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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