What's Cooking

*Special thanks to Jimmy for being my muse on this one*

I watch Lilly in the kitchen.  As an adult, she is confident, throwing ingredients together with spices, then baking, roasting, frying, and sauteing. Being a vegetarian, she often cooks two or three meals at a time. Lilly won't eat meat, John won't eat vegetables, and I will eat anything.  

Sometimes, my heart leaps in my chest as I watch Lilly perform magic in the kitchen. Her graceful artist’s hands pause on a canister as she looks over her shoulder at me.  Her hand resting lightly on the rim, the wrist dropping down daintily.  My mother’s hands.  She looks at me questioningly, waiting for me to speak.  Like my mother would pause, as I spoke to her about important childhood ideas.

                From the age of three to the age of eight, Lilly had me, and I had her.  It was the two of us alone against the world.  Lilly was in a hurry to grow up.  She had been born in a hurry, not waiting longer than six months.  As soon as she breathed air, Lilly looked around and began processing the world.

                In her rush to be forty, Lilly figured out two things.  Mom made food.  Therefore, to be an adult, she had to learn to make food.  Lilly appointed herself my sous chef, as I included her in cooking and baking, just as my mother had with me. 

My most loved memories of my mother always seem to revolve around the kitchen.  I used the lessons I had learned from my mother and passed them to Lilly.  In the process, I realized that the lessons were my mother’s way of keeping me out of underfoot and out of danger.

                Baking bread, I would give Lilly a quart jar with cream inside, to roll and shake until we had butter for the bread.

                “I’m tired.  I don’t want to make butter anymore.  Isn’t it your turn?”

                “I can’t, I’m baking the bread.”

                “When is it going to be butter?”

                After listening to the whining, it was a victory for me to point out the tiny specks of butter forming on the inside of the jar.

                “It’s almost butter!  Keep going, you’re doing great!”

I had an advantage as a child.  I could sit on the linoleum in the living room, roll the quart jar uphill across the floor, and let it roll back to me.  It sure beat shaking for hours!

                Mixing was another job for Lilly.  After baking a whole egg in a pie and a cake, I taught her how to use the mixer.  After wiping down the walls, I taught her how to lower the speed before pulling the mixer out of the bowl. 

I handed over my mother’s rolling pin and taught Lilly how to roll out dough.  Her hands were so small that she had to hold the rolling pin itself to push it across the counter.  Over time, I taught Lilly what my mother had taught me.  Perhaps my mother thought she was teaching me to be a wife.  But I was teaching my child to be independent.

Cooking was the essential part of being a farmwife.  A woman was judged on many things:  the behavior of her children, the sobriety of her husband, her ability to work like a man but be subservient, and her housekeeping.  But food was the major definition of a woman’s place in our community.

I took my mother’s recipe box after she passed away.  Inside, written in her hand, are recipes for “Evelyn’s doughnuts” and “Hazel Brown’s Dessert Bars”.  I see the recipes she copied that are titled, “Erma’s Never Fail Pie Crust” and written across the bottom in prim and proper script is Mom’s comment, “I failed it”. 

Lilly finds the recipes to often be overly sweet or filling, too “heavy”, or too many carbs.  A vegetarian, she avoids anything with meat, grimacing at the recipe for “Ma’s Mincemeat Pie Filling”.  She reads the recipes to force me to tell her the stories. 

“Who’s Grandma Brown again?”

“She is my cousin Kristy’s Grandma.  Kristy’s mom is the daughter of my dad’s brother, and she married Grandma Brown’s son, Lyle.  She always had a herd of people and kids to feed, so she had a lot of recipes.”

“This one from Grandma Brown looks kind of good.  But what are ‘cackleberries’?”

“Those are eggs.”

“Then why didn’t Grandma Pearl just write eggs?  It’s shorter.”

“Because chickens make a noise, they cackle when they lay eggs.  And copying and trading recipes was your grandma’s version of social media.  When she copied them down, she knew that someday your Aunt Donna or I would be reading those, so she made it funny.”

