Family Dinner - by Mom

Back by popular demand are the personal history writing assignments.  We so love to read about you guys and your lives!  

This week's Personal History task is to write about the following:

Describe a typical family dinner. Did you all eat together as a family? Who did the cooking? What were your favorite foods?

I'm really looking forward to reading these again!

      In the house where I grew up, the one in Evansville, Indiana, we had a breakfast nook in the kitchen, and a formal dining room in a breezeway.

Our kitchen was galley-style—long and straight. On one end was the breakfast nook --a true nook, built into a bump-out with windows on three sides. We had a table there, but I can’t remember if the seating was a built-in booth or separate chairs. I’ve been looking at some mid-century kitchen designs online to jog my memory, but I haven’t found the right picture yet. Perhaps I will try to draw it sometime.

     Until I was 12, the formal dining room was in the “breezeway,” or at least that’s what we called it. It was a long room that ran along one end of the house, front to back, between the single garage and the rest of the house. It was paneled in Knotty Pine and had big windows at each end, that could be fully opened, allowing for the breeze to blow through. In a house without central air conditioning, this was a beautiful thing, and for me, this was the most beautiful room in the house. (Ask me sometime what happened to that room, if I haven’t already told you about the drunk driver who knocked down half our house.)

     We had two typical kinds of dinners—evening meals. More than half the time, Mom would have dinner ready a little before 5 pm, and the kids would eat in the kitchen, very casual style- plate, fork, cup- with a high chair for the little kid. She would set a full place setting at the head of the dining room table for Dad and he would eat in there alone when he got home.  He was almost always home by 5 or 5:30, so it wasn’t about timing.  He just liked the peace and quiet of dining alone.  I don’t know how they determined which evenings we would do it that way.  Maybe it was based on how tired she was, or how cranky we were, or if Dad had had a tough day.

     In those days, Dad called Mom from work at least once or twice a day. I think she was his stability and courage back then. I think she probably knew from those phone calls whether to have a family meal or just kids in the kitchen, dad at the table. One of the chores we regarded as a privilege was to set Daddy’s place at the table, just right, before he got there. There were rules: Never put the ice in the glass until he was seated, or the water wouldn’t be cold enough; If you looked at the evening paper funnies before he got home, fold the paper back up perfectly; Finish practicing piano before he got home, or forget about it; Nothing else on the dining room table,,, not homework or toys; Be quiet.

 But other evenings, we would set the table in the dining room for everyone and all eat together. The table had to be set just so, although we used everyday dishes and flatware—Melamine and stainless. Only for holidays did we get out mother’s china and silver. Even so, the forks, knives and spoons had to be in their correct places—forks on the left, knife and spoon on the right--the napkins under the forks, the glasses at the head of knife.

 It was a little nerve-wracking to eat all together, because someone would inevitably spill something, or drop a fork, or knock over a water glass, and the yelling would begin, usually ending in Eddie being sent away from the table without the rest of his dinner.  In my mind, it didn’t matter who spilled, it was Eddie that got in trouble. Several times he got sent outside, followed by epithetic references to various unmannerly animals.

My stomach is knotting up now, just writing about it. I know there was at least one time that I lost my temper at my dad over this, and I went and sat on the inside of the door where my little brother sat on the outside. I’m quite sure this would not have gone unpunished. Maybe I didn’t really do it; maybe I just wished that I had shown some loyalty rather than just fear. It was unfair and very unpleasant.

But the good part was the food.  Our mother was always a good cook.  She was also a bargain shopper.  We had a deep-freezer in the basement, the chest type, and she filled it with breads from the day-old store and beef chuck roasts that were on sale for 39 cents a pound, and I don’t know what else.  I know that there was a limit of 10 roasts per customer during that sale, but the manager told her she could come back again subsequent days for another 10.

In the summer, she would roast the beef over some charcoal briquettes on a small barbecue she constructed herself out of concrete blocks and the rack from the kitchen oven. These were so very excellent in flavor.

We very rarely ate chicken, often had tuna-based meals, rarely potatoes, often rice, very often pasta.  Mom didn’t bottle vegetables, but she did stock up on quantities of canned goods during sale times.  There was often corn—fresh as well as canned—and green beans.  She always grew tomatoes and peppers, but we ate them all up fresh in their season.

