An Indiana Sunday Dinner, Circa 1958

    This week I attended a workshop in McBride for people interested in writing a memoir.  They gave us a homework assignment:  Write about a favorite childhood meal.  After thinking about it for a while, this is what I have written so far:

    An Indiana Sunday Dinner

It was 1958, my eleven year old eyes darted to the various dishes of food arranged on the large round oak table that my Grandma Schmidt had laid out for us.  I was hungry and eager to begin the meal, so I waited impatiently for Uncle Bill to take his place around at the table with the rest of us, so Grandma could give the word to Grandpa to say the prayer.  As he began his monotone presentation, I jeopardized my place in heaven by opening my eyes during the prayer, glancing up below my bowed head, to look at the patterned china plate, piled high with pieces of fried chicken.  Its smell had set me salivating, from the time I had slid into my chair at the table.

Once Grandpa got done with the same prayer he said at every meal, the adults at the table began to pick up the steaming plates and bowls of food to circulate them around the perimeter of the table.  

“Do you want some mashed potatoes, David?” 

“Yes, please.”  Grandma Schmidt ran a tight ship, so we kids had to be quick with our “Please” and “Thank you’s” when we were in her presence.

“What piece of chicken do you want?” asked my mother.  

“Could I have a drumstick?” knowing full well that those special parts were always saved for us kids.  

“Thank you.” I repeated as the crispy brown skinned chicken leg was placed on my plate besides the mound of fluffy white mashed potatoes.”

“Gravy?”

“Yes, please.”  I took my spoon and made a quick concave indentation into my mashed potatoes; a pond to hold the thick white “milk” gravy, with a few flakes of black pepper floating on its surface.  I loved milk gravy, and it could always be depended upon whenever Grandma fried up one of the unfortunate members of her chicken flock.

“How about some corn, David?”  

“Please.”  I loved corn.  Months earlier it would have been served as corn on the cob, but this corn had been cut from the cob, frozen, and now  fried in butter and salt.  I scooped up as much as I could get with the large spoon and piled it on my plate next to the overflowing milk gravy that coated my mashed potatoes.

Next to come around were the the butter beans, a type of lima bean, which my grandparents always grew on their garden.  The broad flat pale green-colored beans swam in a white creamy sauce.  I noticed that my plate was quickly running out of useable space. 

“How about some “Tommy’s?” (My uncle’s slang for tomatoes)  

In the plate were several layers of large, fresh, juicy red tomatoes, thickly sliced and glistening, showing off their small yellowish oval seeds.  They were some of the Burpee Big Boy variety that I helped pick in Grandpa’s field.  Grandpa Schmidt made his living growing tomatoes and lettuce in his large commercial greenhouses, but this being later in the summer, the “hothouse” tomatoes were finished, and I worked picking these field tomatoes in the hot August sun as my summer job.

The tomatoes filled the small space remaining on my plate.  I glanced around to make sure everyone’s plate was full, then realizing that this was the case, I assumed had permission to finally  began forking up the delicious home-grown bounty from my grandparents farm that lay before me.

When I needed to quench my thirst from all the solid food I was shoveling into my mouth, I reached for the tall glass of milk that sat besides my plate.  It was unpasteurized milk from Lilly, my Grandpa’s milk cow. 

“Ugh,” I thought as I took the first gulp, “warm milk.” 

The milk had been poured from Grandma’s blue crockery pitcher into glasses for us kids some time ago when the table was set, so it was now room temperature, and to make things worse, during that time, a quarter inch of yellowish cream had now risen to the top.  I was not a big fan of either warm milk or cream, and so to make it palatable, I took my spoon and stirred up the milk so that the cream disappear from my view, before I drank it.  

Thirst quenched, I picked up my fork and continued to enlarge the empty spots on my plate.

At Grandma’s, it was understood that all the food one had put onto their plates had to be eaten.  When everyone’s plate was clean, Grandma would acknowledge the fact and exclaimed that clean plates meant “a sunny day tomorrow”.  

If this had been a lunch, which I usually partook of when I picked tomatoes on their farm, dessert would have been jelly bread.  I would have smeared the slice of white bread with thick swirls of homemade butter, another gift from Lilly the cow.  That would be topped with some of Grandma’s jelly.

    I had two favorites.  I loved her rich tasty grape jelly, made from the bunches of purply-blue grapes that hung from the grapevines that shaded the walkway on the west side of the house.  My other favorite was her watermelon rind jelly, which she made from left over watermelon rinds from some previous watermelon feast held outside on the lawn on a hot afternoon.  Watermelon rind jelly was tangy/sweet marmalade-like treat with reddish and yellowish-green chunks of rind in a rich sugary sauce that often dripped over the crust of the bread and ran down my hands as I ate it.

This being a Sunday dinner, Grandma Schmidt had cooked up different dessert:  Homemade chocolate pudding, which had a skin-like topping of coagulated rich tasting chocolate which formed on the top.  When I was given my green glass bowl of chocolate pudding, I was happy to see I had gotten a few pieces of the darker chocolaty skin and I quickly went to work on the pudding.  Too soon I was scraping the sides of my bowl with the spoon, trying to eke out every last bit of the rich smooth chocolate delicacy.

After all these years, in my memory I can still hear the voices of our family around the big oak table and can still taste that delicious food my grandfather had grown and my grandmother had prepared.  Those foods still remain among my favorites.

My paintings can be seen at:  davidmarchant.ca