COVER STORY
Holiday
FOOD FIGHTS The holidays bring back fond memories and disagreements over what to eat
Pumpkin pie or pecan? Oyster stuffing cooked inside the bird or cornbread dressing baked in a pan? Collards or sauerkraut? Pick a side. The holidays are coming, so it’s time once again to prepare for our annual Family Food Fights. The holidays bring families together for sharing simply joys and creating timeless memories. But once Thanksgiving, Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve actually arrive, what’s on the dinner table can make or break the holiday party. The turkey, ham, turducken or tofurky may come roasted, baked or fried, but getting Grandma’s sweet potato casserole (with those crunchy little marshmallows on top) just right or preparing Aunt Mimi’s greenswith-chow-chow properly can make all the difference in how the meal
goes down. We asked regular contributors to Atlanta Senior Life for some of their own holiday food memories. They are sort of our little magazine family, after all, so we thought we’d see what holiday recollections are hidden in our cupboards. Some shared a warm-and-fuzzy tale. Others recalled holiday-defining dietary surprises, confrontations with strange new foods, cooking mishaps or hard-core kitchen competitions. Enjoy them as you prepare for your own family feast. — Joe Earle
The season for stuffing (yourself)
marshmallows on one serving, no pecans on another. After consuming massive servings, we were pretty much filled to the gills and useless for the rest of the day. We’d move to the family room to watch football. If it was chilly, there would be a fire in the fireplace. The most difficult thing would be staying awake to escape the food coma we’d just inflicted on ourselves. I must admit when I reflect on those days, I get a little misty. Memories of quite a few who are no longer with us physically, but the delicious memories remain. “Shuga, pass the peppuh sawce.”
My late wife’s family always had huge meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas. My late motherin-law, Miss Carolyn (aka “Meemommie”) was always “lodge and in chodge.” (Translate that to say, “large and in charge.” In her truly “Propuh Suhthun” pronunciations, there were few R’s.) Southern-style everything covered the holiday table: turkey, ham, dressing, gravy, sweet potato souffle, various veggies, greens of some sort, and desserts from G Daddy’s ambrosia to Aunt Mamie’s chocolate pie. Add Meemommie’s biscuits, made
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from a secret recipe, and we’re talking a family feast. There usually were about 12 of us, sometimes a few more. The children’s table was in the kitchen and was reserved for the young ones and immature adults. When we were told “dinnuh” was going to be at noon, everyone knew it actually would arrive closer to 1 or 1:30 p.m. Of course, there was always joyful chaos with kids running around and the occasional puppy trying to steal a sample. With the dressing and gravy, most diners enjoyed giblets (another word for innards), but there was usually some who had to have it giblet-free. Restrictions were requested for the souffle: no
NOVEMBER 2021 | AtlantaSeniorLife.com
— Kelly McCoy
How does a Hungarian cook fix collards? When we celebrated holidays in our small Ohio town in the 1950 and ‘60s, we knew what each other’s friends and families would do and eat. We were all proud of our backgrounds, but none more so than my family, because our grandparents were Hungarian. We kindly excused others’ habits (“Honey, she can’t help it, she’s Italian”) but lived with the smug (but always modest!) certainty that Hungarian anything was the best. For New Year’s Day, our good luck meal was always roast pork nestled atop sauerkraut sprinkled with
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