Everyone is ethnic, right? Everyone, except Native Americans, is an immigrant.
Which is why in fourth grade my children were asked to bring to class a food that their grandparents had brought from “the old country.” The “old country” of their grandparents was the United States. With one exception, their ancestors have been from America since the 17th Century. One set of great-great-grandparents immigrated from Ireland to New Orleans in the 1850s. So I opted for soda bread and lamb stew, just about the first time I’d ever made either of them.
So what did my own mother cook? More important to me, ex-anthropologist that I am, is why she cooked what she cooked: Bolognese sauce for spaghetti and lasagna; welsh rarebit, creamed chipped beef and creamed, sliced, hard-boiled eggs on toast. She grew and served her own vegetables, and made sweet zucchini pickles. Her mother, born in Kansas City, but from a long line of New England farmers and sheep herders, gardened and put up jams and jellies, but all the meals I remember from that grand-mother's house were made by a Maryland-born Black cook.
So where did these dishes come from? Were they the product of the modernization of the family; no servants; a working woman feeding her family quickly and economically? The creamed-on-toast dishes pleased childish palates. Maybe expediency was the mother of tradition. Maybe the home gardening and canning were products of the Depression and New England tightness.
But the Bolognese? Some gene occurs in me that craves that tomato sauce as though there were a phantom Italian on the family tree. Was the secret of her Bolognese the long cooking time? Once in the course of its long simmering, I sampled it so many times the pot was almost empty at the end of the day. Now when I make it, I make too much and freeze it the extra. As would she if I hadn't eaten it all. I don’t re-use my plastic containers, as she did, because after a while, her cooking tasted of all the other things she’d cooked and frozen.
The basis for all the other creamed dishes should be roux: flour cooked in butter as a thickener, milk and cream added, and then the grated cheese, potted beef or hard-boiled eggs. I should have cooked one of these dishes for my children’s fourth grade class. Childhood is my “old country.”
Then again, my mother was a literate cook, which is to say a collector of cookbooks. Among those she collected was
The Just A Minute Cookbook by Alice Wilson Richardson. Alice Richardson was a pre World War II friend of my father, his brother and my grandmother. Alice was a “full-fledged career girl” who worked in copy-writing, editing and television.
Just a Minute included the recipes for rarebit and creamed chipped beef. Her rarebit involves melting a pound of grated cheddar in a can of cream of tomato soup, lots of Worcestershire sauce, and stirring in an egg. The chipped beef uses a can of chipped beef “frizzled” in butter and the addition of a can of cream of mushroom soup.
Alice Wilson Richardson was far from mid-century Sandra Lee. In those days, Hudson River shad was readily available, as witnessed by her menu for shad-roe and bacon. Alice’s recipe for fried chicken was good enough to be mentioned in my grandmother’s diary. My Texas born, South Carolina bred grandmother knew her fried chicken. More on that in the next installment!