The critical day of judgment for a farmwife was having to bring a dish to a potluck gathering.  Each farmwife came with a Tupperware container of their “specialty”.  They knew they would be judged.  Silently judged and talked about for weeks.

Sometimes, the competition to bring a dish to a holiday gathering or party becomes overwhelming and a failure occurs.  Each aunt and cousin were known for their specialties.  And their disasters. 

It was legendary when one wife put olives and pimentos in the potato salad.  Such exotic ingredients were not a hit at the potluck, and it was whispered about for weeks.  I felt sorry for the poor woman, in her enthusiasm to bring a little culture and class to our community, she had taken it too far.

The adults took the potato salad and discreetly buried the olives and pimentos.  As kids, we were required to eat everything on our plate.  That’s the reason I remember the disasters so clearly.

Jello salads came into being in the early 1970’s.  Recipes were traded, scavenged from Jello boxes and women’s magazines.  Even the local papers had recipe sections.  Cut with scissors or ripped out of a magazine in the doctor’s office, the recipes were tried out, and, if successful, written by hand on a recipe card. 

Regardless of where the recipe was obtained, it was, in my mind, a disaster.  Plain Jello with a dollop of whipped cream, I could choke down.  What the farmwives of the seventies did to Jello should be considered a crime, an affront to dessert, and surely driven by the hand of Satan. 

Mayonnaise was often used in the recipes.  Miracle Whip or mayonnaise started putting advertisements in magazines with recipes for use with Jello.  The sweet smoothness of flavored Jello had, until that moment, lacked the mouth-souring taste of Mayo and Miracle Whip.  It snowballed from there.

Lime-flavored Jello, mixed with Tuna and Miracle Whip, was both a dessert and a main course.  Laid out on a bed of iceberg lettuce, it was plopped whole from a copper fish-shaped gelatin mold.  To add to the enticing dish, the finishing touch would be a maraschino cherry sliced and placed as an eyeball. The white Miracle Whip gave the gelatin a heavy off-white color and a sour lime taste.

I would have avoided that taste bud-defiling dish from hell, but no, there was always a helpful older lady who would “dish up” plates for the kids’ table.  If she really liked you, she would give you the piece with the red cherry circle of an eye, despite your protests.  Some food had to be shoved quickly into your mouth and swallowed immediately lest it linger on your taste buds.

“Wow, you really like your Jello, don’t you?  You ate that so quickly that it just disappeared.  Want another slice, honey?”

“No, thank you. I'd better not; I have a lot of food on my plate to finish.”

After each bite of toxic Jello, you must shove in whatever good-tasting food you have to wash away the remnants of the concoction. The method is: Gulp, swig of Kool-Aid, spoonful of good food. I could only pray that this time no one had tampered with the potato salad recipe.

“I saw this in the Ladies’ Home Journal at Doctor Hanson’s office, and it just looked so pretty I had to try it.  It turned out pretty good if I say so myself.”

That phrase signaled another Jello experiment.  I wondered if anyone who created those recipes tasted their own food.  Vienna sausages tucked in layers of colored gelatin, yet another one-plate meal.  With a layer of sliced raw carrots, you have all the necessary food groups.  Gelatin with a cloudy white Miracle Whip layer, then a layer of orange Jello with thin carrot slivers, then a layer of cherry Jello with slices of real cherries from the jar. Then Vienna sausages, sliced in half the long way and laid out like withered corpses in the inevitable lime Jello.  There must have been a rule to use only lime Jello with meat.

The only saving grace in this torture was the liberal application of whipped cream. By taking a generous spoonful of whipped cream, you could tuck in a piece of toxic Jello mix.  Portioning the whipped cream was critical; use just enough to quell your gag reflex.  But make sure you don’t end up with Jello left over once the whipped cream is gone.

