Handing down the taste of fullness
I have a taste for certain ancient foods. Foods I grew up with. Foods handed down, too ancient for any of my friends to have seen them on their tables. Too old, even, to be written down, the routine of them burned into our muscles, the pattern of our footsteps from refrigerator to stove and back again. Foods we call home for at six o'clock when we aren't quite sure how much of the next ingredient to add. Concoctions that would feed a farmer's family with a loaf of bread, two eggs, a few strips of bacon and just one cup of milk. Or would spread a pound of hamburger onto sixteen hamburger buns.
They have names like Owl's Nests and Russian Fluff, and a taste of ancient farm kitchens, wood stoves, and grandmas in yellowed photographs. Egg Butter. We'd carefully spread a thin coat of this golden sauce to the edges of our toast, because that was the way our parents did it for us before we were old enough to spread our own. And at the end of the meal we were full. Not wanting, not to be pitied, not afraid.
Even today I bite my tongue as my husband spreads what I think is too much on his slices of toast. Is it possible that the batch I make for the three of us once fed us all?
Who knows if my mother served those meals because she had to, or because it was just what we ate on a Sunday night or Tuesday morning breakfast when she had forgotten to take anything else out of the freezer? I don't.
And my son won't know the taste of scarcity in those ancient foods. Just the taste of fullness and the certainty, as real as the crunch of toast, and the scent of bacon, and the determination of 161 years of grandmas at the stove, that it will be enough.
They have names like Owl's Nests and Russian Fluff, and a taste of ancient farm kitchens, wood stoves, and grandmas in yellowed photographs. Egg Butter. We'd carefully spread a thin coat of this golden sauce to the edges of our toast, because that was the way our parents did it for us before we were old enough to spread our own. And at the end of the meal we were full. Not wanting, not to be pitied, not afraid.
Even today I bite my tongue as my husband spreads what I think is too much on his slices of toast. Is it possible that the batch I make for the three of us once fed us all?
Who knows if my mother served those meals because she had to, or because it was just what we ate on a Sunday night or Tuesday morning breakfast when she had forgotten to take anything else out of the freezer? I don't.
And my son won't know the taste of scarcity in those ancient foods. Just the taste of fullness and the certainty, as real as the crunch of toast, and the scent of bacon, and the determination of 161 years of grandmas at the stove, that it will be enough.
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