Along the same theme as my earlier post on food's centrality in family and culture, here's a look at food rituals and recipes getting passed down from the patrilineal line this time. One of my Facebook friends surmised that "Hunter's Delight," a dish that does not actually contain the meat of a hunted animal, might be so named because it's a dish you'd serve to someone who'd been out walking around and hunting all day. She's probably right....
My paternal grandmother ate an awful fiber cereal each morning and expected me and my siblings to do the same. We sat in her breakfast nook trying to choke down All-Bran while listening to Amway tapes, which she thought would give us ideas about future career ambitions. Her name was Marcella, which my sister and I decided sounded like the name of one of Cinderella’s evil step-sisters. She hated our mother, and we were always hearing from her about Mom’s imperfections and from Mom about Grandma’s nastiness. She thought our father, her youngest child, was a man-god, perfect in every way. Probably no woman was good enough for him although she seemed to think several of the girls he went to high school with who’d stayed in Rhinelander would have been far better choices than Mom. She was a big-boned woman, healthy and intimidating in stature and timbre, like Bea Arthur. She had very particular ideas about nutrition, the bran cereal just one manifestation. She baked a wheat bread laden with walnuts that I actually thought was delicious; I could not get enough of that bread. Much to my brother’s dismay, she insisted that the only way to make hamburgers was by adding Lipton’s onion soup mix to the ground beef. My brother despised onions but loved hamburgers; he was apoplectic at the way she ruined them. My father, who normally would object to the addition of Lipton’s onion soup mix in the ground beef, quietly went along. He quietly went along with anything his mother did or said.
In Rhinelander, there is snow on the ground from September till May, and people hunt wild animals. We were always receiving Christmas cards with enclosed photographs of a moose or deer strung up by its mouth as if hung from the back of a tow truck hook. I think they might actually have been tow trucks. Someone would bag a moose, and then there would be wild meat of different sizes and shapes wrapped in white paper in the basement freezer. Everyone had a basement freezer for this purpose.
One summer, we all went up to Rhinelander, and my sister and I brought a boyfriend and friend along. The adults had something else to do, so Grandma hosted all six of us kids for dinner, and she served deer stew. I was a staunch vegetarian by then, and although she balked at doing so, I got her to cook a pot of vegetables for me that was untouched by deer flesh. There was also her wonderful bread, so I knew I would not go hungry. Everyone else was to eat the deer stew, but my boyfriend, who had no qualms about eating other kinds of meat, refused to eat it. He complained rudely that he would “not eat Bambi.” He acted as if my family’s long practice of hunting deer was barbaric.
His reaction is even funnier in light of the fact that one day, a deer ran through the alley behind our house in Belleville, Illinois. Out of the woodwork came every redneck with a gun and a flatbed pickup within a five-mile radius, including my boyfriend’s brother. It was his brother who shot and took home the deer. I’m not sure why a deer running through the alley should set off alarms and be instantly killed, but that was the general reaction among everyone on the street, that the animal should need to be killed. The only question was who would get to it first.
From Meat: A Memoir.
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Posted by: Monster Energy Hats | 07/12/2011 at 02:03 AM