Lucky us – born in the 40’s and 50’s, we missed the food lines and scarcities of the 30’s and ate our way through childhood and young adulthood unburdened by guilt associations of cholesterol, additives, and fast foods. Good food, plentiful and proximate, was a major part of the total experience. Could you go to Cedar Point and not have a candy apple and a Belgian waffle? Didn’t Mary’s specialize in cold creamy real chocolate Eskimo pies? Didn’t Bedford Springs and Heilman’s and Elyria Country Club compete for our attentions to their roast beef dinners and chocolate sundaes? We wafted to school on West Side Bakery smells and walked home with huge donuts and cookies bought without benefit of money, credit cards, or signature. We could see the 9th street butcher cut Grandma’s chops and smell the good paper in which Paul Aquilla wrapped yet another chicken leg for Grandma or tenderloin for Mother. We could mark the seasons by the interiors of Fred’s and Faroh’s and marked time waiting for the horse who kept his tail up from Lorain Creamery and the trucks of the bakery man, the Charlie Chip man, the pop man and the many Reagan’s delivery boys who unloaded everything from cases of Campbell’s Bean with Bacon Soup to Planter’s Nuts on our blue kitchen table. Surely we could smell Sprang’s donuts right through the TV set. Fishfrys were worth a trip to Amherst, jawbreakers and Maryjanes worth a walk to Brownells and Mrs. T.’s city chicken worth having a baby sitter. But it was in several kitchens and breakfast and dining rooms that our real experimental eating took place.
Only the oldest of us can remember the comfortableness of sitting at the table in the middle of the huge kitchen in Grandma Moriarty’s house. It was many steps from sink to stove in that kitchen and further yet to the refrigerator. Grandma M was an elegant white-haired lady – a true lady – always powdered and aproned, who made beautiful pies and wonderfully rich fluffy white mashed potato mountains for her grandchildren. Early morning breakfast with a tall, tailored, seemingly stern but kind and soft-spoken grandfather was a very warm milk toast sprinkled with salt. It was in this house that our mother grew up as Sissy and where Grandma told us stories of tornadoes and relatives and a $5 bill being accidentally thrown in the fire. The favorite intrigues of this house were the daybed in the den, the circus peanut candy in the buffet and the covered crystal dish in the refrigerator with Grandma’s insulin and hypodermic.
On 7th street, Lollie’s small kitchen with refrigerator annex was the setting for many hours of our “chewing the fat”. We rarely left there without putting something in our stomachs even if there wasn’t “a decent things in the house to eat”. Grandpa always seemed to dine well and contentedly there at his odd hour mealtimes – on steak and fried bread for breakfast and on bermuda onion sandwiches with mayonnaise for anytime after the breakfast hour. The epitome of homemade was served in Grandma’s dining room – fried chicken and chili and pot roast, lemon meringue pie and homemade white bread with lots of butter and jam. Hot cocoa made from scratch on cold nights and lemonade made from lemons on cold summer days, cookies you had to dunk and Ritz crackers from the stove – and “boys oh boys” the people – will never be forgotten.
But at home – on West 22nd Street and Lakeview Drive and later Lake Road – where the food was the best – was also the place where the food was the least of what we got. There, we drank our milk from jelly glasses and spilled a lot of it, ate a lot of spaghetti, and brought back from school sour and smelly lunchboxes. There we had Boston coolers for bed snacks, 15 varieties of BLT’s for Saturday lunch, and Rice Krispies when Mother served her epicurean liver and bacon and onions. We had fresh strawberries with powdered sugar for Easter breakfast, homemade fudge for Christmas, special birthday cakes and parties on Minton China and Mother’s rendition of The Three Little Pigs when our father couldn’t be home for dinner. We loved chocolate pudding made from a box and Pepperidge Farm and Sara Lee, but we loved without end Mary Louise, who was once accused of having hair that smelled like peanut butter.
“That was very gratifying, dear,” was said more than once of Mother’s dinners – by one who should have known. If we didn’t know then, we do now, that more than our stomachs were gratified at those meals. In the midst of 6 o’clock chaos and bickerings were attentions to details of beauty and gentility and ceremony that could not be overlooked. At crowded and hot summer lunches and tired after school snack times were values we didn’t taste but swallowed whole – values of generosity and welcome and hospitality, of the fairness and equality with which all who were there sat down. In lunch boxes, we found not just thermoses of bean soup or hot dogs with properly condimented crackers and buns on the side, but unwearying efforts to please and delight. Examples of caring and thoughtfulness and traditions of family and meaning came out of Mother’s kitchen.
We give Thee thanks, oh Almighty God, for these and all Thy benefits.