I won’t speak aloud the name of the farmwife who made the mistake of bringing instant mashed potatoes to a birthday potluck.  I was suspicious from the start.  The half pound of butter on top wasn’t nestled in and slowly melting into the snowy white potatoes.  Instead, it sat there, defiantly refusing to meld with the catastrophe in a green Tupperware bowl.  It tasted like the box it came from; cardboard sealed with the tears of real cooks.

Glorified rice was another concoction created by a woman obviously lacking taste buds. Cooked and cooled white rice was thrown into a plastic Tupperware bowl and drenched in Cool Whip.  It only gets worse after that.  If you considered yourself a real chef, a woman with money and time to spare, you would go fancy.  A sliced banana, a few real cherries sliced in half, and small rectangles of real pineapple would be thrown into the Cool Whip and rice mixture.  Or, if you were down to earth, you opened a can of fruit cocktail that had been saved for just this occasion and threw that on top of the rice mixture.

Making glorified rice with fresh bananas, real cherries, and fresh pineapples was obviously showing off.  Your husband doted on you to the extent that he drove you to a big town with a real produce section.  There, he let you throw around his money as if it grew on trees.   That kind of indulgence was reserved for new wives or the wives of men who had sold the farm and moved to town.  Everyone knew that the fresh fruit-glorified rice was made by the “snooty” Aunts.         

Birthdays, Anniversaries, or any major life event meant tables laden with glass casserole dishes and Tupperware bowls of food.  Overall, it was a delicious feast of special-occasion fare.  A time when there was enough on the table to eat your fill.  No matter what catastrophes lurked on the table, you could still find something delicious. Being in Minnesota meant that every farmwife had their own special hotdish recipe to bring to a potluck.  Comfort food eaten with the people who loved you unconditionally speaks of a time long gone in our society. Hotdish is the ideal comfort food, warm and full of carbohydrates.

Even now, when I attend the rare family reunion, picnic shelters are filled with bowls of hotdish.

“What’s in it?” An adult Lilly asked me when I scooped some hotdish onto her plate.

“OH, MY GOD!” I whisper-shouted into her ear.  “You NEVER ask what's in a hotdish unless you want the recipe, and only after you’ve eaten at least three servings of it.  Jesus, they are gonna think I raised you with no manners at all!”

If only we could have had a birthday, an anniversary, or some celebration every day.  Because the food we ate daily sucked.  It was “poor people's” food. Most of our community members, including us, couldn’t afford to go to the grocery store every week.  When we went to the grocery store, it was always an excursion. Snow, icy roads, and blizzard conditions in the winter kept many people at home.  Summer meant haying and caring for the crops and the garden. A trip to town was a treat, not to be taken lightly.

Sometimes Mom would catch a ride with Grandma Brown or Uncle Lester and Aunt Ruby to go shopping in ‘Mills’.  Not that they had much more money or better vehicles, but there is strength in numbers.  The extra person to push you out of a snow-filled ditch can make all the difference.

The stores didn’t carry much in the way of groceries either.  Reliant on the local farmers' business, the store’s managers bought only the basics. The produce section contained a withered head or two of iceberg lettuce, a few sacks of potatoes, and a couple of bags of onions.  Every farmwife had a garden, creating a cellar full of canned vegetables and wild berries. What produce was available at the store was seasonal and meant to supplement the canned goods at home. 

Baking bread at least once a week was the standard of the day; the store would offer a few bags of hamburger or hot dog buns. There were a few boxes of cake mixes for an emergency, such as a sudden funeral luncheon. If it could be made at home, there was no reason to buy it at the store. Only the rich or lazy people would throw around money.    

What the store did was stock bulk.  Fifty-pound sacks of flour, giant packages of yeast.  Cases of Kerr canning jars and lids were always on display.  Fifty pounds of plain white rice in a cloth sack.  (Rice was not eaten as a side; it would go into a hamburger-rice hotdish or be “glorified”.) Cases of pears, apples, plums, or other difficult-to-grow-in-Minnesota produce would be purchased and canned at home.

