Sunday, September 04, 2011

Peggy’s Prompt—tomatoes


I had a tomato sandwich for lunch today at Tomato Jam, one of my favorite small local lunch places. I like tomato sandwiches; I LOVE BLT’s, and since Candy Maier introduced me to pre-cooked bacon, I eat more BLT’s in the summertime than I used to, preferably using my own homegrown lettuce and tomatoes. But since I grow mostly cherry tomatoes, and even smaller ones called Bert’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes, the sandwiches made with them have to be eaten over the sink as those tiny sliced-in-half tomatoes have a tendency to shift wildly when you take a bite out of the sandwich.

The best tomato sandwiches I ever ate were in Iowa City in the early ‘70’s. I was working a few hours a week for a company called Westinghouse Learning Corporation which hired a lot of graduate students part-time to score open-ended responses (non-multiple-choice) to the National Assessment of Education Progress tests that had been given across the country to a sample of students in various grades. This was during the hot Iowa summer. But I digress.

One of the other scorers was a gal whose husband grew an organic garden (new in those days) and grew beefsteak tomatoes as big as a small cantaloupe. We would gather in the company break room kitchen at lunchtime, each with our baggy brought from home with lettuce between two slices of our favorite bread. The tomato gal would cut each of us one thick slice of the beefsteak tomato, sliding it onto our outstretched bread. The tomato slice would cover the entire piece of bread. Then we’d slap on the other slice of bread, take our place at the sink, lean over and eat our tomato sandwich. The assembly line continued until all of us had our fill. All from one tomato. Maybe that’s why I grow such tiny tomatoes. I’m afraid of the competition.



Peggy’s prompt—you give up the trying


Grandma Jane Camp—an enigma wrapped within an opaque shower curtain. I remember the first time I met her. I, already married to her son, went to give her a hug and she literally disappeared inside my arms. She shrank and shrank until I gave up trying. And that’s what she was like always.

She seemed real enough on the surface. She had a big floppy body and old lady curly white hair and glasses and a loud voice and she constantly talked. So she seemed real enough until you began to squeeze or to ask questions and then she just sort of disappeared. She’d go from a blowsy loudmouth to “oh, I just don’t know; it was hard,” and then her voice would peter out and you’d have to wait a few seconds until she got internally charged again and off she’d go onto another tale about her morphine-addicted mother, or how she told a dirty joke to her doctor, or how she and the taxi driver who’s been taking her to her hair appointment for years are good friends and he would do anything for her and, why, his own mother said that he, the taxi driver, treated her, Jane, better than he treated his own mother. And on and on she’d go, hardly taking a breath, until you’d say, “Your mother was addicted to morphine?” And the air would go out of her and she’d say, “Well, you just don’t know; it was hard.”

Peggy’s prompt—my childhood bed


The double bed I shared with my sister Mary was the setting for many of the important events of my childhood. The bed, with its bed-lamp positioned in the exact middle of the wall behind the bed, was where I read Gone With the Wind as fast as my eyes could fly across the pages. It’s where I would listen to my poor sister wheeze and hack her way through an asthma attack. It’s where I listened on the radio to The Great Guildersleeve and to Henry, Henry Aldrich.

The bed was the battleground for turf rights—“Mama, Mary’s getting on MY side!” when Mary would shift herself over onto my side of the bed. It’s where I tried to asset my superior familial position as eldest child by hitting her, oh so softly, to make her move back onto her side. It’s where she’d hit me back, HARD, and I’d cry out, and Daddy would call out from their adjoining bedroom “You girls better cut that out before somebody gets hurt.”

It’s where my girlfriends and I would stay up late in the rare “spend the nights” (now called sleepovers, I believe) and talk and talk, mostly in whispers. It’s where I stove off (staved off?) heat prostration in the summertime by letting ice cubes melt on my pj’s as I lay there in the Florida heat. It’s where I would sleep for hours and hours when I came home from college on vacation, making up for the sleep deprivation that seems to be synonymous with attending college.

And it’s where Mr. Lawrence, my first kitty cat, spent his entire time under the bedspread when, after Larry and I were married, we visited Mama and Daddy with him in tow. That’s a lot of memories for one bed.

Peggy’s prompt—simmer


My mother was the master of simmering. She made pot roasts, and boiled ham, and chicken, all in her oval dutch oven aluminum pot (let’s hope that the current science is right about aluminum NOT causing Alzheimer’s) where she brought the water in the pot to a boil, and then let the meat simmer for several hours. She also cooked green beans and lima beans this same way, but with a tablespoon of bacon grease thrown in. Simmering and frying were her specialties. Fried fish, fried chicken, fried bacon, all staples at our house. She wasn’t much for baking, except for cookies and “plain” cakes, although very occasionally we’d have a baked fish or baked macaroni and cheese or meatloaf. She didn’t broil. Didn’t sauté. Didn’t puree.

Her spices were salt and sometimes pepper. Sugar was for iced tea and cake icing. Butter (I mean oleomargarine) was used at the table, not in cooking. Salad dressing meant mayo with a little pickle juice. Bread meant sliced white loaf bread or sliced loaf brown (whole wheat) bread. She made cornbread in a small iron skillet, but seldom made biscuits (too much trouble.) Pancakes were a rare treat, but never waffles.

Potatoes were almost always mashed, although sometimes she fixed baked sweet potatoes to go with a ham. And perhaps a ham and sliced potato casserole with the left-over ham.

Vegetables were either fresh—raw or cooked—or from a can, never frozen, even after they became commonly available. We lived on corn, peas, and beans. And sometimes pickled beets.

Every meal was accompanied, if possible, by sliced tomatoes, pickles, olives (that I refused to eat), and celery sticks.

Dessert (at every dinner) was ice cream (usually Neopolitan—chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry in one store-brand box) or Jello with fruit cocktail mixed in, or a plain, un-iced, yellow cake made in a tube pan.

Despite the sameness to the menu, I loved my mother’s cooking, and of all the things I missed when I went off to college, the thing I missed the most was my mother’s meal of pot roast, mashed potatoes and pot “liquor”, field peas (a lost variety), and sliced tomatoes. Just writing the words brings back the taste to my mouth. Yum!