Just Like Mom Used to Make

            My mother was not anybody’s idea of a gourmet cook. She learned to make the basics of the day- fried chicken, hamburgers and eventually spaghetti. To her credit, she always made an effort to include all the food groups in our meals regardless of their gustatorial quality. But it was never her thing. She was actually ahead of her time, she worked full time at a “real” job, teaching second grade. Dad could make pancakes and boil hot dogs. So, you see, they were the ideal consumers of all the new time-saving supper ideas. You know, Shake and Bake chicken, those electric hot dog cookers with the metal prongs (bango! Blasted hot dog!), vegetables in a bag, that kind of thing. As fun as those were, it’s a few others that loom foremost in my memory.

            T.V. dinners were a frequent supper visitor, although Mom limited it to once a week. The main course varied from a turkey dinner with “gravy” to the notorious “Swiss steak.” I never did learn what made it “swiss.” I rather suspected that some Swiss child had been served the original and pushed it around on his plate until time for chocolate. There was often some form of potato, usually mashed, certainly rehydrated (this didn’t concern me, I was college-aged before I learned that one could actually, physically “mash” potatoes), some cubed vegetables, usually carrots and peas mixed, and dessert (sometimes a sweet apple glop, perhaps envisioned as apple crisp, sometimes this reddish material that I supposed was cherry substitute of some form). The only good part of a T.V. dinner was that my parents, I guess prompted by cheerful images on the containers, did, in fact, serve them while the television was on (this was a rarity, we always ate at the kitchen table except on Sundays, when we ate at the dining room table (no wait, I tell a lie. On Bonanza night we were allowed to order a pizza before Hoss and Little Joe began their antics.) I remember the first time I was allowed to accompany my brothers to pick up the pizza. The place was new, the very idea was new in Palatine Bridge and the place was run by folks who were clearly Italian. Not a place for youngsters.)

            Perhaps the most remarkable food product we encountered in those days (other than Velveeta, you do know of the cheese that will not die?) was the Cube Steak. In retrospect, I surmise that their appearance was related to my parents two week pay periods and whatever expenses my brothers and I incurred during that interval. I grant you that they were somewhat cubic in shape but steak they most assuredly were not. I shudder to think on the whole process but some food service graduate (probably from Cornell, I later would know some of them) found a way to take the gristle from other cuts of animal flesh and meld them into this material. No amount of cooking could break the bonds, let alone human teeth. When proffered to the dog, he’d huff and return to his Kenel-Ration. In an attempt to, I believe, imitate the aforementioned Swiss steaks, my mother would sometimes smother them in canned stewed tomatoes as a last step in the so-called cooking process. I am convinced that to this day I am still voiding residue from this product.

            Since those days I have eaten haggis, scrapple, spam, escargot, vegemite and pickled tongue, to name but a few. The only thing I have encountered (and yes, such events are encounters) that rates with cube steak is lutefisk (sorry my Norwegian friends). And I complain about my kids eating fast food.