We had company all weekend so I wasn't able to get to the computer, let along write anything for this, but I did think of one thing: Sunday morning I was making breakfast and decided to make toast, the type that we in the El Rancho branch would call "daddy toast," as opposed to the variety made, you know, in a toaster. That made me reflect that practically until I was in college, I had no idea that there were things called "toasters." To me toast was made in a frying pan, you spread butter on one side of a piece of white bread and basically fried it until it was done, then turned it over and ate it with either apple butter or with powdered cinammon mixed with sugar. Toast furthermore had to have a yellow-brown color and had to have a hole in one corner of the piece of bread, where it had been lifted with a knife. But I also remember variations and disagreements on how this should be done, such as: should it be crispy or "limp?" Should it be toasted on one side only, or on both sides? Apple butter, some other jam, or cinammon/sugar? Funny how the simple act of frying a piece of bread in a pan can bring back such memories.
UPDATE:
It must be near lunch and I'm dieting, so it's hard not to reminisce about food...
Other food-related memories: this last weekend we had company and as I was cooking at home, I was joking about sayings I remember from Ruth: the most famous was when we were all talking and she would say "Let your food stop your mouth!" It might have been someone else saying that but in my mind it's her. Another was more from the Lacys, "eat it or wear it!" born, I think, from frustration with my own extreme food pickiness when I would visit them in the summers. I was a teenager before I knew that spaghetti wasn't a type of soup made with pasta and tomato juice. I think it was when Jimmy came home from college, maybe, and introduced the concept of spaghetti noodles with an actual sauce that you poured over them, something that was at first viewed with great suspicion and distrust. Everyone knew that spaghetti was made with tomato juice and noodles! Heresy! For a long time she claimed the title of family spaghetti queen, although I would dispute that now. Another food that none of us would dare think of eating now, but was a standard, was salt pork, biscuits, and gravy. To this day I absolutely love biscuits and gravy and often get them in a restaurant for breakfast--and even occasionally make them at home--but the salt pork, whew! Total cholesterol bomb. I remember Roy Lee loved it though, and it seemed we had it a couple times a month at least. He also loved buttermilk, with saltine crackers broken up and mixed into them. I've often said, perhaps unfairly so, that everything my mother cooked was fried. You put grease, usually Crisco or bacon drippings, into a frying pan and put whatever you were going to cook into it and cooked until done. And "done" is the operative word; stories about Ruth's aversion to any kind of beef or pork--and chicken goes without saying--with even the slightest tinge, the very hint, of pink, are universal throughout the family. She even went so far as to sometimes move from a table in a restaurant so that she wouldn't have to see someone eating a medium rare steak, or hold her menu in front of her face. So needless to say that everything she cooked for us at home as I was growing up was done, if not dead. But she did produce stuff that tasted good, probably to my later detriment, but oh well! "Fast moving hamburgers," hash browns, the aforementioned biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak (which I've not learned the secret of, although I recently heard it has somethng to do with double-dipping before frying), and fabulous fudge and fudge-covered chocolate cakes. I don't remember eating salads very much, although we might have. The only salad related memory is of having dinner with the Jordans in Farmington, with Jimmy and Ken, and of Ken going to shake the salad dressing but failing to secure the top back on the bottle, so on the first shake it went all over the table and whoever was sitting nearby. To me, as a teenager (pre-teen?) that was the height of hilarity, but I know Jimmy was upset. Likewise, I can't remember cooking out, as is so common today, grilling steaks or hamburgers or anything else, unless it was one of those rare occasions when we went somewhere and had a picnic, or were at someone else's house. I'd be hard-pressed to remember a single time that Roy Lee cooked out over a grill in the backyard of any house.
The most universal food memory, though, is of popcorn and Coke. It's all said that way as a single phrase, "popcorn'n'coke," no matter if you drank orange soda or root beer or whatever; it will always be popcorn'n'coke to me. In those days of course you made popcorn by putting the corn from the bag into a covered saucepan of hot oil/crisco/grease, then shaking it when the kernels began to pop. It was always a trick to time it to the very last kernel before it started to burn, for burned popcorn not only tasted awful and smelled up the house, you were exposed to the approbation of the rest of the people eagerly anticipating popcorn. Not that I usually cooked it, as I was small, but the sound and smell and taste of fresh-cooked popcorn is something that I still treasure and value. And I dearly love popcorn to this day, and can hardly go to a movie without it; it almost seems sacrilegeous. I have been able to eat it in a theater without getting a coke--because of health concerns and the damage done to your system by high-fructose corn syrup--but only rarely and then it seems diminished somewhat.
