Tasting Christmas

 

I don’t know why people seem to feel I am the right person to ask questions of in the grocery store.  As the old saying goes, “you are driving your ducks to a poor pond” when you ask me things related to cooking.  I was studying the dairy cooler Sunday afternoon when a charming young lady asked me if I thought she would like eggnog.  Actually what she first asked was if eggnog is good. 

I said something about it being good if you like it and that’s when she asked if I thought she would like it.  From there, the conversation disintegrated into an attempt to explain to her what eggnog tastes like.  How do you explain what something tastes like to someone who never tasted it?  I first tried to compare it to boiled custard but with nutmeg, but it turned out she had never had boiled custard either.  Where did this child grow up?  And what is she doing in a small rural town in Middle Tennessee where boiled custard is as much a part of holiday meals as turkey and dressing?  I finally asked if she liked vanilla pudding because it was a little like that but more liquid and with nutmeg.  She said she likes banana pudding and that she also likes cinnamon.  I didn’t know how to compare cinnamon to nutmeg and we finally ended up agreeing that it would be nice if they would give out little samples of eggnog so people could decide if they liked it enough to buy it.  I moved on to the next part of the store, totally forgetting what I had been looking for in the dairy case.

It did make me wonder, though, about food and how it tastes to different people and how someone discovered it in the first place. I mean, someone had to make the first batch of eggnog.  I remember thinking at Thanksgiving how dressing was invented.  If you try to describe how it’s made, I’m not sure it sounds all that delightful.  Who figured out that you could take crumbled up cornbread, add celery and onions and sage, pour turkey broth all over it and bake it in the oven?  I don’t even want to think about who decided it was a good idea to stuff it inside the turkey and add stuff like fruit, nuts, oysters, or chili peppers.  I kid you not, I saw a recipe back before Thanksgiving that said to add some hot peppers to your dressing.  My family would not be amused.  Then there was the post on Facebook about mixing up your dressing without cooking the cornbread first, just putting the onions, celery and spices into the raw batter and cooking the whole thing at once.  Do people really do that?

Years ago, I went to a week-long writer’s conference in upstate New York.  They had a gourmet chef providing our meals and most of them were wonderful.  They did have some odd things on the table, the most notable being a cracked-wheat salad.  It was as if someone had gone down to my daddy’s grain bin, scooped up a pan full of wheat, mixed in a bunch of herbs and spices and put it on the table.  It appeared two days in a row at lunch – I’m not sure anyone ever ate any of it.  And of course, they didn’t cook their green beans. Then there were the friends from New York who came to a meal at my house and had apparently never seen corn on the cob, squash or okra and only ate the fruit salad and rolls.  They might have tried the pork chops but one of my local friends helpfully explained to them that the pigs they were made from came right off my farm. 

For the most part, our holiday meals don’t hold many surprises.  Sometimes someone will try out a new recipe, but the ingredients are ordinary things like cranberries, broccoli, potatoes or corn. 

One year my uncle brought barbeque to Christmas dinner, and from something that was said, we all assumed it was deer.  I didn’t eat any, but several people did and toward the end of the meal, my aunt remarked to him that his deer was good.  From the look on his face, she realized that there was something he hadn’t told us.  “That’s not deer, is it?” she asked.  “What is it?”  My uncle grinned and replied, “It’s coon.”  That moment is right up there with the time I made a broccoli salad and the same aunt was eating it and found one of those fat rubber bands in her portion.  I know where it came from – the broccoli stems were held together in the package with rubber bands – but I have no idea how it ended up in the salad.  Come to think of it, hot peppers in the dressing might not surprise my family all that much. 

One of the things I really miss about Christmas dinners is my great aunt’s scalloped oysters.  It’s the only way I will eat oysters at all and then only for that one meal out of the year.  The recipe was my great grandmother’s and a tradition on Christmas morning when my grandmother and her sisters were growing up.  I suppose the recipe is somewhere around here, but I will never get the courage to try to make it.  It was at her house I was introduced to asparagus, too, and my mama and I loved it so much we tried to start an asparagus bed one spring.  It was short lived experiment. We built a frame, filled it with dirt, and ordered plants.  We planted it upside down and even though we figured it out a few days later and turned them right side up, the plants didn’t survive.  I’m not sure we ever mentioned growing asparagus again.

