Mom cooked for us all the time; she was what they now call a stay-at-home mom but back then was just a mom like most. Money was always tight because my mother “didn’t work” and my father was a low-ranking Air Force enlistee.
We ate Hamburger Helper at least once a week, my mother mixing two packages of the cheapest meat with one package of the mid-grade, or if we were really lucky, the good stuff. There were always flecks of bone in the meat that I had to spit out onto the side of my plate. We ate meat loaf, of course, infused with plenty of bread crumbs and with ketchup dribbled across the top, and hamburgers that as the oldest girl of four children I learned to make for my family pretty early on, a dozen hamburgers frying in an electric skillet. The key was to use Worcestershire sauce for special flavor and to douse the patties in salt and pepper. With six of us in my family, and the men of large stature and enthusiastically carnivorous, meat had to be purchased in some quantity, and frequently.
We shopped at the commissary on base where they check your ID as you enter, even before 9/11 and heightened security. We selected a cart and then followed the large arrows painted onto the floor, making each aisle effectively one-way, like the streets in most downtowns.
Shoppers were supposed to begin their trips at one end of the store and then wind their way in an orderly fashion, following the directional arrows. My mother hated to forget something because going back meant going against the stream, meeting harsh looks. After a childhood of base commissaries, I was ill-prepared for the relative anarchy of a civilian supermarket.
We loaded not just one but often two carts full of food for our family of six. Economy-sized boxes of powdered milk and cereal, sacks of flour and potatoes and pasta, a stack of ground beef slabs packaged in Styrofoam. My mother’s cigarettes, purchased there duty-free. She smoked Benson & Hedges, at night after my father went to bed. I often stayed up late with her, inhaling second-hand fumes.
Several times a week, we ate hot dogs into which a cheese substance had been injected. The cheese would squirt out of the holes, clouding the boiling water around them. We hardly ever had hot dog buns, so a slice of white bread would be wrapped around the hot dog, creating a rather unsuccessful sandwich that kept flying open whenever we put it down. There was red ketchup and bright yellow mustard. Sometimes we had Grey Poupon, which I preferred. Rarely, there was relish. Never: onions, tomatoes, lettuce. We also regularly ate Chunky Soup, which is characterized by huge chunks of meat. The most outlandish of these soups is the one called Sirloin Burger, which contains mini hamburgers, complete with fake grill marks.
With all of this meat, I was squeamish and prone to fits of distaste. I would insist on eating my fish sticks without bread or tartar sauce; I would shake Real Lemon over them and a little pepper. Often, I would eat my hamburger without a bun. I ate decidedly less than most others in my family, who ate heartily (except Mom). I studiously pulled out the bits of bone and cartilage and fat from all meat, pushing it to the side of my plate. Once, I had the flu and vomited a meal of chicken patties and was never able to eat them again. To this day, walking into a grocery store, I feel nauseated by the smell of the chicken rotisserie. I hated cheap bologna and powdered milk and any meat that came from a can and fried pork chops and especially those cheese-injected hot dogs, which I haven’t eaten since.
But there were meats I could tolerate, even love.
My mother’s chicken soup. She prepared a chicken broth flavored with onions, carrots, parsley, and celery. She added the chicken and rice and cooked it all day. It was a golden, steaming soup that she made in vast quantities in a large maize-yellow pot. The soup would last for several meals, and I did not mind the leftovers. Once I became a vegetarian and made my own onion soup, I realized that it was really just my mother’s chicken soup, sans chicken. It produces the same feeling of well-being in me.
Crock pot stew. She would get beef that had not been ground, and she would place it into the crock pot with pieces of rutabaga, potato and carrot, and she would cook this all day until the aroma filled the house, and all of the flavors had melded together. I loved rutabaga; this was the only time we ate it; and I loved the beef. She made another stew as well, in the large maize-yellow pot, and into this stew she placed dumplings made from Bisquick, which were delicious.
The only time we ate steak was when we had chop suey. If you grew up in the U.S. in the 70s and 80s, you know what I’m talking about: the green packages of Kikkoman vegetables drowning in gravy with the little can at the top full of fried noodles. I did not like these noodles, but I loved chop suey, with dousings of soy sauce and strips of steak that my mother marinated for several hours. In retrospect, I realize they were chewy and the vegetables rendered tasteless, but this was the only Asian food available to me, and at the time I thought it wonderfully exotic and healthful.
We frequently ate boil-in-the-bag slabs of beef in gravy. We cut the bags open and poured the mess on toast or mashed potatoes made from boxed flakes.
My family never went to restaurants. We were treated to a meal at McDonald’s once a year, on our birthdays, and that was it. No one we knew went out to eat with any frequency. The landscape of my childhood in the working class suburbs near military bases was punctuated by large groupings of cheap housing developments surrounded by strip malls, grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, and not much else.
The best meals were reserved for the holidays, and my mother would pull out all the stops. She would get up early to wash and stuff and begin cooking the Thanksgiving Butterball turkey. She would pare, chop, boil and then mash real potatoes by hand, creaming them with milk. She made sweet potatoes for herself and me, and we preferred not to candy them. There were also Brussels sprouts, broccoli, rolls, and gravy. She made, of course, pumpkin pie, but also sweet potato pie, which was from scratch and better-tasting. We ate Cool Whip and were not aware that this was an imitation of a more authentic dessert topping; we kids didn’t know it was supposed to approximate a dairy product.
These were the evenings we had dinner together as a family. We said grace, holding hands. We broke bread. My mother smiled; she and my father told stories. We were happy then, and all of us ate meat.
From Meat: A Memoir
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