Free preview of In Grandma's Kitchen: Food and Family
in Olden Times
by Maria Cattell
Chapter 2
Grandma's Kitchen
It was different then, way back when, in olden times.
We didn't worry about calories back then. I doubt we'd heard of cholesterol, saturated fat, antioxidants and such like. If we had heard of them, we certainly didn't give them any credence. Mom used lard and butter for her melt-in-the-mouth pie pastry, and we gobbled up her delicious pies. Dad made a show of complaining about us kids using his butter and eggs in our home-made cakes and cookies. But his complaint concerned the economic cost, not health issues. And from time to time he'd say, "If you like it, it doesn't have any calories."
Back then we ate what we liked, and what we liked was food. Good food. Farm fresh food. Much came from our own garden and orchard, from animals we raised, from fishing and hunting. Eating fresh and local was what farm folks did in the 1940s and 1950s. We weren't part of a movement, like the hippie back-to-the-landers in the 1960s (I could never understand why anyone chose to live without running water) or today's "buy fresh buy local." It was just how rural people lived, a way of life harking back to a more agrarian age.
Like our farmer neighbors, we ate mostly at home, though a special treat for me was the orange-roofed Howard Johnson's on US Route 1 in Media. We'd stop at HoJo's on the way to Swarthmore College, in the early 1950s, and I'd enjoy crispy morsels of fried littleneck clams. Alternatives were few-no fast food, no Burger King or Wendy's, no McDonald's. In 1958 when Hudson and I were on our way to Minneapolis, we saw our first McDonald's in St. Paul. Their sign boasted of having sold "over 100 million hamburgers." Nowadays the boast is "billions and billions"-which may actually be in the vicinity of 300 billion, though McDonald's no longer specifies the number. But back then...no fast food. And no water in bottles, either. We drank water from our own well and didn't carry bottled water everywhere we went.
The kitchen was the heart of our family life. We lived in the kitchen, as farm families do. The heart of the kitchen was the oval oak table with ball-and-claw feet, which Mom bought for $25 when we lived in Williamsport during World War II. We kids were little then and used to run around on top of that table. Once we were all on one side together and the table tilted to one side, sliding us onto the floor. No injuries to kids or table. When Dad returned from work he'd come into the house with a loud catlike "Mrrrow mrrrow." When we heard Dad's "Mrrrow mrrrow" we'd run and hide, often under the table. Dad would pretend he didn't know where we were and would stalk the house till finally he'd "find" us. "Come on out from in under"-a Pennsylvania Dutchism-would have been the perfect way for him to invite us to leave our shelter under the table. But we didn't know about Pennsylvania Dutch then. (And who says you should never end a sentence with a preposition?)
We kept that oak table busy. We did homework on it, put together jigsaw puzzles, played games like Scrabble and poker (with dried beans for money), practiced calligraphy, made origami. My brother David and I made dollhouses and theaters out of cardboard boxes. We made Christmas cards by cutting our designs into linoleum blocks or by spatter-painting. In summer, after lunch, we kids sat around the table and prepared whatever was in season for canning. We peeled and chopped tomatoes, snapped beans, pitted cherries, peeled and cut up peaches-whatever needed doing. We made jams and jellies, too.
John and his then wife Maroulla took the table with them when The Farm was sold in 1980. Years later John refinished the old table. No doubt he had to deal with fossilized food he'd stuck on the inner ledge. That's where he'd hide food he detested, like those so-good-for-you Yankee baked beans.
For many years we cooked and heated with a coal range. We learned how to manage the fire and how to bake with no oven thermometer. A warming oven on top kept foods warm. On cold mornings we dressed behind the coal range and then spitted slices of homemade bread on long forks and toasted them directly over the coals. Sometimes the bread got too close to the coals and burst into flames. You had to wave the flaming bread around madly to put the flames out, and then scrape off the black. Once a cat jumped on the hot stovetop and jumped off again real fast. He never did that again! Mom didn't allow dogs into the house, but she made an exception for Rajah, who was a mongrel with some pointer in him, but not enough to make him hyperactive like purebreds. When Rajah slept behind the stove, he'd occasionally whimper and twitch. We figured he was dreaming about hunting. Eventually we got a gas stove which was more efficient but less inviting in cold weather.
