FROM WHERE I SIT Glorious Grease Oct. 3, 2013 Pat DeKok Spilseth
The government’s food pyramid forgot about flavor. Everyone knows that grease adds flavor to a dish. I understand the importance of fruits, vegetables, seed and grains, but what about tasty flavors? Butter, oil, sour cream, and cheese are key ingredients that add flavor.
Grease was an important part of my family’s meals: it was the essential ingredient in our daily dinners and suppers and all the lunches we had in between. My favorite meal was when Mom fried lean sidepork, salted it heavily, and fried it to a crispy crunch in hot, snapping grease. Every mouth watered at the sound of sidepork sizzling in grease in Mom’s black cast iron frying pan. Though grease left telltale blotches on her rickrack trimmed bib apron, and our kitchen floor got a bit sticky and slippery with the grease splatters, the mess was worth it.
Dinnertime was noisy. We crunched and chewed crisp side pork, savoring every salty bite. Sidepork was accompanied by chunky white Idaho boiled potatoes smothered with Mom’s homemade milk gravy and canned applesauce. Yum...that meal tasted better than a $100 steak dinner! I preferred a homemade meal of sidepork rather than fine dining at Andy’s Fireside Club in Alexandra, our once-a-year treat.
Mom insisted that we eat some vegetables. Not many fresh fruits and veggies were available in rural Minnesota in the Fifties and Sixties. We ate canned green beans in a casserole with mushroom soup, soggy green peas and corn nibblets canned by the Jolly Green Giant or Del Monte. A good selection of canned veggies were available at Bob’s Meat Market or Harry’s Corner Grocery, just across the street from the jail and courthouse.
Maybe veggies might have had more flavor if Mom hadn’t boiled them to a soggy mush. She made sure everything was good fully because she was deathly afraid of food-borne sicknesses. After all, she had to look out for the jail prisoners’ health as well as her family’s.
Iceberg lettuce was the only lettuce available at the grocery stores. We didn’t know about those exotic romaine or bib lettuces. We didn’t have a vegetable garden at the jail. My parents were too busy to plant and tend a garden in addition to supervising the sheriff’s office with its two-way radio, the phones, cleaning our large living quarters and cooking three meals a day for the prisoners.
Though she wasn’t big on digging in the dirt, outside our kitchen door Mom did grow red Oriental poppies and pink, lavender and white sweet peas that crawled up the chicken wire fencing by our back door steps.
Mom learned cooking when she was a farm kid with a widowed mother and five brothers outside Starbuck, MN. She learned healthy meal planning when she attended high school at “Cow College” in Morris. She worked as a helper to other farm families to earn money to live in the school’s dormitory at what is now the University of Minnesota, Morris campus. She learned homemaking skills like cooking, healthy meal planning, sewing and baking. In the Thirties, family meals were of utmost important as most girls became wives and mothers after graduation. Mom learned to “dress” a salad: a green lettuce leaf was opened and filled with a pale pear from canned fruit jars. The salad would be decorated with a dab of Miracle Whip mayonnaise, chopped walnuts and a red cherry on top. Her salads looked like an ice cream cone with a fancy topping. It filled the latest government food pyramid requirements of fruit and greens.
Being raised on a farm, both Mom and Dad insisted that we use real butter. No margarine for us, until the prices went sky-high. Not able to afford the real stuff, we learned to massage the plastic margarine bag with our hands and burst the red bubble in the middle, making the white margarine turn yellow. It almost looked like real butter. Farmers wouldn’t permit margarine to be packaged yellow: that would make margarine look like real butter. Farmers wanted to sell their product, not the imitation stuff.
Though Mom baked loaves of fluffy, homemade white bread every week, it was a treat when we got to buy Wonder Bread at the store. Those happy-looking packages of red, blue and white polka dots promised to “made healthy bodies eight ways.” I don’t think the company ever listed the ways, but we believed what the package said. Store bought bread was a time-saver for Mom. Weeky, she would stand at our Formica kitchen table to knead pasty, white dough and bake at least four pans of browned loaves with an extra coating of butter to make the crusts glossy.
My parents believed everything was better with lots of butter, especially pastries. Mom was “dessert queen” at the jail, a title I’ve inherited in my neighborhood. Like my mom Esther, I love to bake sweet treats, but I don’t have the amount of company she and Dad had at the jail. She served coffee and pastries three times a day. Often she’d remark, “I wish I had a nickel for every cup of coffee I’ve served.” She loved serving coffee and cookies or cake to the County Courthouse workers many morning at 10AM and afternoon coffee and treats at 3PM. Our kitchen table at the jail usually had at least five people licking Mom’s chocolate frosting from their fingers or munching carrot cookies with sweet, runny, orange icing. At Christmas time she served homemade butterballs and sour cream cookies plus deep-fried glazed doughnuts. Every recipe called for fresh farm butter, white sugar, white flour and eggs.
We hale and hearty Scandinavians were raised on white food and grease. To this day, we still want to taste the good flavors that only grease can add. 984 words
