Dinner Defined

Yesterday's blog mentioned leg of lamb. I've been dreaming about it ever since. Growing up, we had leg of lamb frequently, but usually when there was a crowd for dinner, which was every night. My mother would carry the lamb out to the table like an Emmy Award, slowly placing it in front of my dad so he could carve it. That's about all my dad ever did in regard to food. He would never sink so low as to cook something. That was woman's work. Carving meat was okay, because it involved a weapon.

The luscious leg was always accompanied by mashed potatoes and gravy, and some sort of vegetable, but not the kind you see on the table today. It would more likely have been canned beans or peas, the kind you can mash up and paint your plate with. They hadn't invented broccoli when I was a child; at least I never saw it. We were more likely to be served Rutabaga, whose name also made a good jump rope jingle:

"Rutabaga, Rutabaga, where are the peas?
Step on my foot and I'll break your knees!"  Or something like that.

We also had meat pie. That meant there wasn't enough meat left for an entree so my mother just lined the baking dish with it. Then she added about 5 inches of potatoes and a pie crust. It was as dry as the Bonneville Salt Flats, so we poured catsup all over it. The same treatment was for hash, a fried lump of all the leftovers in the kitchen. My mother never got over the war rationing.

On lots of Fridays we had oysters fried in butter.  My dad loved them and he was the baconator so we treated him right. But if you didn't like oysters, tough. We had plenty of Rutabaga.

We never heard of broccoli or edamame. We thought zucchini was a rare animal from Borneo. We grew strong on fried potatoes, roast beef and squash.

I remember clearly riding downtown one day in the early 1950's with my parents and seeing a new neon sign in a restaurant window. I had no idea what it meant. "Daddy, what's pizza pie?"