Food as culture – I
My dad was a cop and a democrat. He worked shifts which rotated every three weeks or so. Police officers did not get paid much at the time so my mother worked as well. I confess to an occasional embarrassment that we were poor enough that mom had to work instead of staying home like most mothers. It never occurred to me that she might want to work rather than stay at home all day, or that she was driven to acquire bigger and better things. (We moved five times within the same town during the 17 years we lived in Wyoming.) In any case, because she worked, my father often cooked when his shift rotations allowed. He always ironed his own uniforms as well. I have a distinct memory of the ironing board set up in the living room and him ironing a work shirt while an episode of The Cisco Kid played on the big radio, sponsored by White King D laundry soap. We didn’t have a television yet. In many ways we were an anomaly in the 50’s.
Because my father cooked I had no qualms about cooking also once I was tall enough to reach the range. This was fortunate because I have always been an early morning riser, up hours before my parents on the weekends. I often cooked my own breakfast. Later, when I took to the sagebrush to hike or camp, I was always well fortified with dinner folded into a square of foil to cook over hot coals.
My father had lied about his age and joined the navy in the last year of WWII. His cuisine was defined by that experience. He cooked beans, with a hambone, or chili which he put sugar in. He had beans every Wednesday while in the service and again the next morning for breakfast, a habit he continued after the service though he did not offer it to us kids for breakfast. Waste not want not, a joint motto of the depression and the war. He also made cream chipped beef on toast, SOS is the other name, which evolved into hamburger gravy on toast when he could not find the little jars of chipped beef. I think hamburger was cheaper too. I became fascinated with the concept of gravy and its perfection early, but that is a story for another time.
The point is that I cooked without stigma because my father cooked.
When we were married, Lydia and I quickly concluded that I was to be the cook of the family. She didn’t like to cook, I did, and besides it was the 70s and we were a modern, liberated couple. I confess that I had a limited repertoire and to avoid total culinary boredom, I had to learn new dishes. Lyd’s friends had made her a cookbook of recipes glued into a spiral notebook, which we still have thank you very much, and she had a card file box of recipes from her high school Home Ec. Class, a requirement for female students at that point in time. These became my dinner go-to source for ideas until her mom gave me her copy of The Joy of Cooking, for which I was humbled and thankful. Mom Robinson accepted that I was the cook without any questions and role modeled how to change left overs into marvelous meals. (The depression and its mind set strikes again). Expanding my expertise involved a significant exploration of new techniques and often resulted in less than perfect results. We were poor students with little money for tossing away my mistakes. We made a verbal agreement that I would continue to learn new recipes, but that we would agree to eat, however half-heartedly, the product of my learning. On more than one occasion, dinner was cereal or popcorn when the results were less than desirable.
Every family has a cuisine of their own, little variations and nuances that are particular to their own home. We always had bread on the table and much to Lydia’s amazement, even when potatoes were present! Lydia’s family did not serve bread at meals unless rolls were present on a special occasion. For an after school snack she and her brother had macaroni with ketchup. I’ve seen them eat pickles at breakfast. None of this was any stranger than my dad’s sugar on his chili, or my occasional fried onion sandwiches. It was just the culture.
So it was that after we were married, we often took turns making sandwiches. When it was present, Lydia would make her sandwich with the “heel” of the loaf, the end piece that was all crust on one side. In response, I always made hers with the heel as she had, even though I really preferred to have the heel as part of my own sandwich. We continued in this way for years before I discovered that she disliked the heel tremendously, thought its only purpose was to keep the rest of the loaf moist, and only used it for her sandwich because she assumed that I too did not like it. She was being sweet to me by eating it and I, in turn was being sweet to her by giving it up! It was a little thing, yet had we only known, highly ironic. A misguided effort at showing our care for each other.