Sink Snacking: Helen Chappell

Sink Snacking A Secret Summer Tradition

by Helen Chappell

It’s that time of year again, when the last of the summer crops are ripe, plentiful and delicious. Sure, you’ve spent the past month dining on tomatoes, corn, cantaloupe and watermelon like the civilized person your home training taught you to be. You ate at the table, with company, and mostly used a dish and a knife and a fork. Mostly.

Watermelon, Miss Manners says, can be eaten by the slice outdoors with or without tableware. If you’re far enough outdoors, you can even have a contest to see how far a grownup person can spit watermelon seeds. It’s a contest I have yet to win. But, when it comes to sink snacking, I’m a pro. When it’s summer and all the good stuff is ripe and ready, who needs a knife, a fork and a plate when you can hang right over the kitchen sink and gnaw like a caveperson?

I’ve even been known to eat berries right off the cane, fighting off the birds every bite of the way. I’ve plucked cherry tomatoes and grapes off the vine and munched on them right there in front of everyone, since everyone else was doing the same thing.

But, like many people, including some of my most prim and proper friends and relatives, I have sinned in the food department and will probably go to Eater’s Hell for it. At least I won’t be alone. A lot of you will be there with me.

I know I am not the only person who has eaten, right over the sink, a drooling and dripping ripe tomato, lovely orange chunks of cantaloupe, bursting morsels of ripe peach, chunks of watermelon ~ yes, even cold steamed crabs left over from yesterday’s feast. After

all, picking them out and freezing that meat takes hours, and you can demolish a #2 in about four minutes if you’re really hungry.

Eating over the sink is a huge nono among well-brought-up people, especially women. Now, a man will drink right out of the orange juice container and think nothing of it, unless he’s caught. But a woman would rather get down a glass, even if she has to wash it, just for some Minute Maid.

Eating over the sink is one of summer’s guilty pleasures.

All that fresh produce will just spoil unless you eat it. And when you come in from a broiling hot

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summer day when Eastern Shore humidity turns the air into raspberry Jell-O and every breath beneath that merciless sun is an effort, well, doesn’t a fresh peach or a tomato just plucked from the vine taste great when you just lean over the sink and take that first delicious bite?

You know it does. And there’s no one else to see you doing it, because sink snacking is one of those guilty pleasures you only do when you are absolutely alone. Home training starts when we’re in the highchair, after all. You don’t want to let anyone see you with all that juice and chunk running down your face and

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dripping into your sweaty T-shirt and did you wash off all that mulch on your hands before you nuked that corn because you couldn’t wait to boil it? Of course not. But that’s your little secret. I’m not telling anyone. I’m not telling anyone how you buttered it, either.

No, this is a pleasure best indulged as a solitary hobby, like the

Hallmark Channel or a fi ve-year- old Sumo match on ESPN. Other people might question your taste or your taste, if you get my meaning. And in a day fi lled with other people and other work, there’s something just so much fun about breaking the rules, isn’t there?

There’s just something so tasty about forbidden fruit.

The sweet warmness of grapes bursting in your mouth, that crunch of skin, the explosion of melon when you hack off a bit of cantaloupe, the feels when that perfect tomato explodes in your mouth. . .

Come winter, we’ll yearn for that tomato, as opposed to the cardboard Christmas balls in the supermarket. The melons from South America, bred for travel not taste, like wet newspaper scented with a fake essential oil. Nothing will taste the same in the long, sullen months of winter, so that even the burst of a jewel-like Cutie will appease your longing for vitamin C.

Fresh produce is our reward for the endless heat, humidity and sullenness of the legendary awfulness of an Eastern Shore summer in high gear.

Gorging ourselves over the kitchen sink on these goodies is our reward. We just don’t let anyone else see us gnawing that watermelon down to the rind. It tastes better that way.

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.