Rodger is the one in the family with talent (it would be rude to say pretentions!) of being a cook, and indeed he is a wonderful and creative cook. He should write a blog post or an email about it and I'll post it here. At my house we always joke that cooking with Rodger is like cooking with Becci's mother Annaliese: the food is great but they use every pot in the house.
UPDATE:
It must be near lunch and I'm dieting, so it's hard not to reminisce about food...
Other food-related memories: this last weekend we had company and as I was cooking at home, I was joking about sayings I remember from Ruth: the most famous was when we were all talking and she would say "Let your food stop your mouth!" It might have been someone else saying that but in my mind it's her. Another was more from the Lacys, "eat it or wear it!" born, I think, from frustration with my own extreme food pickiness when I would visit them in the summers. I was a teenager before I knew that spaghetti wasn't a type of soup made with pasta and tomato juice. I think it was when Jimmy came home from college, maybe, and introduced the concept of spaghetti noodles with an actual sauce that you poured over them, something that was at first viewed with great suspicion and distrust. Everyone knew that spaghetti was made with tomato juice and noodles! Heresy! For a long time she claimed the title of family spaghetti queen, although I would dispute that now. Another food that none of us would dare think of eating now, but was a standard, was salt pork, biscuits, and gravy. To this day I absolutely love biscuits and gravy and often get them in a restaurant for breakfast--and even occasionally make them at home--but the salt pork, whew! Total cholesterol bomb. I remember Roy Lee loved it though, and it seemed we had it a couple times a month at least. He also loved buttermilk, with saltine crackers broken up and mixed into them. I've often said, perhaps unfairly so, that everything my mother cooked was fried. You put grease, usually Crisco or bacon drippings, into a frying pan and put whatever you were going to cook into it and cooked until done. And "done" is the operative word; stories about Ruth's aversion to any kind of beef or pork--and chicken goes without saying--with even the slightest tinge, the very hint, of pink, are universal throughout the family. She even went so far as to sometimes move from a table in a restaurant so that she wouldn't have to see someone eating a medium rare steak, or hold her menu in front of her face. So needless to say that everything she cooked for us at home as I was growing up was done, if not dead. But she did produce stuff that tasted good, probably to my later detriment, but oh well! "Fast moving hamburgers," hash browns, the aforementioned biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak (which I've not learned the secret of, although I recently heard it has somethng to do with double-dipping before frying), and fabulous fudge and fudge-covered chocolate cakes. I don't remember eating salads very much, although we might have. The only salad related memory is of having dinner with the Jordans in Farmington, with Jimmy and Ken, and of Ken going to shake the salad dressing but failing to secure the top back on the bottle, so on the first shake it went all over the table and whoever was sitting nearby. To me, as a teenager (pre-teen?) that was the height of hilarity, but I know Jimmy was upset. Likewise, I can't remember cooking out, as is so common today, grilling steaks or hamburgers or anything else, unless it was one of those rare occasions when we went somewhere and had a picnic, or were at someone else's house. I'd be hard-pressed to remember a single time that Roy Lee cooked out over a grill in the backyard of any house.
The most universal food memory, though, is of popcorn and Coke. It's all said that way as a single phrase, "popcorn'n'coke," no matter if you drank orange soda or root beer or whatever; it will always be popcorn'n'coke to me. In those days of course you made popcorn by putting the corn from the bag into a covered saucepan of hot oil/crisco/grease, then shaking it when the kernels began to pop. It was always a trick to time it to the very last kernel before it started to burn, for burned popcorn not only tasted awful and smelled up the house, you were exposed to the approbation of the rest of the people eagerly anticipating popcorn. Not that I usually cooked it, as I was small, but the sound and smell and taste of fresh-cooked popcorn is something that I still treasure and value. And I dearly love popcorn to this day, and can hardly go to a movie without it; it almost seems sacrilegeous. I have been able to eat it in a theater without getting a coke--because of health concerns and the damage done to your system by high-fructose corn syrup--but only rarely and then it seems diminished somewhat.
Rodger is the one in the family with talent (it would be rude to say pretentions!) of being a cook, and indeed he is a wonderful and creative cook. He should write a blog post or an email about it and I'll post it here. At my house we always joke that cooking with Rodger is like cooking with Becci's mother Annaliese: the food is great but they use every pot in the house.
1 comment:
The Roy Webbs did indeed have salads on occasion -- at least we did in Monahans because I got into trouble with mixing my salad with my mashed potatoes -- the combination seemed to make Roy Lee slightly ill. Ruth always tossed the salad, primarily iceberg lettuce and maybe cucumbers slices and applied the salad dressing, always French, liberally before putting it on the table. There was no choice of dressing (or of anything else) those days.
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