Sweet Cooking Memories

Sometimes it’s really soothing to think back to a “simpler” time, retreating from the concerns of the present. Of course, a study of history will confirm that there have never truly been simpler times, just different times. It is, apparently, human nature to recall the pleasant memories of times gone by and skip over the negatives that were surely there, but don’t make for good memories.

When I think back, my tendency is also to remember the good things, the happy times. In Southern families like the one of my childhood, happy times often coincided with food. For my parents’ generation, one that had been hungry during the Depression and known rationing during World War II, food was love. My mother and her parenting peers didn’t worry about childhood obesity as we do today, but found ways not just to feed their children, but to feed us abundantly and introduce us to all the flavors their culinary skills might devise.

Recently I wrote about “Depression food,” the dishes my mother used to stretch the meat in our diet further with starches and vegetables. She was quite creative and successful in this endeavor. We loved her vegetable beef soup, not because it was full of beef, but because the minimal amount of meat was augmented with vegetables. In summer months, these were put into the pot fresh from the garden. In the winter, they came from canned produce, some of it put up by relatives.

Mama’s real love in cooking, I believe, was sweets, desserts of all sorts. She had a special love of baking cookies, making several different kinds every Christmas to give to family and friends who might come to visit. One of my longtime friends, Sara, having read some of Mama’s recipes that I posted recently, remembered Mama’s “Stone Jar” cookies. Honestly, I hadn’t thought of those in years due to my ongoing preoccupation with foods that don’t add sugar and other fattening ingredients to my diet.

Sara, however, remembered the Christmas experience with these particular favorites from Mama’s kitchen and suggested that I provide the recipe for them. I rummaged around and found the recipe and have provided it below.

Mama’s Stone Jar Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup Crisco
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Vanilla
1 tsp Nutmeg
2 cups Brown sugar, packed firmly
3 cups Flour, sifted
2 Eggs
1 tsp Soda
¼ cup Milk
½ cup Pecans, chopped

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine Crisco, salt, vanilla and nutmeg.
Add sugar gradually, making sure to cream thoroughly. Add eggs to mixture. Mix half of flour sifted with soda and mix in. Add remaining flour, milk and chopped pecans. Let the batter stand for about ten minutes (can be covered and refrigerated overnight). Drop from teaspoon onto greased baking sheet and flatten with the bottom of a water glass. Bake for about ten minutes.

Makes about six dozen cookies

In reading this recipe, you might notice the word “about” used a couple of times. That word indicates something about Mama’s cooking (and my own, I admit). She might include specific amounts of ingredients in her written recipes, but she understood cooking to be more art than science. Thus, depending on the weather and the oven and a myriad of other factors that might influence the outcome, these cookies might take ten minutes to bake or maybe twelve. When she was baking, she was in the kitchen from beginning to end of a project. There were no time-outs. In fact, I remember more than once being told to “watch the cookies” if she needed to “excuse herself to attend to personal matters.” If she had an oven full of cookies, more than one family member might be pressed into service to help get cookies off the pans or put them on the racks to cool. At Christmas, the sheer volume of what she produced often demanded this assistance.

Remembering Mama in the kitchen brings back several mental pictures that make me smile. One of them is, of course, the obligatory tasting opportunities that arose. When the cookies emerged from the oven, if any of us kids (or Daddy) were around, we were conscripted to taste the first batch to make sure they were turning out right. Typically the smell of cookies baking drew us like vultures and she rarely had to call out for tasters.

But tasting the baked cookies wasn’t the only gustatory option. If we hadn’t done anything within a couple of hours that she felt deserved either punishment or her disappointment, we were allowed to “lick the bowl and spoon” of any leftover smidgens of batter when all the last of the cookies had been put in the oven. She was economical, so left little batter to be had, but we loved this special treat and were willing to pay the price for it. He or she who “licked” also washed the bowl and spoon and anything else she needed washed.

I have a very fond memory of my mother and aunt in the kitchen together, cooking. Like Beaver Cleaver’s mother, my mother and aunt would go right into the kitchen in the dresses they were wearing rather than change clothes. They would tie an apron around their waists and get to work. What they also did for comfort in a hot kitchen was roll down their hose around their ankles.

