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In Shelbyville, Tennessee in the 1940’s the Trolinger
family would not have been considered poor, but then certainly not rich
either. Most of my childhood friends were roughly “in the same boat”, with
a few better and a few worse
off. Our family almost always ate three meals together, except for daddy,
who commonly came in too late from work to eat supper with us. Although
we never went hungry, food standards were drastically different then, and
my family
stuck to a fairly rigid, predictable diet. The cost of an upscale
restaurant meal today, even after taking inflation into account,
would have fed my family for a month, maybe more.
We had hamburgers on Saturday night, fried chicken on Sunday and mostly
beans, potatoes, and fresh baked bread the rest of the week. When daddy
came in late at night, his meal consisted of standing and eating the
slightly warm beans
right out of the big pot still sitting on the stove.
Mother was using Hamburger Helper many years before it was a product. A
pound of hamburger meat, mixed with enough flour and corn meal, produced
two, somewhat crunchy, hamburgers each for the entire family of six. My
first “bought”hamburger was a greasy, mushy disappointing experience for
me. It had a very strange unfamiliar texture, and I never liked “bought”
burgers as well as the ones we ate at home. Even when McDonalds finally
took root everywhere, my impression was that the Big Mac inventor should
have consulted mother to make this thing palatable.
Breakfasts sometimes included eggs with bacon or ham much of which came
from my grand parent’s farm. Partially carved, salt cured hams and
shoulders hung in the open air on our back porch year round. The Sunday
meal was more like a reward we got for attending church with mother, and I
always looked forward to the fried chicken, which came fresh from our back
yard. There was no such thing as left over chicken. A breast was reserved
for daddy whether he was present or not, mother ate the back and neck
(supposedly her favorite pieces), and the kids divided the thighs,
drumsticks, and wings. While we thought we were lucky that mother’s
favorite pieces were the ones none of us wanted, only later did it dawn on
me that the real luck was having an amazing, fibbing, angel for a mother.
I thought she must have some secret hidden way of coaxing the extra taste
out of these very bony pieces. Perhaps a loving mother’s seeing her
children eat the best pieces really does make the bony pieces delicious.
Only a mother would
know.
When it came to dessert, the ever present family ritual was started by
whoever cleaned his plate first. With the gusto of an academy award winner
he would ask, “What’s for dessert?” Then everyone would look at mother,
knowing in advance exactly how she would respond. And we all laughed
together when she said, “Get yourself another helping of beans.” The
loving ritual still made us laugh even after a thousand repetitions.
Mother baked cookies, cakes, and pies, but those were reserved for Sunday
or special occasions. She created a few really special desserts that were
unlike any thing I have had since then. The most memorable of these were
fried
peach turnover pies made scratch from fresh peaches picked from two trees
in our back yard. She would serve these jewels steaming hot, right out of
the skillet, and you had to wait for it to cool to eat it. Oh, my God, was
it wonderful!
Sometimes on Saturdays, my granddaddy, Onman, would come to town to sell
honey on the Shelbyville square. He would find a parking spot near the
square, open the trunk of his 49 Oldsmobile, and sell jars of honey right
out of the
trunk. Coming to town, shopping, and hanging out around the square was a
ritual for many people, so there were always crowds of potential customers
for his honey, and he usually sold out by noon. Then he would show up at
our house for lunch. The added benefit to the kids was that our meal would
be a step up from beans and bread and would always include a dessert since
Onman had a sweet tooth. He loved ice cream, and mother would splurge and
serve it for dessert. Ice cream was a rare treat in my early years.
Candy and sweets, in general, were rare treats reserved for truly special
times. One of the most exciting features of Christmas, even as exciting as
the gifts, were the bowls of candy, fruits, cakes, and sweets sitting
around in unlimited quantities for almost the entire day, the only day of
the year with such a privilege. The location of Christmas in the house
added elegance to the whole event. Our living and dining rooms, which,
although making up a full third
of the floor space in the house, were closed off and unheated to save
money, except for special occasions. They were like a different, more
elegant house, and sitting before a warm, open fireplace in this formal,
somewhat strange and different, usually taboo, room surrounded by gifts
and candy was a one day a year visit to heaven.
My grandmother, Mattie, was a legendary cook, and few times a year she
would put on a feast at their country home. These were special events, not
just meals. The big farmhouse was filled with wonderful aromas and
especially the kitchen, where she cooked on a wood fired stove, was hot
and smoky and wonderful with a table covered with elegant preparations. It
seemed like flour was on every surface and all over grandmother.
The meal was served in the dining room on a huge table that was completely
covered with bowls of food, including chicken and sometimes a second meat,
four or five different vegetables, sauces, fruits, pickled things, slaw,
potato
salad, deviled eggs, tomatoes, salads, and multiple kinds of bread. Most
of these dishes came right out of her garden. With no limits on how much
we could eat, I always ate until I was in pain. The meal included not one,
but several, out of this world pies and cakes and sometimes home made ice
cream. For an hour after the meal the kids lay around in pain from eating
way too much. I never had this problem with the normal, beans and bread
meals.
Fast food had not yet been invented. It would be many years before
McDonalds would hit the scene. Fast food entered my life during mother’s
shopping trips to Nashville. The eating ritual, my own highlight of the
trip, included
gobbling up four tiny, $.12 Krystal hamburgers. I think I loved the very
first one I ever ate. The Krystal was a tiny place by today’s standard,
just wide enough, about 15 feet, for a counter and a single row of counter
stools, no tables; about 50 feet deep; it could seat about 20 people at a
time, and it was always packed. This was to me the greatest restaurant
ever invented.
We would enter the Krystal and take a position behind someone already at a
stool eating. I didn’t mind waiting because I loved watching the chef
turning out thousands of square hamburgers on a large grill facing the
wall directly
behind the counter. He would take a foot long block of burgers from the
freezer, spread them across the hot grill in a cloud of steam and begin
turning them almost immediately. He followed this with a spread of onions
that raised yet
another cloud of steam complementing the meat smell and stimulating my
hunger more than ever. These guys could scoop up and flip four or five
burgers at a time then simultaneously cover all of them with buns. A
continuous stream of burgers came off the grill and within a short while,
almost starving by now, we would grab the seats in front of us as they
were vacated.
Our diet was very simple. Except for Saturday and Sunday I ate exactly the
same thing almost every day. A huge pot of beans would last several days
and by the time it was finished the beans had been reduced to more of a
mush. School lunches added a little variety to this but not much. It was
also simple, including a lot of beans, potatoes, macaroni, and other
simple vegetables like yams and carrots.
While the diets of the 40’s would not win a health contest, almost no one
struggled with being overweight. Nobody talked about dieting. We didn't
need to diet. We didn’t need diet cokes and low fat milk. My school
classes often had one chubby kid in the lot and a lot of skinny ones. I
was one of the skinny ones.
Today, I eat out a lot and, unlike all of my kids, I think that the food
as well as the ambiance is always much better at home. When I do eat out
and the waiter comes near the end to ask who wants dessert I am always
tempted to say to
him, “bring me another helping of beans”.
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