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

The season for stuffing (yourself)

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 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 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

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.”

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 brown sugar and served with rye bread. So, when I moved to Atlanta, I was shocked that I could find only a few pork roasts and dusty cans of sauerkraut at the supermarket.

But I married a Southern boy, and he requested black eyed peas, collard greens and cornbread … so, well, I tried.

I bought a huge bunch—a shrub? –of collards. On New Year’s morning, I sleepily stood at the sink and started to wash the greens—until a real, live grasshopper hopped out.

I hate grasshoppers.

I hate grasshoppers the way Indiana Jones hates snakes.

I threw the greens out the door.

For decades, my husband has had his yearly collards from a can.

I will say that last year was a breakthrough of sorts because

Thanksgiving dinner. But differed on the dressing. My brother favored traditional dressing without too many add-on ingredients. I preferred much of the same, only with the addition of oysters, which a girlfriend’s father introduced to me when I was in high school.

Our disagreement turned into an annual competition to see whose dressing my mother would make each Thanksgiving. She was firm that she would make only one; she did not care which one, but only one.

We decided to hold an annual competition to decide whose favorite dressing would grace the table. We challenged one another in such sports as Wiffle Ball, throwing a football into a 50-gallon trashcan from 50 yards, dice, golf, putt-putt, bowling, and just about anything else we could dream up.

Publix carried triple washed, shredded (did I say triple washed?), bagged collard greens, and I cooked them with some broth and ham, and they were mostly edible.

Michele Ross

A brotherly battle over oysters

My younger brother and I grew up to be competitive. He is 10 years my junior, so his competitive spirit was sharpened by my prodding and olderbrother abuse.

As we grew older, we shared a love of food, especially

Our last competition took place on a cold November afternoon at my house. The contest was cornhole, that game where you throw a bean bag through a hole cut in a slanted board. We played three rounds, complete with bickering over rules and close calls. My cornhole game was strong that day and I broke the tie with a couple of well-placed shots. It would be oysters.

On Thanksgiving Day, we gathered, as most families do, compared kids, jobs, politics to start the argument, and whatever continued on page 10 continued from page 9 else. I gave myself a healthy dose of oyster dressing and passed the bowl.

“No thanks,” my brother said. “I’m going with green-bean casserole.”

Early the next day our wives headed to the madness of Black Friday. My brother and I headed out for a game of golf. When we finished, we packed the clubs in our cars and said goodbye.

He told me he had a gift for me. He handed me an envelope, smiled, and was off. I got in the car and opened the envelope. Inside was a wrinkled plastic wrapper for a can of Rocky Mountain Oysters and a note: “Your move.”

Steve Rose

Wisdom of the sages: Grannies do battle over holiday dressing

My grandmothers had very different recipes for making holiday dressing. And, yes, it’s cornbread dressing baked in a pan, not stuffed in the bird – which is just disgusting. If you consider Stove Top a suitable alternative, delete me from your phone and social media.

My maternal grandmother, nicknamed Moom Moom, made very traditional cornbread dressing, starting with a skillet of buttermilk cornbread. She added chicken broth, eggs, onions, salt, pepper, butter, and some ripped up pieces of Sunbeam white bread to help “hold it all together.” The result was always a perfectly browned top and a super moist interior about two or three inches thick.

My paternal grandmother, Granny Kelley, followed a similar recipe but added two ingredients I could not abide by: sage and celery. What a way to ruin a good pan of dressing! I could live with the celery if it was finely diced, but sage just overpowered the concoction.

When the families came together for holiday meals every year, there was always an argument over sage vs. no sage in the dressing. Some family members were adamant that sage was an essential ingredient, while others – like me – thought they were crazy.

Over the years, Moom Moom’s dressing started to become the favorite, especially after Granny Kelley became more liberal with her use of sage, seemingly out of spite. Even the sage lovers started to drift toward Moom Moom’s pan – so much so that eventually she had to make two.

When asked about the family’s preference for Moom Moom’s dressing, Granny Kelley would suck on her dentures and diplomatically say, “Folks like what they like.” But I caught her more than once dishing up a big hunk of Moom Moom’s dressing when she thought no one was looking.

Collin Kelley

Forget the turkey!

I was about 10 years old when my Mama stopped having turkey for Thanksgiving at our old home on Johns Island, S.C. We would have chicken instead, she declared. She never gave a real reason, but I’m pretty sure I know why.

First, some background: Both Mama and I had the same gastric complaint, what some called “weak stomach.” My Daddy, three brothers and sister seemed not to be bothered by it. People with the condition, we all knew, tended to get sick in the stomach by just the sight of gross things like rats, roaches, blood and worms. Even the mere mention of them could make us lose our appetites.

My Uncle Bubba may have contributed to her ban on turkey. Bubba, Mama’s brother, and his wife had stopped by the house for a visit a few weeks before Thanksgiving.

It was a pleasant day and we all sat on the front porch. The women were sipping iced tea and chatting about what they would have for the holiday when my uncle interrupted and said that he once read a hilarious story in a tabloid newspaper about Turkey Day. A disgruntled café cook in Texas, seeking revenge against his bosses for docking his pay, he recounted, secretly substituted a roasted buzzard in place of turkey and served it to unsuspecting Thanksgiving Day diners — which caused them to gag when they took a bite. They wanted the cook arrested, but he skipped town and was never seen again.

“They ate a danged buzzard,” my uncle said with a chuckle. “But buzzards and turkeys do look a lot alike.” Mama, though, with her queasy stomach, seemed to turn a little pale. “Bubba,” she said, “let’s talk about something else.”

It might have ended there, except that a few days later Mama was driving my sister and me and one of our cousins to church. Then, up ahead, we saw a large dark mass alongside the rural, two-lane road. “Buzzards,“ I said.

Mama slowed down. As we approached, the heavy vultures lifted themselves away from their roadside meal. “They look like turkeys, fattening up for Thanksgiving,” our cousin joked. Mama clearly was perturbed. “That’s not nice, son,” she said. But it was shortly after that when Mama announced that continued on page 12