.THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN SMELLED LIKE...

01/29/09……..THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN SMELLED LIKE


fried fish most of the time, although occasionally it smelled like whatever Mama was cooking in her pressure cooker or in her version of a slow cooker—a big heavy oval metal pot with an extra heavy lid. That would be “roast beef”, or really chuck roast, or a picnic ham, whatever that is, or a whole stewed chicken. Those were our Sunday staples. The rest of the week it was fish, fish, fish. Not that I minded. Luckily for food-picky me, I loved fish. Although sometimes in the summer when the river and ocean water got warm and my commercial fisherman father’s catches were small and didn’t pay well, we’d have fish all seven days of the week. During those times my mother would try to vary the lunch menus (fish was for supper) with different kinds of “luncheon meat”—mostly boiled ham—they actually called it boiled ham on the label—or bologna, or something awful that my mother liked called liver cheese. All served on fresh, locally baked white bread, of course, slathered with lots of salad dressing—not plain mayonnaise—always salad dressing.

But fried fish were the mainstay of our diet. Daddy would bring home raw fish that he had scaled and filleted at the dock, all wrapped in old newspaper (waste not, want not), and leave the package in the sink. Then when Mama had time, she’d take the fillets out of the newspaper wrapping, rinse them off really well under the tap, let them drain a bit and then put meal-size portions in plastic bread wrappers (waste not, want not again) to place in the freezer or the meat tray at the top of the fridge. I had no clue at the time of how well we were eating, both in terms of nutrition (if you ignore the fried part) and cost. All I knew was that winter or spring, fall or summer, if you walked through the front door of our house, you were going to smell fried fish.



Addendum:

And Mama fried the fish in a little tiny kitchen on a tiny little stove in a big black iron frying pan. (Mama called it a frying pan, not a skillet.) And the stove was on a wall away from the two windows in the kitchen and there was no vent fan (I was so surprised when I went to college and lived in the Scholarship House to find the stoves had vent fans above) so naturally the fumes and aromas of whatever was cooking would hover in the tiny kitchen and then overflow to the rest of the house.
Some people look down their noses at houses that carry the aroma of cooking food, but I always thought our house smelled delicious!