Food For Thought

One thing that I felt was undisputable about my mom was that she was a terrific cook. Kids that I knew were jealous of their own mothers' cookings and we each bragged about our own mothers' ability at stove and oven. Occasionally we'd be at other friends' tables and sample that what we heard so much about and quietly reserved opinions that might jeopardize otherwise indestructible friendships. One doesn't tell a pal that his mother's cooking tastes like shit.

This isn't to imply that everything that came out of other people's stoves was rotten. Cakes and pies and sometimes cookies always were worth hanging around for. And then a big cold glass of milk, the milk from pre-homogenized times, was the cap to treats. Thank you, cows!

It was at supper where the suspect dishes were prepared and there were very few pigs in our circle. There always had to be certain meats, certain vegetables and certain desserts too that just wouldn't go down. One thing, though, was exempt from our individual fickleness, and that was gravy. Our prejudice favored the gravy that was made in our kitchen and each palate was tuned to that particular taste. All others were measured on a degrading scale against it. That's where the trouble began when we sat at other tables and imagination turned the unfamiliar into the unpalatable.

Whatever the reason I didn't like some foods is a mystery to me eventhough I'm a past expert. I think, by the time I was (say) twelve my list of objectionable fare was buttermilk, coffee, vanilla soda, bean soup, baked beans, lima beans, sweet potatoes (yams), liver, any kind of fish and crustation, cottage cheese, sweet pickles, cranberry jelly, marmalade, fruitcake, mince pie and olives — both green and black.

That's not a very long list.

The problem was that we didn't have menus to choose from and some of these items appeared with regularity at our table. There was no problem with turning down olives and pickles and pies and jellies and sodas, or with coffee that was for adults only anyway and with buttermilk (along with egg-nog was a personal favorite of my mother). Discounting all of these things the others never missed a week being served up.

It's hard to describe in detail any of those continuing confrontations with unwanted portions of dinner being placed arbitrarily on my plate and my always futile obduracy, as well, that useless balking at the inevitable, the delay that made ingestion worse because the food had gone cold. It was an expected ritual that parents were doomed to participate in and mine never backed down. We lived in poorer times. Monies budgeted for food would not find their end in the garbage but in their natural evolutionary target — the toilet.

Kids don't understand "balanced" diets. They might be humbled a little if they knew that hard earned money is what bought the food that had to be included in that "balanced" diet. Parents reinforced their choices in "balanced" diet by a more direct interpretation of that balanced diet stuff by way of an order coated in both fun and threat. "Eat it. It's good for you."

Does that sound familiar?

We might get the feeling that they're lying. They told us a long time ago that there was a Santa Claus. And they told us that the needle for tetanus or small-pox or whatever wouldn't hurt. Our lives were freckled with small promises broken and to have them say "..it's good for you" had a not too assuring ring to it.

Some parents have no sense of economy. They'll sit at the table with their recalcitrant child <@145>til he's finished eating.

Mine tired of that. They went into the parlor and listened to the radio: to Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny or Amos <@145>n Andy or Lowell Thomas. They were the better choice against a whining child locked to his dining-room chair <@145>til the plate was clean, the threat of no dessert notwithstanding..

It was difficult to lay our small wits against adults, especially parents. They were all-powerful and somehow could find our innermost secrets. They demanded a "clean plate." They got it because I was clever. From the table I made my trip up the "wooden hill" to my own room: to homework and to radio to listen to Gangbusters and Suspense and Light's Out and a host of others from the theatre of the imagination. I went up the stairs to my room exulting in my own triumph. I'd outwitted them at their table without concession. And I had a handy accomplice. I left a clean plate and deception on the table. Ha!

Those unbearable foods (fish, liver, sweet potatoes, lima beans) would have never been eaten. In the scheme that I developed I toyed with and picked at and shuffled these non-delights around the plate. Bored, but not given over to violent threats, the rest of the family retired to the parlor and radio. That's entertainment. The child balking at the menu isn't.

"Yer not leaving the table <@145>til you're finished."