In the 50’s women wore hose and would not be bare-legged when wearing dresses. There were no panty hose then, so they would simply unhook the hose from their girdles or garter belts and roll them down into funny-looking concentric tubes just above the ankle. There was a time in my life when I found this somehow embarrassing and unseemly, perhaps when I was in puberty and most of my mother’s life was an embarrassment. Now, however, I remember that practice and can’t help but smile with affection.

Their generation had endured much. Thus, they were thankful for the bounties of post-war America, happy to have children in the house (with no sense that a birth control pill would change everything for the next generation) and managed to share their homes with their parents or their husbands’ parents as that older generation aged and needed to shelter in their children’s homes. My father’s father lived with us for as much as a decade in the last years of his life. My aunt hosted first her own mother and grandmother, then my uncle’s parents in their last years.

As I said at the beginning of this, they weren’t really simpler times, just different times. Those times had their problems and burdens as we have our own today. But there were so many good times and there are so many good memories, many as sweet as Stone Jar cookies. I’m grateful for those memories and hope our generation is providing some good memories for our children and theirs in the years to come.

Celebrating Friendship

Photo by Mike Lumpkin

I just came across a favorite quote on the front of a note card: “A friend is someone who knows all about you, and still likes you.” It seems particularly appropriate to me as I have reveled this week in the joys of friendship.


For two wonderful days, Mike and I shared our home with friends of long standing. We shared meals, a drive through the North Carolina mountains, an afternoon boating on the lake and a funny movie. Best of all, we talked about things that really matter to us and we laughed together about the follies of life, including our own foibles.

I shared a well-written newspaper column with friends and got thoughtful responses, including one asking for more information about our son’s impending wedding. Tell me more, she said, and I loved her anew for caring about those I hold closest and most dear.

Later in the day she shared news of another friend and I reconnected with someone else who has known me for decades and still thinks I’m worth knowing and loving. Just thinking of her makes me smile and even as she encouraged my blogging with her kind words, I remembered working on the high school newspaper where my love of writing was encouraged and I recalled so many fun times we all had then.

And so it goes. We find each other at various points in our lives and friendships are forged. Over the years these relationships wax and wane, perhaps, as we follow different paths. We scatter across the country, even across the globe for job opportunities or family changes. But when we come back together, there is still that initial connection that draws us together.

Sometimes our connection is only the memory of when we knew each other first or when we spent time together in the neighborhood, at school or a workplace. If we’re lucky, and I have certainly had more than my share of luck, the connection is re-ignited in reunion and we either pick up where we left off or even refresh the bond and it grows stronger.

In less mature years, I thought of friendship as the bond between people with common interests, similar opinions and probably similar backgrounds. Those common experiences laid the groundwork for two people to create the foundation of a relationship. I’ve learned over time that many of my most treasured friendships are with people whose experiences have been quite different from mine and those differences are sometimes the spice that makes the relationship meaningful.

I now have friends whose social, political and religious views are very different from mine. Sometimes these are differences we can discuss without rancor, sometimes not. When the differences are too painful for conversation, we simply opt to leave those topics out of our conversations. We seek and find common ground that allows us to continue to love and support one another, aside from those areas in which our disagreement would pull us apart. I have learned that it’s possible to disagree vehemently with friends, yet keep my disagreement to myself. I have come to understand that there is room in my life for many points of view and the fact that someone doesn’t see eye to eye with me is not a reason to avoid them, as long as we are mutually respectful of each other’s right to differ.

In fact, I find myself wishing that our public discourse could focus less on our differences and more on looking around us to find ways in which we can care for each other and for our country, rather than how to “best” one another. I am confident in my beliefs and feel no threat from those who don’t see the world the same way. I believe, in fact, that despite our differences, we can achieve important goals if we are willing to value one another more than we need to influence one another toward our own point of view.

Friends are a critically important part of my life. They are, many of them, an extended family that enriches my experience of the world in so many ways. They encourage me, they challenge me and I hope I do the same for them.

It has become a habit for my husband and me to walk early each morning on the shores of our beloved lake. One of the joys of those walks is watching the wildfowl that make their lives there and begin our days with their activities.

The geese are particularly interesting, honking and stirring as they move out of the coves where they have spent the night and into the grass or onto the lake. They honk and flutter, sometimes stirring suddenly off the water and taking flight noisily, for no apparent reason. Out of a group of domestic geese that once lived here, only one remains. It swims and waddles with the others, then is left alone when they fly away since it doesn’t fly. Wherever the flight has gone during the day, the geese are regrouped again the next morning with the single white one sailing close by its Canada goose companions.

