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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Tuesday, January 27, 2009
I was raised by a woman who lacked emotional nurturing skills, but she was a great cook, with an amazing repertoire - even while working full time, she was able to present a varied menu, items often not being repeated for a month or more.
She was good at all the classics, like Beef Stroganoff, Toad-in-the-Hole (Yorkshire pudding baked with embedded sausages - !), and Macaroni-and-Cheese.
Here, Macaroni-and-Cheese was actually not macaroni at all, but rotelli pasta with a light béchamel (a thickened sauce base made with milk), to which she added grated Tillamook Cheddar (THE cheese, in my part of the world - and back when I was a kid, it was coated with thick wax) - so it wasn't actually a Mornay sauce, being made with cheddar, rather than gruyère and parmesan. All this was assembled in a shallow dish, topped with bread crumbs, and baked.
I had no idea that mac-and-cheese meant something much different to most people until I was a guest at a friend's house for dinner; I was about ten.
"What's for dinner?" I asked his mom.
"We're having macaroni and cheese!" she said, knowing that she was in the process of scoring huge points with her son's little friend.
"Oh boy!" I said, "that's one of my favorites!"
We had a Betty Crocker moment, she and I - I'm sure her hair was in a beehive or something like it, and she must have had an embroidered apron, no doubt, and I'm sure she looked great.
I was presented with that stuff in a box (which, although appearing radioactively orange, is colored - or was - with annatto, the same stuff used to color real cheddar). Rather gluey, bland, no plate appeal…
Of course, I was polite, and claimed to enjoy it.
Indeed, though, I'm sure I did enjoy it - if something's tasty, I want some - and although I have eaten the finest caviar (from Columbia River Sturgeon, made, briefly, by an artisan in the 80s), along with all the other great dishes made from excellent ingredients, I can still enjoy food that's served on the Low Road (see my epigram, High Road or Low?, at geniusweirdo.org).
When I got home:
"You won't believe what she thought macaroni and cheese was supposed to be like!" I sniffed, outraged.
My step-mother replied, "It's best, sometimes, to not ask what's for dinner." How true.
But I was raised surrounded by passion for food. And not like a big, Italian family, everyone carrying on around the pot of freshly-made pasta, but just with the simple, but pervasive notion, that food was supposed to be tasty, nutritious, varied, and you were supposed to cook it yourself.
We had - this being the 60s and 70s when I grew up, and six mouths to feed - margarine and Minute Rice at the table; I secretly relished having dinner at my grandmother's house, because it was real rice, and butter.
I knew what I liked.
So there was good food around, but I think I also was predisposed to be interested by it - the only thing I didn't really like, and would push to the side of my plate (which, two generations away from the Great Depression, was nearly unheard of - waste not, want not, and all that) - were raw mushrooms in the salad. I'm not too keen on raw mushrooms anyway - although I did have some raw truffle once, which I apparently was sharing with a squirrel, but that's another story for another day…
I ate everything. Even the unrecognizable tiny black cubes in the tuna casserole - which I later learned were canned, diced mushrooms. Didn't matter what it was, I ate it.
Once, my step-mother made a meat pie. "What kind of meat pie?" I asked, intrigued and eager.
"I'll tell you after you eat it."
Now, that right there would have flashing red lights and warning bells and alarms - like a flooding submarine - and nobody would eat anything after hearing that:
I'll tell you what it is after you eat it.
But she was such a reliable cook, and I was apparently open-minded, so I merely said, "Okay."
It was fantastic - what kind of meat pie was it? I still didn't know.
"That was steak-and-kidney pie," she said, and it was the first of many I have eaten and baked, and thought about…
"Well, it was great - and next time, could you just tell me what I'm eating? I'm going to eat it anyway, you know that," and she always did.
Food is my dearest, fondest love.
And I'm not one of those portly trenchermen, as one might assume - no, we're blessed with a high metabolism, so we burn right through it - which means we're almost always hungry, like a shrew. But we love to eat! So we get to do it more often! How nifty is that?
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