What Fed Me. What Sustains Me.
When I was growing up, I thought that my mother was the best cook in the neighborhood.Lots of sons remember their mother's cooking as the best. But my mother's cooking "? which was commonplace "? was really the best in my neighborhood.
Through the 1950s, I lived among families who had known both the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, among housewives who knew food only as the opposite of going hungry, and among husbands who insisted on eating poorly because they had been poor for most of their life. On the tract house plains, daily meals reflected what you stubbornly held on to. And if you ate to remember, many of those memories were of loss.
As a percentage of family incomes, food in the 1950s was expensive. But on a $100-a-week paycheck you could feed a family. The results were hardly memorable if all you knew was Wonder Bread and margarine, a beef roast cooked dark and hard, canned string beans, mashed potatoes, and strawberry Jell-O for desert. My mother made almost the same meal, but the meat was savory, the side dishes were respectable, and there was always a salad (served at the beginning, which initially puzzled my New York-born parents).
My family's food habits were unfamiliar in other ways, too. Because my father worked in Los Angeles and rode the bus, we ate at 7:00 p.m. or even later, when everyone in the neighborhood ate dinner at about 5:00 p.m. My parents, my brother, and I always ate dinner together. Dinner was always served with two vegetables.
My mother cooked plain food, untouched by the recipes in women's magazines or even in the wartime edition of Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking kept in the cabinet over the refrigerator. My mother cooked the same meals in weekly rotation for decades, punctuated by the obligatory dinners for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, when we used her wedding silverware.
It was rote cooking "? measured out in cans of Hunt's tomato paste, packs of Birdseye frozen Brussels sprouts, and pounds of stew meat "? but my mother treated the ingredients with enough respect that they always seemed more than just nourishment. My brother's friends and mine "? tasting medium-rare roast beef for the first at my house "? always fell in love with my mother.
It's as if my family and the other families on my block ate on two different continents, the width of a dinner table apart.
My family ate out, too, and it seems it me that we might have eaten out more often than some did. We ate at local places, at Hody's Family Restaurantin Lakewood Center. It was one of many proto-Googie restaurants designed by Wayne McAllister. And if we didn't dine at Hody's, we might have gone to Clifton's Cafeteria at the mall or Manno's Restaurant on South Street or the Clock Coffee Shop on Lakewood Boulevard or Sam's Seafoodon Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach.
I ordered lobster thermidor once at Sam's, too young to know what I was getting into. When I didn't like the rich, rank stink of simmered cheese and cream, my parents ordered me something else, despite the extra cost of another dinner, and said nothing of it. A meal, even for a foolish kid, was meant to satisfy.
My parents gave me many gifts when I was growing up. This one I'll always remember. It sustains me still.
(A different, longer version of this essay appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2009.)
The image on this page was made by Flickr user Tim Murtaugh. It was used under a Creative Commons license.