Today I’d like to get back to the purpose of this blog: memories. Yes, I know, the recent ones are just as valid, just as much a part of me, but I’m trying to capture those memories that are unknown to my son, my daughter, my nieces, my nephew, and all of their children.
Anyhow, today is about food. I imagine that I’ll do more than one blog entry about food, maybe even include more recipes, but this one is about how the foods available to me changed over the years.
Growing up in Middletown, mealtimes were fairly predictable. Usually we had meat, potatoes, and a vegetable for our biggest meal of the day. On Sunday’s that big meal was at dinnertime (noon — what most people call lunch). Weekdays we had the bigger meal for supper (5:00 on the nose). We ate all types of meat: beef, chicken, pork, fish, turkey for special occasions, and sometimes game of some sort (when my Dad was going through his hunting phase). Veggies were simple: corn (the only one I liked), peas, lima beans, cooked carrots, and every now and then, Brussel sprouts. Funny — my Dad’s favorite vegetable is broccoli, but I don’t remember having it while I was growing up. We also seldom had salads, unless you count lettuce with bacon dressing, which we only had with pot pie.
Pot pie? We usually had it with chicken, though baked beef pot pie was a real event. Later in life I also came across ham pot pie, which is equally tasty. I’m not talking about this:
Though a good chicken pie (note the difference: Chicken. Pie.) is welcome, that was something Mom took out of the freezer when in a pinch. The real thing took hours of work and home-made noodles. It looked more like this:
There were usually leftovers, which meant fried pot pie — the only way to re-heat it. Nowadays, leftovers can be heated in the microwave and taste pretty true to first day. This is a PA Dutch meal and traditionally served with lettuce with hot bacon dressing (also known as wilted lettuce salad):
PA Dutch seemed to be the way we went with special foods. On New Year’s Day we needed to eat a special meal for good luck the year through: pork and sauerkraut.
Of course, I liked this better as leftovers because that’s when we had it with nep (dumplings).
And another of my favorite childhood meals, hog maw:
It’s a pig’s stomach, stuffed with sausage and potatoes and then baked. The stuffing is delicious, but we ate the stomach (the maw) as well. Parts of the stomach were crispy while others were chewy — something for everyone. There were other PA Dutch foods, like scrapple, but I didn’t really like that and it wasn’t required eating (most meals were).
Of course, we didn’t consider that as eating ethnic food. In fact, we didn’t eat ethnic food, though we occasionally had chili or spaghetti. Those were just things we ate, probably because they were cheap.
The reason we didn’t eat “foreign” foods: they just weren’t available. I remember going to my friend Paula’s house when I was about twelve. She was Catholic and of Polish descent. That didn’t bother me but at suppertime (which they called dinner) I found out how different that really was. It was a Friday, so no meat. Really. No meat at the main meal of the day. The whole Friday/no meat thing made no sense to me, but I had grown up reading about everything the Kennedy family did while in the White House, so that made it okay. But the food they brought out. . . Pierogies, filled with either sauerkraut or potatoes and cheese. I’d never heard of this, but I tried them and found that they were quite tasty.
Now things are quite different. I’m not living in the Middletown of my childhood, where most people were from Germanic backgrounds, with a few Italian or Slavic — and the one Jewish family down the street. I imagine that Middletown has changed, with a little more diversity, but I’m living in the DC metro area. Unless I stay in my apartment, I hear several languages each day. Even staying in I can occasionally hear one of my neighbors on the landing and they seldom speak English.
And I work with some lovely ladies of diverse backgrounds, born in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Morocco, Ghana, several Central or South American countries.
I never know what I’ll be eating.
Bread. It may look like a cookie, but it’s actual bread with fruit filling. This is from South America.
Vegetable curry with chick peas, rice, and a hard-cooked egg. Sri Lanka.
Suman. Rice and coconut milk wrapped in banana leaves. Philippines.
Bhel puri. Puffed rice, veggies, cilantro. Indian.
These are the types of things that I eat each day. I never know what will appear on my desk: it might be a taro roll, a cupcake, or one of the above. Yes, all of those were gifts to me.
And I eat them, though I grew up with simple, predictable fare.
On my own, my tastes have changed as well. I cooked tonight (something that doesn’t always happen — I tend to try to keep things simple). Not pot pie or even chicken pie. Nope. Chicken korma. And it was delicious.
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