What we ate on a daily basis reflected what we could grow on the farm or raise in the barns.  Chickens were common, supplying eggs and meat.  An overabundant hatch meant canned chicken meat for the winter.  Extra eggs were a side income.  It was a dairy farming area, and milk, cream, and butter were always available. 

Meat was rarely beef; extra youngstock was sold off for money.  Instead, there was always fish, Dad was deadly with a spear, in a dark house on the river. Any game could be stocked in the freezer.  Every farm had a large chest freezer, stocked full of pork, venison, chicken, geese, ducks, and whatever other little furry or feathered creature that was edible.

“Why are you throwing those away?”  Dad asked Mom one day as they butchered a deer.

“I’m not eating kidneys!” Mom told him sharply.

“They aren’t bad, if you boil the piss out of them!” Dad chortled.

From what was canned, preserved, frozen, and stored in the pantry, three meals a day would be produced.  In between endless hours of chores each day, 365 days a year, Mom had to feed her family.

Pancakes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or sometimes all three, were cheap and easy.  Eggs from the chickens, milk from the cows. Flour from the fifty-pound bag, melted lard for the oil, and a bit of baking powder.  Pancake syrup was fresh from Uncle Erick’s harvest or any of the neighbors.  In a pinch, brown sugar and water could serve as a poor substitute.  To me, pancakes will always taste like poverty and emptiness.

Most meals consisted of a few slices of side pork.  The cheap, fat-rippled side of a pig, side pork, is used to make bacon.  But we didn’t have a smokehouse, so we ate side pork. Dad usually sold or traded the good cuts of meat, so our pork was those fat slices with little threads of meat.  Fried in its own fat, the slices were dripping with grease.  We were eating hunks of rubbery pork fat.  If she was in the mood, Mom would mix water and flour, then pour it into the hot grease and, with the remnants of the fried meat, make a gravy.

Potatoes grow easily in the rich, dark soil of central Minnesota.  Kept in the dry cellar with a steady underground cave temperature, potatoes can last from the time of digging until the next season. Potatoes are also very filling, versatile, and easy to cook.

Mom would boil huge pots of potatoes at a time.  The remaining two-thirds of the pot, after the meal of peeled and boiled potatoes, would be transferred to a bowl and refrigerated. For some reason, mashed potatoes were a treat. Mom was tired from chores and “in no damn mood” to mash potatoes for our meals. I would mash the potatoes on my plate with my fork and drown them with gravy. The gravy tasted exactly like what it was made of: fried pork fat and flour. I liked to cut up a small dill pickle and put it on top of the hand-mashed potatoes. The sharp taste of the dill pickle gave flavor to an otherwise flavorless dish.

One large pot of boiled potatoes meant one meal with gravy, and three following meals with sliced boiled potatoes fried in the grease from the side pork. By the third meal, if the boiled potatoes were running thin, a few torn-up hunks of bread would be thrown in the grease.  This would stretch the number of fried potatoes by camouflage.

Bread, buttered and covered with jelly from berries we picked all summer, was both a side dish and a dessert. Depending on which batch of jelly was opened, the jelly would be either water-thin or so thick it would roll into a ball as you spread it on top of the bread.

Sauerkraut was another staple.  If the cabbage worms had been kept at bay in the summer, Mom would shred cabbage for hours.   She had thick white crockery tubs that held the shredded cabbage as it fermented in the bedroom off the kitchen. Each day, Mom took off the heavy rock that pressed down on the wooden cover over the cabbage.  Then she would drain the water off the fermenting cabbage.   The amount of water meant it was “working”, turning the cabbage into sauerkraut. 

The problem with sauerkraut is that it produces a gas while it ferments.  A smell that wafts through the house and lingers despite the open windows.  The other problem with sauerkraut is that it must be finished “working” or fermenting before it is canned. This requires patience.  Something my mother never acquired.

*Boom* 

Sounds of glass exploding and shattering in the root cellar beneath our feet.

