A Childhood Remembrance of Food

Talking to my brother in Colorado on our weekly Skype call this morning, brought back a lot of childhood memories for both of us. It was interesting to talk about things that we both remembered or even if just one of us did. We spent some time talking about food.

We both remembered some of our “favorite” dinner meals. Pop didn’t like spaghetti so we didn’t eat much of it even though Mom was Italian. Not until she began to substitute deer meat for the hamburger in the sauce. Then we ate it quite often.

We both remembered fried shrimp and homemade French fires both cooked in a fryer with hot oil. Nothing better!

Of course, we lots of chicken. I ate the breasts. My brother ate the wings. Mom ate the legs and thighs. Pop ate a little of all those and everything else – neck, gizzard, liver etc. Remember he grew up on a farm during the Depression with 12 siblings.

We also ate salmon patties quite often. They were from the can and always had some bones, so you had to be careful. We also ate store bought fish sticks, but no other fish except at Christmas.

Of course, we boys always drank milk. Our parents would drink coffee. And Pop always had a small plate next to his dinner plate that had about 4 slices of white bread – there wasn’t really any other kind back then – and some butter. He ate that with his meal, sopping up the juice or sauce.

We ate steak sometimes, usually T-bone, but more often pork chops. I hated the pork, but my brother loved it. Mom would cook the fat until it was crispy and he loved that.

Mine was still too rubbery and I would cut it all off leaving about a quarter of an inch of meat all around the fat. It didn’t leave much for me to eat. Pop would always yell at me that I was wasting food. But then he would feed it to the beagles so it didn’t go to waste.

Remembering school lunches, my brother said he told Mom once that he like bologna and mustard, so after that, he never got any other kind of sandwich. I must have been smarter because my sandwiches rotated between bologna and PB&J.

In high school, we carried them in paper lunch bags and kept them in our lockers – no cold storage back then – until lunch. We’d buy milk. We’d usually have cookies; Mom was a good baker. Fruit was unknown for lunch. 

(Cambria 12)