Entry #2 for Today: "Memories of Childhood Food"

NOTE: Scroll down to the next entry to read about TLC Ranch.

Having been tagged by "Kitchen Mage" for a "meme" (a word not quite as annoying as "blog," eh?), I am requested to address the subject above: memories of childhood food.

I grew up in the Deep South in a family that often bordered on poverty. Worse than poverty, though, was growing up in a suburb in the Seventies, when things like Tang and TV dinners were considered appropriate for human consumption. With the exception of tomatoes and corn, most of our vegetables came from cans or were frozen, and the only lettuce that existed was iceberg. Most of my food memories are of deprivation, or are riddled with the horror now of knowing that we ate garbage.

Despite that, I do have some pleasant memories, and almost all of them take place away from our house. In no particular order...

PEPPERMINT ICE CREAM
On my sixth birthday, we still lived in Miami, where it was hot all year. (And where the ocean was warm, as oceans should be.) I remember requesting peppermint ice cream for my birthday, and we actually got to go to a restaurant that served it. It was air-conditioned, and there were white tablecloths. I was in heaven. My love affair with peppermint ice cream did not last into adulthood, however. Nevertheless, this is a very strong memory, almost enshrouded in an overlay of the exotic (a restaurant was exotic to us) and luxury. Air-conditioning, curtains on the windows, carpets, and white tablecloths. I wanted to be that rich when I grew up.

GOING TO DINNER WITH MY GRANDFATHER ON MY BIRTHDAY
I often felt like we didn't have enough to eat growing up. A special treat for me was that my grandfather would take me—and each of his 14 grandchildren—anywhere I wanted to go for my birthdays, and I always chose Davis Brothers Cafeteria. I was allowed to order as much as I wanted, and not just one meat and two vegetables. I always loved vegetables as a little girl, with few exceptions (okra being the number one most-loathed vegetable), so I would sometimes get three different vegetables, so that I didn't have to choose between spinach and green beans. Mashed potatoes with gravy was an automatic, as was roast beef.

Granddaddy took me once to a Braves game, the last home game of the season, before Hank Aaron hit his 714th home run. Aaron got a five-minute standing ovation in the eighth inning, and I became a Braves fan for life.

SUMMER DAYS AT THE LAKE
My grandparents had a little cabin cruiser boat, the Queen Elizabeth (my grandmother's name was Elizabeth Jewell), on Lake Allatoona, north of Marietta, Georgia. The happiest days of my childhood remain those we spent with our oodles of cousins up at the lake on a summer afternoon. We'd swim until we could barely breathe, then climb onto the shady dock and pant. We'd walk up the cool sidewalks to the little store, and buy a Fanta (grape or orange, I didn't care) and a Nutty Buddy or an ice cream sandwich. We would fish for hours, and if we were lucky, we'd come home and Memaw would cook up a mess of fried fish (cornmeal, butter, salt and pepper...and lemon juice at the table). There would be corn on the cob and tomato slices and dinner rolls or biscuits, and all kinds of other vegetables (canned or frozen, but I didn't know or care that I was missing anything). The corn and tomatoes were from G. W. Washington's little farm, and I've never had better. Watermelon after dinner, eaten outside where you could drip and spit your seeds at your cousins, was mandatory.

I do remember one big family dinner in particular. I told my grandmother, "Memaw, I love your rice!" The grown-ups all clucked appreciatively at my sweetness, and I finished my sentence, "It's so nice and sticky!"

BLACKBERRIES AND SOME PEACE AND QUIET
I wrote this in my newspaper column once, and have retrieved it for purposes of this meme.

At the end of Sunny Lane, there was a vacant lot. There are, of course, no vacant lots within a 50-mile radius of Atlanta now. But this vacant lot was my private island, with its red clay that sparkled with mica, and the blackberry bushes that were an oasis of solitude for me each summer.

On the hottest summer mornings, I'd dress in long corduroy pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and gloves to protect me from the thorns. I was a patient picker, and probably liked it because standing in the brambles was the only solitary time I was to know, with four sisters at home spoiling for fights. Surely I was hot, but I don't remember suffering to the point of complaining about it. I just stood with my Tupperware bowl, carefully lifting vine after leafy vine, knowing that the best berries were hidden from quick glances.

They were like Chinese fingertraps, those vines. If you struggled, they would rip your skin and clothes, so I learned the art of gently extricating myself from their grasp, pulling one row of thorns at a time from my sleeve, my pants leg, or my hair. It was easy to dream in the middle of the green, thorny vines, where the slowest movements brought the greatest results.

In my imagination, I'd bring home the berries and my mother would don and apron and bake a pie for us, and the aroma would curl out of the oven like loving arms, enfolding us in domestic bliss.

The reality was different. I don't think my mother owned an apron, and she sure as hell wasn't going to heat up the oven in July. The berries instead stained our fingers and mouths as we fed ourselves like a group of greedy baby birds. It didn't matter to me if the berries all molded; I'd just go pick more tomorrow.

TEA, HONEY, CHEESE, CRACKERS: A WRITER'S REPAST
I have been a tea drinker since I was seven or so. Iced or hot, I love it. (Sweet iced tea is a big thing in the Deep South, as you may or may not know.) I have also loved the book Little Women since I was a child, and was automatically "assigned" to Jo, as the second sister of five girls. Our house was filled with chaos and fighting, an out-of-control sister being the vortex of most of that pain, and I took to hiding: literally (inside the house or outside) and figuratively (inside books, or being motionless if she walked through the room, hoping that she wouldn't notice and attack me).

One favored activity allowed me to escape my life: I would take my pink quilt into the back of our station wagon, and pile up pillows. I would also bring in a pot of hot tea, a container of Sue Bee whipped honey, cheddar cheese (which I sometimes bought with my babysitting money, since anything that precious wouldn't last long in our house), apple slices, and Ritz crackers. I would pretend that I was Jo, in her garret, and I would read Little Women while I nibbled Marmee's food.

. . . . . . . . . . .

And the other piece of the chain-meme. For those of you who have been tagged, remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired effect.

1. Pumpkin Pie Bungalow
2. Once Upon a Feast
3. Belly-Timber
4. KitchenMage
5. Small Farms: A Blog from the Heart

I'm going to tag some bloggers whose writings I enjoy, and whom I would like to get to know more about.

Jen of Life Begins at Thirty
Stephen at StephenCooks
NS of San Francisco Gourmet
Chef Farid Zadi of Ya Rayi Our Rai
Andrew Fenton of Rome Journal

Coming up next: a wrap-up post for Jen on the Eat Local Challenge. Short answer: yes, I will be doing it again next year, hopefully under better circumstances.

Comments

[Molly]

Tana, I loved reading this--so evocative, so rich, so real. I can just picture you and your cousins splashing around in the lake and tucking into a good, homemade summer meal. And what beautiful descriptions of your places of refuge--among blackberry brambles, or with tea and goodies in the back of the station wagon. Just beautiful. Thank you.

[David]

I would give Peppermint Ice Cream another try. It's terrific drizzles with hot fudge sauce...tastes like a big Girl Scout cookie!

[kitchenmage]

How wonderful your memories are! I remember the "pick any restaraunt" dinners for special occasions too. Once when I was about 7 I picked one of those over-the-top "Hawaiian" places and ended up with flaming something to start and baked alaska to end--although how that was hawaiian have no clue. But it was oh, so adult.

And you've also reminded me I must go look at the state of my blackberries tomorrow.