My deceit moved to action when they were in the other room for a while. Knife and fork clashed. An empty fork would go to my mouth then noisily hit the plate on return. It was a great fake. At the right moment my napkin would be drawn to position and all of that potential garbage or nourishment and future excrement was rolled up as adroitly as a magician could hide and stuffed into my pocket. "I'm done."

The parents examined the dish. I was dismissed and at arrival at my room I opened the window. With a whistle I called the neighbor's dog "Paget" and tossed the offensive fare down to him. Good catch. Good dog. He'd eat it all. Some dogs eat anything and he was one of them. I bet he would have snared a hot tea-bag flung from its cup.

I'm sure the Heffners fed their dog. If he was a bit heavy that's my doing. I enriched his diet with fish and liver and limas and yams and he ate them all. It would have been on me if he choked on fish-bones.

And I didn't have to tell him: "Eat it, it's good for you."

Boys in my generation and even now, I'm told, head for the kitchen immediately upon arrival at home. Only the unfortunates run to the bathroom first. I think that my snack was a peanut-butter sandwich and cold milk. I ate so much peanut-butter in those days that I was almost unaware that meats and cheese could be put between slices of bread. Grape jelly could be put on the bread, too.

I followed the trench made walking from front door to kitchen every day from when I first entered school. A thousand trips and more were trode unhindered to the refrigerator and the cabinet for snacks. All that suddenly came to a sickening interruption. My mother blocked the way at the dining room. She commanded me to the table where on a plate lay an insipid gray badly shaped undefinable mess.

"Eat it." The command lacked the promise of previous entreaties.

"What is it?" I really didn't want to change a happy habit, my peanut-butter entremets, for the unknown.

"Eat it."

There was a choice: to eat this thing or be beaten to death. And, if I ate it, there was no guarantee that my father wouldn't kill me when he came home from work. "Wait <@145>til your father gets home."

Poor fathers. If they were obedient to their wives in wrath they would all be in jail. Maybe mothers of that time anticipated the movement that in a later time would acknowledge how tough they could be but then were biding time by surrogating some of the corporal work off to their husbands.

"What is it" I asked rather dolefully. It looked like the sole of an old shoe.

She snapped back an answer, but it was evasive. "You know damn well what it is. Eat it. Eat it all."

If I saw any humor in this at that time, I would say that she was hysterical. But I was downright terror-stricken and when she identified this faux-treat and the circumstance by which it came to this plate I was more or less resigned to fate.

The night before, Paget the beagle and my friend, missed his snack. I had forgotten to empty the garbage, which is what the portion of liver still in the pocket of my trousers was to my way of thinking. In the morning I went to school wearing a different pair of pants. The one with the liver went into the washwater fortified by Oxydol, her soap of choice. She found it when it squeezed through the wringer.

"Eat it all," she hissed.

I did.

I have no memory of how I felt. It must have certainly been awful. I do know that everything is relative and somewhere along the way I acquired a taste for liver. It's not disguised with onions and a heavy gravy, smothered as it were, nor is it covered with bacon, but it's just a good slab of liver — on its own. Mmmm! Lay down some limas with it. And mashed spuds. There's a meal.

I'll have my yams these days with fowl, thank you, but no cranberries or olives (green or black). I still don't like those things. As for baked beans, I'll take them hot or cold and they're not bad between two slices of bread. I do like fish. My earlier aversion was simply based on the fear of choking on bones. I've solved that by chewing rather than, as kids are wont, to swallowing things straightaway. Keep the cottage cheese, though and marmalade and mince-pie and anchovies.

Paget's long dead but not from fish-bones hurled from my window. He didn't gag on yams. He liked his slabs of liver. He was a lucky dog that didn't complain. But then, we know what dogs eat, and they'll stick their noses anywhere. All liver, I maintain, is good. Afterall, I had my introduction...in a saute of Oxydol.

The horrible liver debacle

On a plate lay an insipid gray badly shaped undefinable mess.

"Eat it."

It looked like the sole of an old shoe. "What is it," I asked rather dolefully.

"Eat it."

There was a choice: to eat this thing or be beaten to death.