7 minute read
Home Cooking: Helen Chappell
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
Home Cooking grandmother was pretty busy. My grandfather, however, was a man of hats is genetic to us, at least below imagination. the Smith and Wesson line. His daughters were named Wa-
I learned all this stuff growing up halla Arintha, Helen May (my in the matriarchy of my mother and mother!), Pearl Hazel and Aurora her sisters. Four fiercely ladylike Zora. Mom was going to be named women who each ruled the roost in Hyacinth, but my grandmother put her home, and each let her husband her foot down. Otherwise, Mom believe he was large and in charge. might be mistaken for Patricia Rut-
There was a son at either end ledge in Keeping Up Appearances. of the line of children my grand- So you can just bet, with all this parents produced early in the 20th housekeeping and baby tending, 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 Great Time To Sell
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Home Cooking By this time, it was the Depression, and barter was a part of a that all four girls learned domestic cash-strapped economy. My mothskills early and often. Four attrac- er and my Aunt Wahalla were very tive brunettes, they may not have close, so it was nor-mal that Mom gone to college, but aside from the would drop by her sister’s place usual dreary provincial prejudices after work. My mother was an acof their time and place, they were countant and a good one. But one basically smart, although some thing and another, and the next times I have to wonder. True to thing you know, my parents got their breeding, they were charac- married and had my brother and ters, every single one of them. me, and there we were.
Which brings us to the ab-solute Where we were was family dinnumber one reason you never hold ners. Now, my mother hated to a WASP festival. The food would be cook, except for her legendary awful. Just awful! lemon meringue pie, and frankly
In their defense, I think my fa- my Aunts Pearl and Aurora, bless ther might have married my moth- their hearts, were taste deaf in the er to get to my aunt’s cooking. He kitchen. Pearl could put together was a young doctor in town, a bach- that WASP specialitie de maison, elor who’d just bought a practice, string bean, mushroom soup and and my Aunt Wahalla, whose mot- Durkee’s Fried Onion Rings casto was feed the hungry and clothe serole, a dish no self-respecting the naked, started setting an extra WASP would fail to serve at wedplace for my father at the dinner dings, funerals and holidays. Dear table. Not too long married her- Aunt Aurora, well, she all but inself, and with a baby daughter, she vented the Jell-O mold. And she couldn’t resist feeding that young had a fantastic set of Fiestaware doctor in return for his services. that I would kill for to this day, and I hope my cousins are taking good care of it.
Home Cooking Maybe I didn’t appreciate it because in my family, if it was green, it
Of course, back in the day, food- was boiled into a lifeless, olive drab ieism hadn’t crept into the dreary thing the consistency and taste of provincial culture. I mean, in the seaweed. Any sign of crispness, any ’50s, pineapple upside down cake hint of taste was stewed out of it bewas considered cutting edge and fore it hit the table. And if it wasn’t maybe just a little too risque for fresh, it was emptied out of a tin can, our family. already limp and lifeless. I was thir-
The main reason a WASP festival ty before I learned about vegetable would sink like a stone would be the steamers and the pleasure of raw assheer awfulness of the cooking. A paragus. Mashed potatoes were the typical family dinner for us would only accept-able consistency. be a beautiful rump roast, left in the Now, no ethnic festival would oven until it was burned to a black- be complete without some kind of ened mass. If there was any juice bread. Peasant I am, I love breads in it, it was considered raw, and of all nations. The bread of my peopushed into the oven for another ple, however, is the snowflake roll. half hour. Roasted chicken was as Brought from the supermarket dry and tasteless as old sponges. in a package of eight, heated in
And the vegetables! Good Lord, the oven after the dissipated roast the way WASPs cooked vegetables is removed, then served in a cloth should have been a war crime. napkin placed in a bread-basket. All summer, my father’s patients Soft and mushy, it has absolutely brought us beautiful produce from no taste whatsoever. It’s like chewtheir gardens. Wonderful Big Boy ing Kleenex. tomatoes, shiny purple eggplants, And this is why, dear friends, spinach, asparagus, limas, peas, just there are no WASP festivals. Peogreat stuff that I didn’t appreciate. ple might come for the martinis, but they wouldn’t stay for the food.
Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.
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