Modern Food

I've been looking at some of the 1950's cookbooks I own. Some are well thumbed, like my mother's "German Cookbook", from which she prepared alledgedly Swiss cuisine - she was born in Luzern - because she really did not have a clue as to how to cook when she met my father who was stationed in Germany. And, being the discriminating gourmet that he was, he never knew the difference.

Every dinner in my childhood consisted of a hunk of meat (usually cooked to a hockey-puck like tenderness), a starch (potatoes or rice, but mostly potatoes) and one over-boiled green something or yellow something - or turnips. My father loved turnips. Personally, I have spent the decades since moving out avoiding anything turnip or turnip-like. My mother always makes them for Thanksgiving, and I try to sit upwind and look the other way as they pass by me. Sometimes there would be a pile of canned, sliced beets garnished with a lump of butter. No margarine in Dad's house.

Beef was almost always chuck steak, the kind with the big globs of delicious, oily, burnt fat on the outside. (After my mother's cooking, the only part that was still chewable. Chicken was for Sunday and barbeques outside in the summer - or, cooked in the lovely tomatoe sauce made with Spatini sauce mix and two cans of tomatoe paste until the meat had sort of disolved and fallen from the bones into the sauce. And then there was Hasenpfeffer, a roast Mom also made on Sundays a couple of times a year. It was one of the few things that actually was never overcooked, but watched like a hawk until it was perfect. We all loved it, with the slightly vinegary gravy and carrots that fell apart into morsels of wonderful tenderness.

And then Mom got a real refridgerator to replace the Kelvinator that she had been given as a wedding present for her first appartment. This one had a freezer that made ice cubes, as opposed to the little tin box in the top center of the old one, that would keep a quart of ice cream and two trays of water semi-solid as long as no one opened the door too much.

And with the new refridgerator and freezer came a journey to the frozen foods aisle of the A&P and Shop-rite.

And then there was the Sunday that Mom asked me to take out the meat for the hasenpfeffer.

And I discovered it still had little furry feet left on by the butcher. To my credit, I did not tell my siblings, and I ate it. Eventually, my sister found out - and that was the end of hasenpfeffer on Sundays.

If we had hamburgers at home, they were always made "German-style", meaning containing minced onion and breadcrumbs or crackers and an egg. They were charcoal black and crusty, and about a third the size of the raw meat by the time Mom got done with them. You could use them as a weapon if the other siblings got on your nerves, and we did, too. They also came in handy if you had a stubborn front tooth that was wiggling but not quite out yet, and the Little Rascals thing of tying a string around it and the other end to a doorknob while slamming the door was too daunting to try.

So here I sit, fanning through pages of artfully arranged pastel plastic plates, ganished with bright red tomatoes and little poofy dabs of fluffy white stuff that could be mayo, or whipped cream, or Marshmellow Fluff. There is usually a glass of transparent liquid on a coaster, and a bunch of shiney bright thingies to fill up the empty table space.

The reality was that if there was something fluffy and white on the plate either Mom made whipped mashed potatoes for the starch requirement, or she was doing her nails while cooking, and put the cotton ball down for a minute. The potatoes did taste better, tho.