“What the hell is that?” Dad yelled, rising out of his seat into a crouch.

He was ready in an instant. The explosions signaled that the Russians had finally fired on the United States. Interestingly, the Russians chose to target rural north central Minnesota.

Dad went for his loaded rifle, which he kept by the front door in case an edible creature wandered through the yard. This time, he would use his hunting rifle to defend his home and country.

“Shit. The sauerkraut is blowing up.  It must not have been done working.” Mom confessed.

Several more explosions rocked the house before we dared go look at the damage.  Mom, followed by the three of us kids, walked carefully down the cellar steps. I lingered at the back of the line, too young to die in a bloody sauerkraut explosion. 

There, on the wooden shelves, the damage was plain to see.  The oh-so-precious quart canning jars were shattered, and glass lay shining in the overhead light. It was a disaster, a culinary and a financial catastrophe. 

Each year, the quart jars were brought up from the cellar.  Cleaned and stored carefully, those glass jars were used year after year.  Mom would count the quart canning jars, then one by one take them from their boxes and wash them a second time to remove any dust.  Then she would gently run her index finger around the rim of each jar.  Any imperfection, chip, or crack would ruin the jar for future use.  Replacements cost money, something we did not have to spend. Mom grieved each canning jar that had to be thrown out.

Now, each of those carefully stored and curated jars that had been set aside for sauerkraut lay in ruins. Glass chunks, swimming in fermented water and slimy handfuls of shredded cabbage, dripped from the shelves onto the dirt floor.  

“Oh no,” Mom covered her mouth in horror. 

Gathered behind her, we were silent, overwhelmed with the entirety of the situation. Then it started.  Mom’s shoulders started to shake, and she bent over and clutched her stomach.  I was sure that my mother was overcome by yet another setback in her life full of setbacks.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, look at that.”  Mom gasped out the words and began to laugh.  Big, loud, and deep guffaws filled the cellar.  Mom leaned over and held onto the shelf, laughing too hard to stand upright.

It was hard for Mom to talk; she was laughing, fighting to catch her breath, and getting the words out.

“I guess your dad isn’t getting his sauerkraut this year.  I never liked the shit anyway, and it’s a pain in the ass to make. Now he won’t be asking me for sauerkraut anymore.” 

When Mom canned jelly, she used blocks of melted wax to pour over the top and seal the jar.  She never made preserves or jam.  Instead, she took the berries we had picked all summer long and boiled them endlessly with a package of pectin until they formed a jelly-like texture.  Some batches were a little more liquid than jelled, some were so jelled that they would refuse to spread out at all.   But there was always jelly and bread at every meal.  Cheap and filling drove the menu.

We picked berries from the woods and gardens endlessly under the summer sun.  Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries, juneberries, wild plums, and chokecherries.  If it was edible, it was jellied. 

Off Mom and I would go to the woods to a “good patch of berries” with our pails in hand.  Small pails to hold while picking, five-gallon buckets to hold the bounty of our pails. There was no point in whining; there was no escape.  We each did our time, Donna, Tubby, and me.  Dad never picked berries.  I don’t think that was even an option, since Dad would have considered berry picking to be “woman’s work”.   

The worst part of picking berries was that there was no lunch.  You could eat what you were picking.

“Wipe the bug off and eat it.  If you are hungry enough, you’ll eat it.”

Raspberries have tiny green worms that crawl inside them.  That grossed me out so much that I had to be absolutely starving before I would finally concede and eat a handful of unwashed raspberries.

“Make sure you don’t find half a worm!  You know what that means!” Mom would shout if she saw me eat a raspberry.

Even at my youngest berry-picking age, I knew what that meant. It meant I had eaten the other half.  Even the thought was enough to make me gag and stop eating.

Chokecherries are sour little berries that grow on tall trees.  The berries are small and round and can suck every ounce of moisture from your mouth and, eventually, your entire body.  No one carried water bottles then; we just suffered loudly from thirst.  I hated picking chokecherries, with their tiny, evil stones inside. Eating them created the threat of death by dehydration. Unfortunately for me, chokecherries grew wild all over our pasture and most of the state land.