In the spring they show off their babies, teaching them how to forage and how to swim. The geese have a lesson then for all of us. The entire gaggle watches over the young geese with the adults surrounding them on land and water, wary of us and any other potential danger that might come their way. The white goose is a part of this protective nursery, willing to challenge us if we seem too close with a hiss as fierce as any. Clearly, she is not the mother, but she cares for the young ones and is loyal to her “friends.”

In her way, she understands, as I do, the value of community, the grace of friends. I begin and end each day grateful, so thankful for the love and comfort of friends. Each day, too, I give thought to how I might be a better friend to those who are such good friends to me.

Thomas Jefferson, a man of great intellect, said it well: "I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."

Mama's "Depression" Cooking

Mama, so young

So I wrote about Mama and said she was a good cook in the 50’s, a woman who could stretch a small budget to feed six people and have leftovers. I also said that someone told me once that some of her recipes might be called “Depression” food because they were probably created during the Great Depression when people couldn’t afford much meat and found ways to augment it with rice and other starches, and vegetables they could grow in their backyards.

I decided to publish a couple of Mama’s “stretcher” recipes here not because we’ve returned to the Great Depression, but because they are actually pretty darn good recipes. If you try them, let me know what you think.

RICE DINNER
Ingredients:
1 pound ground beef or turkey
½ cup chopped green pepper
½ cup chopped celery
½ cup chopped onion
3 tbsp cooking oil
salt and pepper to taste
2 cans whole tomatoes (15 oz. cans)
1 cup rice, uncooked
Directions:
In a large saucepan or skillet, sauté onion, celery and pepper in small amount of oil. Add beef or turkey and brown. Reduce heat. Mix well and spread as bottom layer in pan. Coarsely chop tomatoes and spread (with juice) on top of beef or turkey. Evenly sprinkle rice on top and cover tightly. Cook on low heat for about 1 hour or until rice is done. (Add water if necessary.)

This one sounds simple, eh? It is. It does, however, require some watching. Mama often spent the entire time it was cooking in the kitchen not far from the stove, sometimes making biscuits to go with the meal or chopping up fresh fruit to be served with a little sugar on top as needed. If we had fresh strawberries, some of the biscuits might include some sugar and we’d eat them with strawberries on top for dessert.

We might also have green beans or peas from Daddy’s garden to go with this dish. I don’t recall many green salads being served at our table. Daddy didn’t grow lettuce and we weren’t finding it in stores as readily as we do today. Nobody back then would have imagined we’d be getting lettuce already cut up in plastic bags!

Daddy & Mama

One more staple from Mama’s recipe box was Country Fried Steak. This was a favorite of my father's and was usually served with mashed potatoes.  Don’t be misled by the use of the word “steak” here, by the way because the whole point of this dish was that it was based on cubed steak, a cut of beef that is still available, but was more popular in middle-class homes back then because it was the cheap way to eat beef. Cubed steak, for those who haven’t had it, is meat that requires beating before cooking to tenderize it. Mama did this with either a wooden mallet or the top of a Coca-Cola bottle, the old kind that was made of glass and in our house had multiple uses after the Coke was out of it. Despite this less than glamorous introduction, I will tell you that this is one of my favorite dishes (when I’m not dieting) and one that my son requests from my kitchen.

COUNTRY FRIED STEAK
Ingredients:
1-2 pounds cubed steak, tenderized (Beat it within an inch of its life, folks)
½ cup flour
1 dash salt
1 dash pepper
1 stick butter or margarine
1 cup milk
Directions:
Mix seasonings with flour and dredge both sides of beaten steak. In electric (or large) skillet, heat butter. Brown both sides of steak in butter; cook until done. Remove steak to platter and hold in warm oven while making the gravy. Using the same skillet, add more flour and butter (if needed) and brown slightly. Then add milk and cook, incorporating browned beef bits (we called “scrumples”) and stirring frequently, on low heat until gravy is at desired consistency. Serve gravy hot over steak, cooked rice and/or biscuits.
Note: The Armstrongs are partial to gravy with “body” rather than the classically smooth or thinner gravy.

