Food Times and Candyboots

posted 10/05/2006
My parents were Old World Europeans who had been caught, cumulatively, in the two Great Wars, the Holocaust, the Great Depression in America and the poverty of post-war Europe. Having lived through hungry times, they never quite trusted, decades later, that food was plentiful or that its availability could be relied upon.

The other result of all of this deprivation was that, lacking any essential ingredients, they never learned to cook. They both had a fundamental understanding that food had to be heated or boiled or fried or baked. But to make it to our dinner table, the food had to come in some sort of instant form - canned or powdered or frozen or packaged.

Overlay that with a Slavic fondness for sausages and processed meats, and we had a diet only a refugee from a former Soviet Bloc country could appreciate. For example, growing up I ate headcheese (a highly peppered luncheon meat made from the compressed fatty meat scraps found on the head of a hog - you're glad I cleared that up for you, eh?) on rye bread with a glass of full-fat buttermilk.. If you listen closely, you can hear arteries all over San Juan County slamming shut just reading that.

A representative meal would start with greens with hot bacon fat, vinegar and sugar drizzled over the top (which.is, oddly enough, pretty good). The second course included obligatory canned sauerkraut (not that fresh sauerkraut is a huge improvement) with fried Polish sausage or pickled sausage ring and instant mashed potatoes, followed by a dish of canned prunes in syrup.

Given my upbringing, I was unable to identify a peach on a third grade comprehension test, having never seen one at home. Time did not improve our meals…

When I was in college, I invited a friend home during Thanksgiving break. Knowing that my parents were naturalized, she was curious what kind of foods we had for our holiday meal. Bless her...I think she was expecting to hear something vaguely Germanic sounding like "kringle" or "schmetterling" or "gezundheit". Or, maybe we served a traditional Bohemian Forest dish like "wild weasel with chestnuts" or "boar chops with bladderwort gravy." Whatever her expectations, I did not want to give her false hope that her Thanksgiving dinner with us would be anything short of inedible.

"Well, if I am correct, my dad will open up a family-size can of Spam. He will slice it and fry this up in his electric skillet in his workshop because, as he likes to say, 'women don't know how to handle meat!' My mother will be slaving away in the kitchen boiling a pot of instant egg noodles. My father will carve the Spam into tiny bits, and the noodles and Spam will be combined in a large bowl. Ketchup will be added. We call this dish "Spam and Noodles" and it's a holiday favorite. We will listen to polka music while we eat, and there may be Del Monte fruit cocktail. And we will be grateful, because we couldn't get Spam during the War." (Although I suspect that this was not true...I think you probably COULD get Spam during the War. Email me if you would like a copy of this recipe.)

My friend was certain that I was making this up and that my mother, at least, was going to create a memorable homemade German feast. My friend was mistaken.

Even though I was an unfortunate victim of my parents' culinary shortcomings, I'm not sure that the rest of America was eating so well in the 60s and 70s either. To prove my point, let me refer you to www.Candyboots.com. There you will find photos of Weight Watchers recipe cards, circa 1974, that will not only entertain and astonish, but will have you reaching for a packet of gelatin and your parfait glass.

I believe that Wendy McClure, webmaster of Candyboots.com, found the cards in her mother's house. She recognized them as an important piece of culinary Americana from a time when the Tiki Lounge was oh-so-chic and everyone's mom was trying to slim down with Tab and Metrical. To visit this site and scroll through the recipes is like a walk down Just-Add-Water-and-Stir lane (there is a recipe book available).

Highlights include Fluffy Mackerel Pudding (fluffy?), Fish Balls (according to McClure, "the fisherman would like us to know that he has an impressive set of buoys too"), Jellied Tomato Refresher, Chilled Celery Log and Frankfurter Spectacular (!). The complete set will leave you not only delighted, but a little bit nauseated as well.

The real joy of this site is the incredible food design… never have you seen such unappealing food displayed in such an absurd effort to create palatability. One seldom sees food enhanced by the presence of a small ceramic cheetah posed next to the serving dish.

Had you forgotten the craze of making Jello molds and coordinating the color of the Jello to the color of whatever you were adding into it? (I refer you to Rosy Perfection Salad on Candyboots, which appears to be shredded red cabbage in Black Cherry Jello.) The average cook knew how to put strawberries in red Jello, or green grapes into green Jello. But the true genius lay in mixing foods into Jello that had, according to flavor, no business being there.

At my university, the Jello standard was innovative as well as economical…the cafeteria cooks combined the leftover vegetable (say green peas) with the similarly colored (lime) Jello. In this way, yesterday's niblet corn would resurface in today's lemon Jello mold for a colorful salad option.

Despite fast foods, pesticides, mercury, hydrogenated fats, high fructose corn syrup and GMOs, these may be the best of times to eat in America. I have had people of a younger generation, who have never been exposed to canned, pink "pork shoulder" ask me what Spam tastes like. My answer was, "It tastes like Spam." Although, after admiring Candyboots, I want to say "It's SPAM-TACULAR!"

No one ever asks what headcheese tastes like. I can't think why.

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Ingrid is currently living and respectably employed in Austin, Texas with a firm specializing in environmental law. She hopes to get back home to the San Juan Islands next spring to stay.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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