“I love picking chokecherries,” Mom would announce. “They grow so thick, all you have to do is pull down a branch and strip it into your pail.  We’ll have our buckets full in no time. It’s gonna take a few days to clear this patch, though. There’s another grove over down by the lane to the meadow I saw last night.”

“Mmmph, oomph,” I would reply, trying to suck some moisture remaining in my body back up to my mouth.

The only enthusiasm I ever had for picking chokecherries was when Grandpa Brown made a deal with the three of us kids to make chokecherry wine.  For our summer of labor, dehydration, and hunger, we each got giant jugs of red chokecherry wine.  Mom and Dad were agreeable to this arrangement.  In retrospect, it was a lesson in non-union, blue-collar labor, and it took a lot of work to be a wino.

Gooseberries have sharp stickers on the bushes and the berries.  Strawberries meant crawling around the ground for hours, as did blueberries.  Wild plums fell easily from the tree when ripe; all it took was a shake.  But between the birds and the bugs, the harvest was minimal.  Juneberries were plump and juicy, but I resented the name. No matter the berry, I had a personal hatred of it.

Mom baked bread every week to serve with each meal.  A meal was not complete in Dad's eyes without bread and jelly. Mom had a huge, dented tin mixing bowl she brought out for breadmaking. She put the dough in it and beat the hell out of the pending loaves repeatedly. 

The ritual never varied: warm water to start the yeast, flour, salt, melted lard or Crisco.  Mangle and dust with flour, mangle again, and lay a dishtowel over the bowl. As soon as the dough had the audacity to peek over the top of the mixing bowl, it was punched back down to a deflated and sad-looking ball.  Eventually, with some inspiration from her soul, Mom knew when the dough was ready and didn’t need another mauling.  She would grease her hands with lard, pinch off a hunk of dough, and throw it in a greased bread pan. 

I longed for store-boughten bread.  That was the name for it: “store-boughten bread.” Thin, uniform slices with soft edible crusts.  Each slice matched the next; sandwich-making was so much easier.  Store boughten bread didn’t have sudden air pockets in a slice, leaving you with one and a half slices to match up for a sandwich.  Store boughten bread had soft, thin crusts on top.  Mom’s bread had a crust of cement that, despite her buttering it immediately after baking, would cut the side of your mouth like a razor blade.

It was a rare day when we got a loaf of store-boughten bread.  Once the bread was consumed, the bag was carefully saved.  Plastic bread bags were used to store homemade bread, and the twisters were reused until they were bare wires.  Plastic bread bags were used in the winter to waterproof our winter boots.  The thin plastic was intended to keep moisture from the snow and muck from seeping into our boots through their holes.  Instead, my feet would sweat and slide around inside the plastic bag.  Eventually, my sliding foot would go through the bread bag, ruining its waterproofing.  I think Mom only bought store bread when we needed the bags. 

Cutting the homemade bread to serve was always a struggle.  Did you saw through it with a gentle back-and-forth motion? This was time-consuming.  Or take a butcher knife and attack the hard, unyielding crust, as your left hand held the loaf in place?  This approach created a nice slice, but it left the rest of the loaf about an inch tall from the force of your left hand holding it in place.  Bread is an unforgiving medium.  One slight angle off and your slice is thin and sandwich-perfect on top, but three inches thick on the bottom. 

That thin at the top and three inches thick on the bottom slice was an all-purpose chunk of bread.  Sandwich bread, hotdog bun, hamburger bun, toast (if you could squeeze it into the toaster and back out again).

The trick was to smash the bread as flat as you could, so it would work for any occasion.  It was the little black dress of food.  If you smashed it correctly, the ketchup would not leak out of the airhole in your “bun”.  Imagine my sense of betrayal when I observed Donna’s mother-in-law pulling a perfect pan of buns from the oven.  What the hell kind of sorcery was that?  Was it possible to make buns out of bread dough in your own home?  Could my mother have done this?  I was wounded.