Now, as with all my cooking, I’m prone to experiment and add my own touches. So these days I’m partial to coarse ground black pepper and garlic powder in recipes like these. I encourage anyone who cooks to try things. The only right way is the way that you or those you are serving enjoy the food.

Mama hasn’t always approved of my innovations, by the way. She grew up with the notion that the way to cook green beans was all day in a pot with fatback. In an attempt to live a somewhat healthier life, I steam green beans. The first time I served them, slightly crisp, but I thought really tasty, she was appalled. “What have you done to these green beans,” she asked with horror. When I told her I steamed them, she huffed and said she was surprised to find that I’d taken up Yankee cooking methods.

There’s no question that her green beans, steeped in fatback and juices all day, did have a wonderful taste. They tasted, of course, the same way that anything cooked that way would taste—like the fatback with which they were cooked. I couldn’t convince her that the naturally sweet taste of the beans themselves, steamed briefly, could compare. Actually, I assured her, I like both, but since I don’t work all day in the fields, I can’t afford to eat the way people used to eat. I also don’t work the same way Mama did then, on her feet much of day, ironing, cooking and sewing and sometimes going to work in an office, as well.

Mama's kids

For those who look over their shoulders for “the good old days,” I say “not me.” I had a wonderful childhood, thanks to Mama and Daddy, and I’m grateful for that. I’m also happy that our world has changed in the way the world always changes. Some things change for the worse, some for the better. I wouldn’t trade the time period I’ve known for any other. I don’t think Mama would have, either.

The picture above was taken some time in the 50's.  That's me on the left (with the strange hairstyle), my brother Buddy and my sister, then known as Patsy.  The dog's name was Inky.  I think she liked Mama's cooking, too, because she and her companion dog, Bingo, were always underfoot in the kitchen, hoping for a scrap or two, usually competing for those with one of our cats.   

Remembering Mama

It’s Mama’s birthday today and memories of her flood my thoughts. She died in 2001, just a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. I’ve always been grateful that she was gone before that happened. She didn’t need to experience that.

What she did experience in her life was somewhat extraordinary for a woman of her time. As an independent person in her twenties, she left her family in Atlanta and moved to Albany, Georgia, to live and work there. Acceding to her parents’ wishes, she lived at first in a boarding house run by a family friend.

She moved into an apartment building later and that’s where she met my father. They fell in love, rather tempestuously, I believe, and married. Little was ever said directly about their courtship and early marriage, but there were hints throughout their life together that they found equal footing in both intellect and temperament. Nobody could back either of them down once they had set their course.

My memories of Mama during my childhood center on her ability to feed and clothe three growing children and also make a home for Daddy’s father, all on a limited budget. She was a great cook, finding ways to stretch dollars and turn the simplest ingredients into meals that were not only filling, but always tasty. Interestingly, when I prepared one of her dishes later in life for a boyfriend, he referred to it as “Depression” food. That’s what his mother called dishes that were stretched with rice or potatoes, a tactic that was widely used in the Great Depression. (I’ll post some of her recipes later this week.)

I still have a fondness for seersucker because Mama made so many of our summer clothes from that particular fabric. It was inexpensive, felt cooler than other materials in summer and was, perhaps, the first “wrinkle-free” fabric. All of us, including Daddy, had summer shirts of seersucker in every available pattern. We kids also had shorts and pajamas. She ran that old Singer sewing machine night and day to produce our clothes. Then she put them away carefully at summer’s end so that those items that survived active children could be passed down from oldest to youngest the next year.

Even as a child, I was aware that Mama had a good mind. She read voraciously, as did Daddy, and our home was filled with books and magazines. I’ve always believed that I learned to read before I went to school because everyone else in our house always had their noses in books. I could either be left out or learn to read, so read I did.

In addition to taking care of all of us, Mama found time to include a small menagerie of pets in our household, including cats that had kittens and dogs that produced puppies regularly. She helped with whatever scouting program we were in, too. She sometimes belonged to a garden club, knew the neighbors and could be counted on to provide a dish for new mothers or those with a death in the family. Food was the social currency in our middle-class existence and Mama deftly provided food wherever it was deemed necessary, from church suppers to birthday parties.

