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.
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