high he could stack the glasses in a pyramid.
We thought of ourselves as very sophisticated diners.
Breakfast was hard dry toast cooked in the oven because toasters were for the lazy and privileged. Lunch, if you stayed home, was one of two flavors of Campbell’s soup: vegetable beef or pepper pot—which had the distinction of having real beef tripe in it—the avoiding of which taught us carefulness and persistence.
One of the central literary moments of my life was my complete identification with Heidi’s grandmother when she asked Heidi to bring her soft white rolls from the city. My mother will roll over in her grave when she hears I told you this.
Oddly, I remember it all as summery, sunny days. I remember the cold hard frost on my tummy as I dangled from the side of the freezer to reach for the last of the sandwiches. I get teary-eyed at cigar smoke, even in elevators. My dad’s specialty was elevators.
My mom was a great cook—as long as you were company.
One of my parents’ chief concerns was that we would be spoiled and one of the ways we were saved from this moral crisis was simple food.
Take for example, our school lunches, the very model of efficiency.
Mom made school lunch sandwiches for the four of us—Betty (my nickname), Mary, Bill and Emmett, in September and January. She bought 12 loaves of thin-sliced sandwich bread and lined it up on the long, tin-topped table in our large, very old-fashioned kitchen. She’d make eight loaves of peanut butter and grape jelly and four of our favorite, cream cheese and chopped olive, a cocktail hors d’oeuvre popular at the time. She wrapped them in wax paper sandwich bags, stacked them thirty deep in brown paper grocery bags and put them in the freezer chest.
A chest style freezer looks like a big trunk. To get to the bottom sandwiches, we’d have to jump up and hang over the edge. The peanut butter ones were purple on both sides from the jelly.
That was my lunch from third grade through ninth where I went to a school with a hot lunch. And butter from government subsidies.
My Catholic family’s other two interesting meal choices centered around fish on Fridays: tuna casserole, the kind with soda crackers on top, or shrimp Creole with loads of giant shrimp nestled amid the green peppers and onions and tomatoes. Pretty great except for the okra.
If you’ve ever heard of okra, you’ve probably had it pickled, or fried in corn meal. Boiled okra is the culinary equivalent of boogers. It’s green and ridged on the outside with slippery little seeds inside. The outside has this thick snail-trail stuff on it that was originally a warning from heaven that you weren’t supposed to eat okra. But people in the South are either too dumb or too hungry to listen and they eat it all the time. (I believe deep in my heart that they have all been driven crazy by the heat and the bugs.)
Once every six months, my parents took us to the Louts Room, a Chinese restaurant run by the VFW. For some reason, we had the reputation in our mostly Protestant family of being a huge family, one or two kids being more the norm. So our eating out was viewed as a daring expedition involving the transport logistics of a cavalry charge of thousands. My father would wait outside while my mom got everyone ready—honk, honk, honk, being his contribution. Then he would say how my mother was well worth the wait.
We’d all stuff together in our Chrysler New Yorker—four kids in the back, my father and his cigar, my mom and her Winston, in the front. We were never allowed to open the window because that was rude and only spoiled children were rude. Literally breathless, we’d speed through the darkened city to our exotic oriental destination.
Once there, we’d be shown to a special table for massive parties and order, at the least, the chow mein dinner for 12 and the egg foo yong for eight. My father would make lots of jokes about Chinese food going right through you and being hungry an hour later. He’d also see how high he could stack the glasses in a pyramid.
We thought of ourselves as very sophisticated diners.
Breakfast was hard dry toast cooked in the oven because toasters were for the lazy and privileged. Lunch, if you stayed home, was one of two flavors of Campbell’s soup: vegetable beef or pepper pot—which had the distinction of having real beef tripe in it—the avoiding of which taught us carefulness and persistence.
One of the central literary moments of my life was my complete identification with Heidi’s grandmother when she asked Heidi to bring her soft white rolls from the city. My mother will roll over in her grave when she hears I told you this.
Oddly, I remember it all as summery, sunny days. I remember the cold hard frost on my tummy as I dangled from the side of the freezer to reach for the last of the sandwiches. I get teary-eyed at cigar smoke, even in elevators. My dad’s specialty was elevators.
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