This week’s prompt inspires food writing, and is a favorite of mine. Ever since I published my memoir cookbook, Kitchen Inheritance, I’ve been dabbling with food writing, and planning food writing workshops. Past participants know that my workshops and retreats always involve food, from the meals we share together on week-long retreats, to the snacks and various DeLorenzo Desserts I put on the table at our live weekly workshop.
Let’s begin with this week’s quote, from Oscar Wilde.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives.
Wilde’s humorous quote connects nicely to today’s prompt, and is also a nod to the piece I wrote in response to my mother’s cooking during the 1970’s. The prompt is a short section from the cookbook, Almost Vegetarian, by Diana Shaw (the link here is to Thrift Books, which is a business I’d love you to support). I’ve recorded the prompt rather than posting the copy, because I often read prompts out loud; I find our response to listening to a prompt rather than reading one is quite different.
You can listen to the prompt below. What I wrote follows, along with a poem “Strawberries,” by Paul Martin.
What I wrote in response:
“Christopher,” my mother used to say when I was ten or eleven, “don’t say you hate something. Say you strongly dislike it.” She was studying early childhood then, working as a preschool teacher, and was constantly practicing her new mediation skills on me. She also started saying, “I always love you, but I don’t always like you.”
“Fine,” I often said in response, “I strongly dislike you right now.” That got me a little smack on the butt.
Big deal.
The fact that I was a smart ass wasn’t her fault; I blame it on my older siblings, and the way we all clamored for attention in a big family, the way we wanted to stand out. Mama only put up with so much griping and tattling though. She taught us not to be so self-focused.
One place she gave up the fight though, was cooking. She had five kids, so trying to please us and keep us well fed was a struggle. We ate a lot of meat: beef lasagna, meat balls with spaghetti, pork ribs. She rarely cooked fish, since most of us didn’t like it, and I can’t remember her ever cooking rice either. The staples were: bread, pasta, meat, with the occasional vegetable, mostly frozen. “Frozen is second best to fresh!” she used to say, unloading white plastic bags of Bird’s Eye from the paper grocery bags, and stacking them on the white wire freezer shelves. Frozen vegetables were a revelation for her: crinkly fried potatoes, sliced green beans, and my favorite: broccoli with cheddar cheese sauce.
Looking back, I realize what a picky eater I was as a kid. I didn’t like anything green at all (I just could not wrap my mind around the concept of eating spinach until I was about thirteen), so the frequency with which she got me to consume broccoli with cheese sauce may have been solely responsible for any vitamins and minerals I ingested from the age of five to thirteen. I also loved sweet potatoes (with brown sugar, of course) and carrots, though they had to be overcooked and drowned in butter (most likely margarine back then). Other than that, it was white bread, peanut butter and jelly, bologna sandwiches, cheese pizza, and Kraft macaroni and cheese from a box.
Years later, when Mama got sick and Pop became the family cook, I came to realize how poorly we had eaten most of our lives. I mean, there was always plenty of food, and fast food was not a big part of our family meals—though Mama loved Burger King, and what she always referred to as their “burger whopper with special sauce”—but we ate a lot of nutritionally poor convenience foods at home: hot dogs and processed lunch meat, potato chips, cornbread from a mix. Initially, I had to beg Mama to buy Wonder Bread, that doughy, wet, processed sandwich bread, but she always gave in. It was the same with the sugary breakfast cereal, like Captain Crunch Peanut Butter and the overly sweet Lucky Charms, with those artificially colored pastel moons and stars that dissolved in your mouth like cotton candy.
We obviously didn’t have the healthiest diet, but our family meals together were relaxed, lively and playful. So many of my friends describe years of stern parents, stressful family dinners, and being forced to eat foods they hated simply because they were “good for them.” That wasn’t the case in my family. And I’m aware now how Mama included me while grocery shopping, how I felt what I liked to eat actually mattered. Decades have passed since she’s been gone, but those memories of eating and shopping with her—and eating her mostly processed food—still remain so sweet. Comforting indeed.
Strawberries
by Paul Martin
It’s ripe strawberries that bring me
to my knees in the garden this morning,
impossibly big and red as those
on the covers of gardening magazines in January
and almost as sweet as the small wild ones
my brother and I picked up on Best’s Hill,
eating more than we dropped into the coffee cans
our mother fitted with wire handles.
If a cloud moved across that blue sky
casting a shadow, I didn’t notice,
the snakes we were warned about
never appeared, and who could see,
even in that brilliant light,
beyond the quiet hills all the way to Vietnam
and the war he’d carry back with him.
Heads down we browsed through the field
until we were filled and drowsy,
sprawled next to each other in the warm grass,
juice smeared across our T-shirts,
our mouths and hands.