The white sink with two basins was in front of a window overlooking the yard and the road. We kids were the dishwashers. Next to the stove was a small rectangular table used for food preparation. The table was a doughtray, with a removable top opening onto a large inner chamber. The chamber was a place to put bread dough to rise, big enough to hold dough for many loaves, easily a dozen or more. But Mom made only three or four loaves at a time, so she used the doughtray as a work table.
Mom bought two pine cupboards at auctions and refinished them. One cupboard housed dishes, the other pots and pans. Sitting on top of one cupboard were Mom's grey metal recipe box, two cookbooks, The Joy of Cooking and The Boston Cooking School Cook Book (better known as Fannie Farmer), and several pamphlets produced by food manufacturers, like Brer Rabbit's New Orleans Molasses Recipes.
Most of our kitchen things were nothing special. Not surprising, given that we were only a few years beyond the Great Depression and the scarcities of World War II. Plus we didn't have much money. But Mom was happy to have her blue-and-white Johnson Bros. "Historic America" china, of which I have the gravy boat and one platter, along with a Danish-made silver gravy ladle and a blue-and-white pitcher. I remember how thrilled Mom was when the gravy ladle arrived in the mail. Such small things were her treasures.
Cast iron skillets got heavy use for Dad's cornbread, Mom's fried potatoes, fried fish (trout and catties from local streams, bluegill-sunfish and bass from our neighbors' pond), steak, sausage and red-eye gravy, Dad's scrapple-and-apple, fried or scrambled eggs-Dad called them "scramboolas"-and many other things. For his cake-making, Dad bought a stainless steel mixer, which I inherited. When the mixer wore out, a few decades ago, I replaced it with a duplicate. The speed indicators have been rubbed off, but it still runs fine.
Mom did most of the day-to-day cooking. She was a reliable cook, dependable, steady. Though as a kid she resisted learning to cook, as a mom and grandma she prepared a lot of food: our weekday dinners of good filling food like soups and stews, fresh bread to greet us when we got home from school, fruit pies. Dad cooked mostly on weekends, especially the roasts we usually had for Sunday dinner. He specialized in things like fried chicken, tomato sauce and fancy cakes.
We Gleaton kids cooked too, and as the years went on, so did my kids. When I was only three I stood on a chair and beat the batter with my hand. My hand learned the feel of the batter and knew when it was time to add the next ingredient. A generation later my daughter Kharran learned to make cakes the same way, standing on a chair at the kitchen table and beating with her hand.
Though we kids learned how to make everyday rib-sticking foods, we specialized in sweets, especially as after-dinner or late night treats to fill up adolescent tummies. It was first come, first served, and we accomplished some legendary feats of eating. My brother David recalled that "John and I would make cakes late at night, sometimes an angel food and then a lemon sponge to use up the yolks. Of course we'd eat them before we went to bed." "One time I was playing hooky from school and made a Blueberry Buckle," David told me. "When it came out of the oven, I ate the whole thing. Then I made another for the family." He also recalled that when Mom tried a new recipe-Orange Rum Cake-for Dad's birthday, Liz ate most of it. Liz recalled the time she and David made an Orange Rum Cake and ate the whole thing. The traditions continued with my kids. Once John put green food dye in an angel food cake, thinking they'd be deterred by the moldy color. They ate it anyway. Another time John and one or two of my kids ate the whole of an angel food cake before the rest of us even knew it was out of the oven.
This is what my daughter Kharran wrote about The Farm's kitchen. Her memories are in sync with mine. The Queen is a family nickname for my mother.
Until 1962 the Queen's Kitchen was dominated by a big black coal stove, and always by a large clawfoot oak table whose only repose occurred when the family was asleep or away. Everything happened here. Behind the coal stove was where we dressed on chilly mornings, and then we toasted our homemade bread on long forks over the coals. In the '40s and '50s the Gleaton kids' regular after lunch summer job was sitting together around the table preparing food for canning. But usually the place buzzed with various activities: cooking, homework, paper art, knitting, reading, talking... Hudson and Maria's kids experienced this hub. Kharran baked her first cakes here, the one and only of her generation to cook on the coal stove.
Mom and Dad lived on The Farm until 1979. My kids spent a lot of time on The Farm with their Grandma and Grandpa. And that's what this family food memoir is about, those years of good eatin' and good livin' in olden times. In Grandma's-and Grandpa's-kitchen.