Food: An American Icon

On Easter, after our bi-annual church attendance, Mom would prepare a baked ham with new red potatoes with fresh green peas in white sauce, which is still one of my all-time favorites treats. The white sauce mashed up with the potatoes and sweet peas made a creamy, salty taste treat. Spaghetti was another favorite at our house. It wasn’t a particularly Italian version like my husband’s family loves, but served with garlic bread, couldn’t be beat. One time I was helping her place the plates of spaghetti on the table and one serving started to slide off the plate. I whipped the plate back the other way and the spaghetti went the other way, then back and forth until the entire plateful landed on the new, gold brocade seat of our dining chair. It was never the same again.

Then there was A&W. We also had a drive-in restaurant called Dog “n Suds. Both had great food, but there was nothing like a frosty mug of bubbly root beer. We often ordered a basket of French fries or onion rings when we pulled in with our dates on summer nights. They had a fine shrimp basket, too, always served in a red plastic basket lined with white paper, and I”m still a sucker for the shrimp plate in almost any restaurant.

It’s hard to get a warm, fuzzy feeling about vegetables, but my dad was a great vegetable soup chef. He always made it with oxtails and the broth took on the combined flavors of everything he could find in the vegetable drawer. Probably another “poor” food. Sometimes Dad whipped up a batch of macaroni and cheese for Friday nights back in the days when good Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. I guess some still don’t but it’s a practice that has fallen a bit to the wayside. The macaroni was always best with Velveeta cheese, but occasionally he would discover an old, hard chunk of Colby cheese in the fridge and cut it into squares and try to blend it with the sauce. Sadly, those chunks rarely melted and we shuffled off to the side of the plate by us kids. “Eat that,” he would urge. “It’s fine, it’s just a little dry,” he’d say, popping a piece in his mouth. Our grimaces said it all.

I know the world over that favorite foods evoke and make for great memories. No matter what woes beset us, it seems a nice plate of comfort food can go a long way to making things better. Speaking of which, I think I’ll have French toast for breakfast! Bon appetit!