My mom did not have the booming voice possessed by some of the other moms in the neighborhood, like Mrs. Fisher for instance, but nevertheless we free-ranging kids knew when it was suppertime. Maybe it was our internal dinner bell ringing; it certainly was not me monitoring a wrist watch – I didn’t have one.
I may not have realized it then but I was lucky to have both a mom and a dad around when I was growing up, and come 6:00 pm my three siblings and I would plop down at the booth table my dad had built and join my parents for the evening meal. Luckily we were skinny; the booth was tight with three people on each side. Dinner time at the Robinson household in the1960’s was old fashioned in that we sat down and ate together every night.
Mom was not exactly a natural-born cook. She was a no-nonsense, utilitarian family feeder; nothing fancy. I guess cooking was just not her thing. Or possibly it had to do with the fact that my paternal grandmother, mom’s mother-in-law, was such a knock-’em-out, drop dead chef that mom thought, “Just forget it.”
It wasn’t until years later that I realized the food I remember most fondly growing up was pretty basic. For instance, I always thought that a bowl of applesauce – straight out of a can – sprinkled with cinnamon was SUPER special. Yum! And a stalwart standby: canned spaghetti dumped into a glass casserole dish with the ubiquitous processed artificial cheese slices cut into strips and laid on top, all heated in the oven for a while and resulting in voila! Mom’s baked spaghetti.
Bologna – baloney actually – was standard menu fare on mom’s dinner table. My siblings and I were especially enamored with baloney slices cut into quarters and fried as baloney “sailboats.” And made from the same stuff as the baloney, I guess, were those Vienna Sausages. I loved those things. And Beanies and Weinies! Wow, the memories keep coming.
Anyway, dinner time was then as now a time of family meetings, of telling tales of the day, of making and discussing plans. And of laughing. It seems that at dinner time the typical sibling irritations and rivalries were put aside in lieu of lighter moods.
In fact I remember many times where a laughing attack would overtake me or one of my siblings during dinner, resulting in for instance a mouthful of milk being sprayed all over the table. Speaking of milk, I also remember untold glasses of the thick white stuff – it wasn’t skim- being knocked over and spilled, a tsunami of it spreading among the plates and utensils upon our yellow Formica table. “Catch it!” was the cry as dams of napkins were quickly put into place with little effect.
For dessert a special treat was a canned pear half in each of our own personal bowls. And “cheese-on-paper” was always a crowd pleaser. Mainly eaten as an afternoon snack, cheese-on-paper was when a slice of the aforementioned sliced cheese product was placed on a piece of aluminum foil and then placed in the oven for a few minutes, allowing the cheese to get soft and bubbly -or brownish black if we left it in the oven too long. We ate it immediately, scraping the cheese off the foil and into our mouths with a fork.
A sensational variety of bread was always to be found at our house when I was growing up. (Heavy sarcasm here.) It was either “Merita” or “Rainbow” sliced loaf, both versions were foam rubber white in consistency and appearance. And delicious. I considered a real treat to be toast made from such bread hot out of the toaster and spread with butter.
Come to think of it, another kind of bread we had sometimes were those ready-to-bake biscuits in the pop open container. Slathered with apple butter and honey, they were special indeed. There was always what seemed like a huge bottomless jar of apple butter in the refrigerator, and since we had a few bee hives from which my dad harvested honey, we always had around a jar or two of that sweet liquid gold.
Being picky eaters was certainly not an option growing up in my family. I learned to pretty much like everything put in front of me, including the heated up frozen peas, a bowl of which seemed to always be part of the evening meal.
One thing that I did not like, however, that we (my parents anyway) ate about once a month was calf’s liver. Luckily I was not required to eat it but I did taste it now and then and was amazed at how bad it tasted.
A super special dessert which mom provided for us occasionally was one of those Sara Lee ready-made orange-flavored cakes with the thin white icing. Really, I can taste it now.
Gosh, today I know how lucky I was to grow up where food was plentiful, so fortunate to eat dinner every night with my parents and sisters and brother. There was abundant love and humor. It was special.
Even if the food wasn’t so fancy.
– Johnny Robinson