Next week we will gather for Christmas dinner and everyone will bring their usual offerings.  I’m in charge of the corn and the peas and I might make an asparagus casserole.  There will be turkey and dressing, without any exotic additives, country ham and sweet potatoes and all the usual dishes. I don’t think anyone will bring any barbeque coon and I know the dressing will be made the traditional Southern way.  I don’t know where the young lady I talked to at the store will be eating Christmas dinner, but I hope someone has some eggnog there and she can find out whether or not she likes it.

 

Playing "White Christmas"

 

I was going through some sheet music the other day and ran across a worn and fragile copy of "White Christmas."  I had to sit down for a minute to pick out the melody and enjoy a spell of remembering.  The only memory I really have of ever playing the piano at my great grandmother’s house was of playing this song from this very piece of music. 

I don’t know why that memory is so clear, but I can just see my little self, feet swinging and slowly stumbling through the notes while my grandmother smiled proudly and my great grandmother nodded her head.  My great grandmother Colley, Fannie Tate, was famous for saying to her young daughters when they tried to demur from playing for guests on that very piano, “Don’t say you can’t play; get up there and show us you can’t play.”  That thought might have been going through her mind the day I played "White Christmas" because I could not have been very far along with my piano lessons.  Actually, I probably don’t play it much better now than I did then because my piano playing is mediocre on my very best day. 

I have other memories of my great grandmother’s house in town.  She lived just off the square, in a small white frame house with a wide screened in front porch.  Growing up in a big drafty farmhouse, it seemed quite a modern house to me, with beautiful furniture and lovely pictures and knick-knacks to inspect.  Fancy candy dishes held wonderful treats and there were always cookies in the kitchen.  Best of all to a little girl, it had carpet in the living room, where that little girl could turn summersaults and tumble around without touching a cold, hard floor.  “Ma-Ma” as I called her, held court in a wingback chair, unless her youngest daughter, who was known to the world as Minnie Pearl, was on television, at which time she left whoever was visiting to sit in the dining room in front of the tv set and watch.  Her eyesight was pretty bad for as long as I can remember, and she sat about twelve inches from the screen, hands folded in her lap and smiling at the jokes she had heard a hundred times.

Ma-Ma was an accomplished musician, having graduated from Price’s College for Young Ladies with a degree in music.  She played at the Centerville Methodist Church and for every major event around Centerville during her younger days.  Her five daughters played piano, practicing on the big upright piano that now sits in my living room.  My grandmother followed in her footsteps, playing piano at our little country church in Shipps Bend and for various events around town.  I found out just a few years ago that she taught music for a while at the Shady Grove school and that she played piano in a popular band in Centerville as a teenager.  She played from printed notes, but she also played by ear, a talent I did not inherit and wish I had.  I’m sure the people at my church wish I was more accomplished, having suffered through my efforts to play hymns off and on throughout the years when we didn’t have a better pianist.

She also rode horses in her childhood, competing in horse shows all around the area and bringing home blue ribbons on a regular basis.  She bragged that she had a beau in every town she rode in and I don’t doubt it.  She was a Southern belle in every sense of the word, it seems.  But she chose love with a childhood friend who was 17 years older than she was.  He waited for her to grow up and finish school before bringing her from Franklin to Centerville, which must have been quite a shock, with its muddy streets and lack of the sophisticated social life she was accustomed to. 

When I was a child, I remember thinking she and all my great aunts and cousins were so sophisticated when they came to visit, with their city clothes and shoes and jewelry.  Ophelia kept her mother in nice clothes and hats and trinkets, and she was always dressed up.  I’m sure she would be horrified at my appearance in my sweatpants and oversized flannel shirts and I don’t even want to imagine what she would think of the music I listen to now.  I barely remember this, but I have heard stories all my life of how she would walk uptown every day, crossing the busy highway that led off the square, to eat lunch at Breece’s Café and to go to the post office for her mail.  As she grew older and her sight was failing, everyone worried about her crossing the streets, but she never was concerned.  She was vain enough not to want people to know she couldn’t see well.  The last few years she played organ at the Methodist Church, she would put the book up on the stand just as if she was using it to play.  Some people reported that half the time it was upside down, but no one ever pointed it out to her.  She hated to lose at bridge, and her daughters would cheat and let her win at their weekly bridge games.  Except Aunt Virginia, who refused to let her win and complained that the others spoiled her too much.  Aunt Virginia, even more than the other girls, inherited an independent spirit from her mother.  Once a visiting preacher at a revival delivered a scathing sermon on the evils of playing cards.  At the sermon’s close, he exhorted all the young ladies who played cards to come down to the altar and repent.  A group of tearful teens obeyed his call, but Aunt Virginia kept her seat.  She said she wasn’t about to stop playing cards and neither were they and they were just being dishonest to say they were.  I never asked what her mother had to say about it.  I imagine she was on Virginia’s side – she wasn’t about to stop playing bridge either!   Ma Ma’s husband said, during his lifetime, that she was the belle of Franklin and she never stopped ringing.  From my memories of her and the stories her daughters told, I expect he was right!

