Helen Chappell - October 2011

 

Home Cooking

by

Helen Chappell

There’s a good reason there are no ethnic festivals for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. For one thing, WASPS are hardly festive. We celebrate by mixing a cocktail and feeling smug, which doesn’t exactly bring ’em out into the streets. Our quaint native dances, the foxtrot and clumsily lurching around the floor like Frankenstein with a bad case of poison ivy to the strains of Nirvana, are not fun to do and are, Lord knows, painful to watch.
Nor do our national costumes seem all that bright and colorful. Both men and women are clothed in khaki pants and powder blue shirts, 24/7, 365.
You can tell our womenfolk from the men, in the summer at least, by their insistence on wearing cute straw hats. Yes, I have two myself. I know, I know, but love of straw hats is genetic to us, at least below the Smith and Wesson line.
I learned all this stuff growing up in the matriarchy of my mother and her sisters. Four fiercely ladylike women who each ruled the roost in her home, and each let her husband believe he was large and in charge.
There was a son at either end of the line of children my grandparents produced early in the 20th century, but it was the girls who mattered, it seemed to me.
My grandfather was lapsed Old Order Amish, an orphan who had run away to escape mistreatment. My grandmother was a farm girl. He swept her off her feet with considerable charm and a job as a lineman for the phone company. Yes, just like the Jimmy Webb song!
Those were the days right after the Great War, when kids were coming into the towns from the farms, looking for a better, or at least a more interesting, life.
I imagine with all those kids to raise and a house to look after, my grandmother was pretty busy. My grandfather, however, was a man of imagination.
His daughters were named Wahalla Arintha, Helen May (my mother!), Pearl Hazel and Aurora Zora. Mom was going to be named Hyacinth, but my grandmother put her foot down. Otherwise, Mom might be mistaken for Patricia Rutledge in Keeping Up Appearances.
So you can just bet, with all this housekeeping and baby tending, that all four girls learned domestic skills early and often. Four attractive brunettes, they may not have gone to college, but aside from the usual dreary provincial prejudices of their time and place, they were basically smart, although sometimes I have to wonder. True to their breeding, they were characters, every single one of them.
Which brings us to the absolute number one reason you never hold a WASP festival. The food would be awful. Just awful!
In their defense, I think my father might have married my mother to get to my aunt’s cooking. He was a young doctor in town, a bachelor who’d just bought a practice, and my Aunt Wahalla, whose motto was feed the hungry and clothe the naked, started setting an extra place for my father at the dinner table. Not too long married herself, and with a baby daughter, she couldn’t resist feeding that young doctor in return for his services.
By this time, it was the Depression, and barter was a part of a cash-strapped economy. My mother and my Aunt Wahalla were very close, so it was normal that Mom would drop by her sister’s place after work. My mother was an accountant and a good one. But one thing and another, and the next thing you know, my parents got married and had my brother and me, and there we were.
Where we were was family dinners. Now, my mother hated to cook, except for her legendary lemon meringue pie, and frankly my Aunts Pearl and Aurora, bless their hearts, were taste deaf in the kitchen. Pearl could put together that WASP specialitie de maison, stringbean, mushroom soup and Durkee’s Fried Onion Rings casserole, a dish no self-respecting WASP would fail to serve at weddings, funerals and holidays. Dear Aunt Aurora, well, she all but invented the Jell-O mold. And she had a fantastic set of Fiestaware that I would kill for to this day, and I hope my cousins are taking good care of it.
Of course, back in the day, foodie-ism hadn’t crept into the dreary provincial culture. I mean, in the ’50s, pineapple upside down cake was considered cutting edge and maybe just a little too risque for our family.
The main reason a WASP festival would sink like a stone would be the sheer awfulness of the cooking. A typical family dinner for us would be a beautiful rump roast, left in the oven until it was burned to a blackened mass. If there was any juice in it, it was considered raw, and pushed into the oven for another half hour. Roasted chicken was as dry and tasteless as old sponges.
And the vegetables! Good Lord, the way WASPs cooked vegetables should have been a war crime. All summer, my father’s patients brought us beautiful produce from their gardens. Wonderful Big Boy tomatoes, shiny purple eggplants, spinach, asparagus, limas, peas, just great stuff that I didn’t appreciate.
Maybe I didn’t appreciate it because in my family, if it was green, it was boiled into a lifeless, olive drab thing the consistency and taste of seaweed. Any sign of crispness, any hint of taste was stewed out of it before it hit the table. And if it wasn’t fresh, it was emptied out of a tin can, already limp and lifeless. I was thirty before I learned about vegetable steamers and the pleasure of raw asparagus. Mashed potatoes were the only acceptable consistency.
Now, no ethnic festival would be complete without some kind of bread. Peasant I am, I love breads of all nations. The bread of my people, however, is the snowflake roll.
Brought from the supermarket in a package of eight, heated in the oven after the dissipated roast is removed, then served in a cloth napkin placed in a breadbasket. Soft and mushy, it has absolutely no taste whatsoever. It’s like chewing Kleenex.
And this is why, dear friends, there are no WASP festivals. People might come for the martinis, but they wouldn’t stay for the food.