If it’s Sunday, I must be thinking about food. Ever since I was a little girl, Sundays were for one thing and one thing only: making bets on how soon after lunch Mama passed out from her highballs. I kid my mother. She waited till right after dinner to pass out.
No seriously, Mama may have devoted Sundays to Jack Daniels, but she also had her priorities straight. Starting on Saturday afternoons, she would take out the latest issue of Gourmet and she and my father -- who, when it came to food, was metrosexual before his time -- would flip the pages and ooh and ahh over photos of Soufflés the way some people flip over expensive jewelry.
My parents were Captain Ahabs in their own right. Their Moby Dick was not a whale, not even a seared Ahi Tuna. It was Soufflé. Damn, I have never eaten so many bad Soufflés in my life as I did during the late seventies. Where did bad Soufflés go when they died during those days? My mama’s oven. They came out as flat as my hair during the awkward years (which I’m still living, evidently).
We were southern, yet we couldn’t eat green beans like normal southerners. During those experimental food days of the late seventies, we had to eat French Bean Almandine. I longed for a simple canned bean casserole smothered in Campbell’s mushroom soup and topped with a can of French Fried Onion Rings. While others ate Jell-O mold, we learned the benefits of a fire extinguisher when my mother made Bananas Foster. I swear, she wanted to make that desert because of the alcohol involved (Drink your Desert!). Having heard that alcohol could kill, I almost turned Baptist that day and left behind my Episcopalian principles of “drink up” as the 11th commandment. That day alcohol nearly killed us all -- and no one had had a sip. What was worse is there were a few terrifying seconds while the flames licked uncontrollably across the kitchen table as my father struggled with the nozzle on the extinguisher. Metrosexuals, then and now, are not good with equipment.
The only saving grace back then was my grandma. She also liked to cook, but she didn’t need Gourmet magazine to tell her how to do it. She was a no-nonsense southern cook who understood you could win more friends with salt pork than you could saffron.
When she cooked, the Sunday table groaned and sighed from the weight of all the food. We had lima bean, cooked straight up thank you, Parker House rolls, asparagus done the proper Southern way: right out of a can, damnit. We had roast beef that fell onto your fork it was so tender, we had mustard greens that had percolated in the pressure cooker along with the aforementioned salt pork. Grandma’s served corn on the cob that had been boiled, not grilled the way Daddy liked it, but instead, she would infuse the water with Zataran’s crab boil to give the corn the impression we were in New Orleans. She also served rice and a thick brown gravy made from the juice of the roast beef.
Seconds were mandatory. When Mama made Soufflé and her French Beans Almandine, the only seconds were leftovers from Grandma’s Saturday night meal.
It bothered my mother that she couldn’t cook as well as my grandmother. Of course, my grandmother never tried to make a Soufflé. If she had, she may have failed, too. But asking her to cook something like that is like asking W to consider an opposing view. It just wasn’t in her nature.
Eventually, my parents moved on from their Gourmet magazine phase – though they never cancelled their subscription. When my father died, there was a chest filled with them that Mama sold to a local antiques dealer for a few hundred dollars. After the excitement of making complicated food wore off, they did what other culinary-challenged Southerners – and everyone else – does: they simply went out to eat.
I moved to San Francisco, and developed for a few years a tradition of going to the Mission District and having burritos, before meeting my husband, an Italian. Now winter Sundays are all about wine and good pasta. In the summers, we grill, as if obligated to do so once the temperatures rise in our new town of Las Vegas. Mama’s Jack Daniels is replaced with spring water. We have to watch our calories, you know. Today, as the sun baked Vegas to 111, we grilled Jamaican Jerk Flank steak and had a cucumber and green onion salad, a slight nod to my Southern roots. We also had corn on the cob. We grilled it. Just the way Daddy would have liked it.