Another favorite meal was what she called sukiyake, a Japanese-influenced dish of beef strips, bell peppers, sliced celery and sliced onions in a soy sauce gravy, served over rice. Mom had gone to occupied Japan and Okinawa during her service in Guam, and loved Japanese foods and art.  It seems like we had that once a week. And we loved it.

There was also her famous tomato meat sauce, and while I thought for years that her manner of constructing it was eccentric—crushing the canned tomatoes with her hand directly into the pot—I recently discovered in a classic Italian cookbook that this is the traditional / classic way to do it. Of course we had this with spaghetti or other pasta, but we also loved to come home from school and, finding the sauce bubbling on the stove, make a quick “sauce sandwich” which was sauce on bread in a bowl. So yummy!  I don’t think we had meatballs very often.  Another classic dinner was beef chunks and rice.  I think this was one of Dad’s favorites, and sometimes she would make it just for him, and we would have something else.  There was often salad—iceberg lettuce and tomatoes with a simple homemade vinaigrette. I don’t remember that we ever had bottled dressing except for when there was company ( very rare) or a holiday.

In the winter, she made her vegetable beef soup, starting with a chuck roast (of course) in the pressure cooker. I have tried for many years to achieve that aroma and the flavor of that soup, coming up with some near misses but never perfection. She gave us the recipe, but I think it must have been some of her biome in it that made it so heavenly and impossible to reproduce. This soup was almost always accompanied by her homemade noodles, another bit of perfection unachievable by regular human beings.

Chicken Cacciatore with dumplings—in a red sauce with peppers, and the puffy dumplings cooked on top of the sauce. Impossibly delicious1 WE had broad flat bowls, that I think are called soup plates, for this dish, because there would be a drumstick or a wing in the sauce and you needed room to maneuver the meat and the bone without losing all the heat from the sauce. This was always eaten in the kitchen.

On Saturdays, dad was a lot more relaxed, and he liked to “make lunch.” This consisted of driving to a small grocery store not far from home where there was a deli department that carried homemade German deli meats: headcheese (ugh, don’t ask.  Look it up and see for yourself. Okay, never mind. Here it is. )

     www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/ark_product_detail/southern_louisiana_hogs_head_cheese

It is not exaggerating to say that this would be the food of Melissa’s nightmares. It’s everything about ham that you hate, mixed together and suspended in vinegar-flavored gelatin. A quote from the website above says,

“Sadly, a taste for the product has not been cultivated in younger generations and consequently Hog’s Head Cheese could very easily disappear from the realm of gastronomic knowledge.”

Disappearance of Hogshead Cheese would be  very good, I think. Nothing sad about it.  This is totally a peasant food, using all the otherwise-unusable bits, for which we should show respect, but, oh, my…. Daddy thought it was pretty funny that we didn’t like it.

(I always thought it was a German thing, but when I Googled it, I discovered that it is also a Southern Louisiana thing, which would account for it being such a favorite of my Dad.) Not to let Headcheese predominate, I just thought you would like to know an oddity.

This same Deli also had fantastic sandwich meats—Garlic bologny, pickle- and –pimiento loaf, regular bologna, also hommade,  and wieners as fat as a little kid’s wrist with skins as thick as …. skin… that had to be boiled thoroughly before eating. You had to pierce the skin in several places before or while they cooked, not sure why.

Along with these things, Dad would get the crustiest French-style bread he could find, always instructing us that it wasn’t “real” French bread, just a very poor imitation. He would also buy the “good” mustard, brown, with seeds, And he would make sandwiches with us all gathered around the kitchen table. These were very happy times, in marked contrast to the sit-down meals in the dining room. 

     I think there were a number of dinners of eggs, and of bologna sandwiches. Vienna sausages sometimes. Spam and eggs. Fish on Fridays—Red Snapper for the parents, fish sticks for the kids. Otherwise meatless, probably eggs. Tuna casserole.

 To the best of my recollection, there was no take-out while I lived at home. Ice cream was only for birthdays. Cookies were only for Christmas. Gnocchi for holidays. And always something exotic, seafood-ish and new-to-us for New Years—caviar, octopus smoked oysters, shrimp.
     One thing for sure, when I was young, there was always a meal together at the end of the day—not always with dad, but with mom and the kids. She was always there, it was always a meal, seated, with a prayer to begin.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord. Amen.”