Thanksgiving Night

 

Thanksgiving night is one of my favorite times.  Too tired to do anything other than sit by the fire.  The dogs are worn out too – they had too much company and too many scraps from the Thanksgiving table.  They are sprawled all over the living room, Sophie in her spot near the fire, Carli in her favorite spot behind the couch and the others sleeping wherever they happened to drop.

We had twenty people for dinner, a dozen around the big dining room table that has held unthinkable numbers of family and friends over at least a century of use. Four generations were at the table. It was good to see the house filled with family again; it’s a house intended for large gatherings.  A second table in the living room held some of the younger bunch – young couples just starting their lives together, with two of those couples about to become three by this time next year.   The dogs, when they made it inside, were well-behaved for the most part, although Scout kept scouting the table and countertops for accessible food. There was lots of talk, lots of laughter, an indecent amount of food and memories sprinkled with plans for the future. It was good to have the house full of people.  I tend to get so used to rattling around in this big house alone, I forget what it was like growing up in a full house. One of my cousins took the cradle that my great-great grandfather made not long after the Civil War.  It's been sitting in my back room since it was last used by him when he was a baby. His baby will be the sixth generation to lie in the cradle.

There was no real drama with the food this year, unless you count my meat thermometer breaking at the critical moment for testing the turkey and a nagging worry that it might not be done when I took it out of the oven.  The normal worry about the rolls, compounded by a recent failure with the last batch I made.  A little uncertainty about the dressing – did I add enough sage, or too much sage, or the right amount of celery and onion?  My mama never had a written down recipe for her dressing and I wish I had asked for more details about how much of everything she used.  I doubt she knew herself.   It’s one of those things you have to guess at.  Or as a meme I’ve read says, “Just keep adding stuff until the ghost of an ancestor says, that’s enough.”  My ancestors are not very reliable at helping in the kitchen so I’m mostly on my own.  But the turkey was done, a ten-pound breast is enough for twenty people when you also have ham, the dressing was pretty good, although I have to remember to buy a really large bowl to mix it in before next time.  My hint for the day is that the cover of a large cake carrier makes a pretty good mixing bowl in a pinch!

I bought paper plates with pretty Thanksgiving decorations on them, fully intending to use them this year.  But at the last minute, I gathered up the china and crystal and set it out.  It took all my mama’s and my great grandmother’s plates, all the heavy Fostoria glasses that were mine and my mama’s, and what seemed like every piece of silver in the house.  There is something gratifying about eating off the same plates my family has eaten from since before I was even born, and washing up is really not that big a chore when you have memories for company.  As I hand wash my great grandmother's fragile plates, I wondered how on earth it survived through the decades of use by a bunch of farm boys!  She was an intimidating woman, if my vague memory is correct - I guess they knew to be careful under her watchful eye. As I washed my grandmother’s ornate silver, I wondered why on earth I don’t use it all the time – what am I saving it for?  When she was alive, we used it every day, for all three meals.  Maybe I will leave it out of its wooden chest this time and enjoy it.

Along about dark, putting all reason aside, I made a plate of leftovers and ate by the fire.  I don’t know why people complain about leftover food at Thanksgiving – I think it tastes better when you’ve had a little time to relax after the hustle of the big meal.  The dogs had already enjoyed their plates of leftovers and were quiet and peaceful, even the one puppy still waiting to go home with his new family.  Leftover food, echoes of familiar laughter, leftover gratitude for a blessed life.  That’s the one leftover we could all use more of – giving thanks every day for the lives we enjoy.  For life itself, for the sunrise and sunset, for birdsong and the night sky, for music and paintings and good books to read.  For family and friends and the sharing of good times and the comfort in bad times.  Saying thank you every morning is a good way to start the day, and saying thank you every night is a perfect way to end the day.  You really don’t need the turkey to make it Thanksgiving!