Bread was essential for every meal.  Dad had his bread-and-jelly requirement for all three meals and sometimes for the “little lunch” in between. When there wasn't enough to fill your plate, a slice of bread served to round out the meal.

Meat was necessary for a meal to be considered a meal.  Otherwise, it was just a little lunch.  The meat had to be fried to be considered cooked.  Beef roast was rarely prepared, we didn’t butcher the milk cows, and the steers could be sold for money.  Mom wouldn’t make a pork roast; she said, “It's just too greasy.”

Mom would, however, make a bear meat roast.  Bear roast is greasier than pork but has the same taste. Rabbits and squirrels were banned ever since Donna observed the skinned bodies and announced they looked like babies. Chicken was usually baked or, sometimes, fried, and served with potatoes and gravy if Mom had time.  Dad liked a nice roasted duck, but Mom blackballed it, so it was a rare meal.

“Those damn ducks are greasy and nasty, they will swim in anything, I have seen them swimming in shit!  I ain’t cooking them, you can cook them your own damn self if you want duck!”

If Dad tried to coax Mom into cooking duck, she would hit him with the final word.

“Then you can pick the pinfeathers off those nasty, dirty ducks”. 

Dad would often admit defeat at that point. He had no patience to sit and pull out the tiny pin feathers.  Goose was a rare option as well. Pin feathers, the dryness of the meat, and the amount of time to prepare were brought up at the suggestion of roasted goose. Of course, there were days when Mom had to prepare whatever Dad could shoot.  When the side pork and the venison were gone, all bets were off, and Mom had to pick pin feathers.  And as we were fond of saying, “be grateful for it”. 

Mutton or lamb was a definite no-go.  The baby (me) would cry.  Ever since Tubby told me I was eating my pet bottle lamb and the resulting hysterics, I don’t remember lamb ever being served again.  There were a few suspiciously small pork chops occasionally, that I avoided just in case.

Venison was the family's staple when I was a child.  Venison roast, venison chops, venison hamburger, venison sausage, and every variation thereof.  We had a brief respite from venison chili; Dad declared it gave everyone too much gas.  Mom would cut the venison into chunks and preserve it in quart jars.  Cold venison sandwiches for lunch, canned venison chunks in gravy over boiled potatoes, maybe venison hamburger mixed with Ragu over spaghetti noodles.  I had seen Disney’s Bambi, even had the Disney Golden Book, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut and eat what I was served.   

Besides mutton, there were two other things I refused to eat.  Liver, which mom fried in a pan full of lard and served with cooked onions.  I tried it, but the taste and texture were so horrid that I just couldn’t do it.  The smell of liver frying was enough to make me gag.  I would end up eating a few fried onions, the fried potatoes, and the inevitable bread and jelly. 

The third protein I despised was fish.  Each winter, Dad would go out to the dark house with a spear and sit for hours spearing fish.  He would come home with a gunny sack full of frozen fish, northern pike, and suckers.  The cold outside the fish house would flash-freeze the fish, and there was a loud thunk when he set it down on the kitchen linoleum.

“Youse clean these up,” Dad would direct Donna and Tubby.

Off they would go, to scrape the scales and degut the frozen fish.  Donna, always scientifically helpful, would take the time to point out all the major organs and systems within each fish. She lectured to me and whoever else was nearby.

“Oh look, this one has eggs,” Donna would exclaim, scooping out some sort of Northern Pike caviar to show me on the blade of her knife.

Thanks to my sister, I knew the anatomy of a Minnesota fish like no child should. Including the stomach contents.  I had a gag reflex that became so triggered by these lessons that the smell of fish can make me gag to this day. 