She was always busy, always doing something with her hands, preferably using her active mind in the process. Back then, much of our clothing had to be ironed. She would wash the clothes and hang them on the line to dry. Then she would iron those things that needed it, having sprinkled them with water from a Coke bottle with holes in the top. Sometimes this would be the time she talked on the phone with friends. I can still see her ironing away with the phone cradled between chin and shoulder, mostly listening if it was a talkative friend, but often debating one subject or another with someone who challenged her.

She had been a working woman before we kids came along and she returned to work at some point after I, her youngest, went off to school. At that point, my sister Pat, six years older than me and two years older than our brother, became our after-school baby-sitter. Sometimes, depending on Daddy’s work schedule, he might work nights and be at home and awake in the afternoons, so he took the lead on those days.

When Mama went back to work, she took a clerical job with Social Security. As years went by, she was promoted until her final job involved assessing and processing the claims of people who applied for benefits. She alternately came home frustrated and discouraged by their plight or energized and engaged by their personal stories. There were the great Southern names she encountered, like Stillwaters Logan or Jesuslovesme Reynolds. There were the touching stories of births recorded in family Bibles that were lost for years, then found to reveal that someone who thought he or she was 55 was actually 65.

Mama also brought home some office jokes that made Daddy laugh out loud when they were behind closed doors. Only later did I find out how salacious my Mama’s sense of humor could be. Daddy, she told us when we were grownups, would never have condoned those jokes in front of anyone else, but they shared them privately and she made him laugh a lot.

That bawdy sense of humor points to one of the many paradoxes about her. In contradiction to the baseness of the jokes, she was often quite ladylike and encouraged that behavior in my sister and me. She despaired that I was such a tomboy, having protected my long golden ringlets for years, only to finally cut them off and perm my hair rather than endure my complaints about the brushing long hair required. She gave up after entering me in the “Miss Sunbeam” contest to find the girl who looked most like the photo on the Sunbeam bread wrapper. I fought her all the way on that one, wanting neither to have my hair put up on my head nor to put on a dress and patent leather shoes instead of my usual tee shirt, jeans and sneakers.

Another way in which Mama defied being easy to describe or to understand was the way her temper appeared without warning. She could exhibit the patience of Job when anyone else would snapped long before. But she could erupt like Mt. St. Helens, too, her anger blasting forth with a heat that could singe the doorknob of Hell. Her fury was unpredictable, most often generated by something the rest of us had neither noticed nor could name.

She was a hypochondriac, prone to illness when any of us became ill. As I remember it, she didn’t miss work that much, but seemed to have a great many aches and pains, as well as ills without specific symptoms, with frequency. On the other hand, always one with a complex personality, she endured more than one hospital stay for serious and identified illnesses without complaint.

Quick to learn, she loved card games at one point in her life, becoming something of a whiz at Canasta. As long as I knew her she did crossword puzzles, including the ones I still find unfathomable, the ones that come with a blank grid so that the puzzler must create her own grid and figure out where the words go. None of them elicited more than an occasional “well, phooey” from her.

In her last years, a victim of senility and diagnosed with an “Alzheimer’s-like condition,” she once again defied the norms until the bitter end. She was alternately confused and delusional, then bright as a penny, remembering verse after verse of a song sung in her childhood. She was dependent one minute, completely on her own the next. She declared herself ready to “go,” saying that she had had a good life, made peace with her Lord and was not afraid. Only in the final months did she lose her faculties. Even then, when she was no longer articulate, the light was still in her eyes, dimmed only in the last days.

As I think about Mama today, I remember so much to admire, so much that I appreciate. I remain perplexed about the contradictions, confused by the quirks of personality. I realize each day the influence she was in my life and am reminded of a line from a song about how we know each other. The song, a love song, of course, says “you know who I am, who I’m not and who I want to be.” I can’t say that I think she knew me this way and I know I didn’t know her so completely, but I know that I wouldn’t have traded her for any other mother. And I know that, no matter how I’ve fought the notion throughout my life, seeking to be just my own self, there’s a lot of Mama in me.

So on this day that would have been her 95th birthday, I wish she were here to hug and be sung to, here to be appreciated for what she brought into her life and mine. I miss that burning spirit of fire, that intelligence and humor. On this day, I’m grateful for Mama and hope not so much that her spirit is at rest, but rather that it is lighting up whatever space it occupies.

Happy Birthday, Mama, and thanks for the memories.