Mom would take the chunks of fish, still filled with big and small bones, and wipe them across a plate of flour.  Mixed in the flour were the two Minnesota spices, salt and pepper. In a sizzling frying pan half-full of molten lard, she would throw in the chunk of fish, lightly dusted with flour. At no point in this process was I hungry.  Mom tried to encourage me to eat fish; some days, it was all we had to eat besides bread.  I tried, with my index finger and thumb, to pick off a tiny piece of the meat and bring it to my mouth.  Mom would take Miracle Whip and mix it with a cut-up dill pickle and a few tiny pieces of onion.

“Here, try it with tartar sauce,” she would plead.

Having seen the entire process, I knew this meat was tainted with things beyond imagination. I would layer on several inches of the goop that Mom called tartar sauce.  Then, by eating a layer of the sauce and smashing the fish into my plate, I managed to create a pile.  This pile had a confusing texture and color, making it appear as if I had eaten some of the fish.  This behavior remains my go-to when I am served fish in public.  The biggest reason I refuse to go to London is the abundance of fish and chips that appear in movies set there.

I was determined not to pass on food issues to my daughter.  Being morbidly obese for thirty years of my life, I knew food could be a trap.  Food is fuel.  But it needs to be the right kind of fuel, at the right time, and for the right reasons. 

“I am gonna have hamburgers from Hardee's and McDonald's every day when I get big! And I’m never going to make homemade bread.” I would declare to Mom on liver or fish nights.

“You are gonna get sick of hamburgers pretty quick.”  Mom would announce as she went about her cooking.

“No, I won’t!” I would announce defiantly. 

Then I would wander off to dream of my future life.  A life full of store boughten bread and hamburgers at my beck and call.  I could have my pet monkey bring me my hamburgers and grape pop!  Yep, when I got big and rich, it would be nothing but the good life for me!

It was feast or famine in our neighborhood.  If you went to a neighbor’s house, a “little lunch” would be served.  Donuts, cakes, or bars would be offered repeatedly.  In my childhood mind, I believed everyone ate like that, except for us.  It made me feel more like an “other”.

That wasn’t the case, however. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to put the pieces together.  I recall meatballs being stretched with cornflakes to feed the people who came over to help harvest. I overheard conversations that, at the time, were meaningless but now carry so much more weight with hindsight.  out

“Those cheap co-op hotdogs smell rotten, but they taste okay if you fry them.”  I heard one adult cousin tell another.

“That government cheese will plug you up!  I don’t know what’s in that shit, but it won’t even melt if you make a grilled cheese sandwich.”  A bachelor cousin remarked.

“You’ve had enough to eat, go outside and play.” A mother would tell her children while doing the mental math so that everyone got "some".

Food stamps helped some families.  But there was never enough.  Gardening was a necessity, not a hobby.  Garden bounty was shared. Minnesota nice forbade embarrassing your neighbor.

“I got so much of this crap this year, I don’t know what to do with it.  I hate to see it rot, but I got more than I can put up.”  

Stubborn pride, rooted in the bloodlines of pioneers, kept everyone from admitting they were in need.

“I have a few canning jars left over. I can take them off your hands.  Hate to see it go to waste.  The kids will eat it.”

The dining room table was in the kitchen; there was no formal dining room for any of us.  Except for snooty Aunt Violet.  Visits were centered around coffee and a “little something for lunch”.  Mealtimes were family gatherings, and TV was not allowed.  So much of our community’s time was centered around food, planting and harvesting, growing and weeding, canning and preserving, feeding and eating.  

It is no wonder that I see my mother again in my daughter in the kitchen.   That and the fact that when something goes wrong, my sweet and kind daughter will let loose a string of profanity.  I smile and think to myself, “Yup, that’s her Grandma Pearl in her.”

If someone questions Lilly’s cooking, there are always one of two replies:   

“Don’t bitch with your mouth full.”

  “Shut up and eat your hockey puck.”

My mother taught me those phrases at the kitchen table.  I like to think that somewhere, she laughs to know her legacy lives on.  Maybe not in fried boiled potatoes and fried side pork, but in humor, laughter, and family.