If Only We Could Eat Together...

Many of my writing seem to be focused on matters of the kitchen... the tools required to make comfort food... the devices that draw one to the warmth and creativity of the kitchen.  Cooking, after all, is one's attempt to provide nourishment and pleasure to friends and family living together in a difficult world.  Preparing a meal is a time-honored activity that involves sharing and gift giving at its core.  Sharing and gift giving... quite a concept when simply talking about a meal.

One thing I need to guard against As I ramble on is to not barrage you with stories from "the good old days" of my youth.  There were some joyous moments back then but also a pile of rather dark days that have been deftly suppressed   And, if one ever gets into a discussion about the days-gone-by with a history buff, they will take pains to bring out all of the reasons why those days were not so good after all - the cold war,  the Korean War, assassinations, nuclear proliferation, Vietnam, etc.  As seen through the eyes of a 10 year old, however, life could not have been more ordered and perfect.

This writing will have a tangential relationship with cooking and food but will dwell primarily on what I see as a basic child rearing and family values issue - the lost art of the meal.  Rather than preach or admonish I will simply relay the joy (and sometimes pain) of sitting around a table and being very much together with my immediate family.

• The Setting: Wallingford, CT - CIRCA 1957
• Immediate Family: Father (Ron), Mother (Jan - polio victim in a wheel chair), Sister (Kathy), Me (Davy), Collie Dog (Lassie - of course)
• Extended Family: Maternal Grandmother (Nanny), Grandfather (Pa)

Our meals were taken (yep... that's how it was put) every night at the same time; about 5:30.  As my family was living with Nanny and Pa, there were six of us gathered around a large claw foot oak table just about every evening.  On Sundays, our "big" meal of the week took place mid-day; we all assembled around the same table, however, there were usually many more relatives squeezed in.

So where is the centerpiece of today's lifestyle - the TV?  Only a minor intrusion in 1957, it was a little black & white set that was normally set to the OFF position for most of the day and it was certainly not ever on during our evening meal.  It was also far on the other side of the house in the living room - not able to be seen or heard from our table.

The TV was reserved for those special adult occasions - 30 minutes of "Douglas Edwards and the News" each evening or "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Sunday night.  TV was very much regulated for the children with early Saturday morning cartoons and cowboy shows being the focus.  Ahhhhh... the Lone Ranger, Abott & Costello, Roy Rogers, and (of course) The Bugs Bunny Show!      

 

OK... let's talk about how our mealtime unfolded... generalities are required:

Pre-meal Activities:

• Still well before women's rights kicked in, Nanny was usually cooking in the kitchen with my mom.  Pa worked in the living room at his shaky card table desk tallying up his daily silverware sales figures while listening to the news on the radio.  My father was making his way home from the factory - yep a real blue collar family.  Just before supper, sister Kathy and I were puttering about - doing homework if school was in session or washing up after a long day of outside play if in the summer.  The family is together - poised and ready to make their way to the table directly at the appointed time - 5:30.

The Meal-time Logistics:

• All of us would be called to the table - usually by Pa's raspy voice; the reminder for hand washing always went out.  We all sat down in our appointed places with Nanny at the kitchen end of the table and Pa at the opposite end or head of the table.  That seat was always reserved for the 'elder' so on Sundays when my Great Grandparents were alive, Grandpa Craig assumed that seat. 

• The meal is set in the middle of the table with the food piled high in individual bowls or on platters... now we call this serving food "family style."  Back then, that is just how we did it.  The food was passed around from one to another; a very sharing gesture when you think of it.  We had a single meal, single menu, and all food was to be at least tried.  Peas?  Yuck!  "Take 5 of them and eat every last one!"

The Menu:

• The menu usually included meat, potato, a canned vegetable, Wonder Bread, and lots of butter... all washed down with a tall glass of whole milk.  An alternative might be a casserole - mac and cheese or goulash were favorites in this house.  Surprisingly, meat was not the centerpiece of every meal, fish was almost never served, and we actually ate LIVER!  And, of course, there was always a dessert - pie, cake, rice pudding, or red shimmering fruit jello.  

• We children were encouraged to eat every morsel and were admonished for any food left on the plate with comments about how the "starving children in Africa" would appreciate the scraps that remained.  The dessert was the first bribe I ever experienced and it almost always worked, "If you don't eat your peas... then no pie for you!"  I soon became a member-in-good-standing of the CLEAN PLATE CLUB.

Table Rules and Conversation:

• The adults talked and the children listened... end of story... no exceptions.  We heard story after story about life's little lessons.  Pa in particular would have story re-runs but they were never quite identical to the one that was told two weeks ago.  Embellishment was an art that Pa simply mastered.  

• We had our most interesting listening experiences whenever a distant relative would visit our table - fresh new stories... YIPEE SKIPPY!  When Art and Flossy came all the way down from Springfield we had a jolly good time... Flossy would tell story after story while Art would sit and chuckle with a cloud of cigar smoke wafting around the table - yep... they smoked at the dinner table back in '57.  

• The primary rule for the children was to stay seated throughout the meal.  As a child, one had best not leave the table until "excused" by an adult.  A child who left the table evidently broke one or more rules and was sent to his room to think about it - no stomping or muttering... head down... go to your room.  

• Once the meal was finished we all sat around and listened to the stories of our elders' - family history with some additional tidbits thrown in to help the story along.  Some stories were funny while others were very disturbing (racism and ethnic intolerance ran rampant).  The adults rarely spoke to the children.  When we were addressed by the adults it was usually to correct us on how we held our forks or to remind us to chew our food completely; rarely (actually never) did we hear, "and how was your day today, Davy?"

Wrap Up:
So how did we get from the "then" of the 1950s to the "now" some 60+ years later?  It was all my parents doing... once they left the nest and Nanny and Pa were not in the house to enforce the traditions, they went completely modern on us.  They brought us the lifestyle of the 60s and never looked back.  The following list says it all:

• TV Dinners drove us to expect to have an endless variety of food at the table.  Little aluminum pans with ridged compartments completely changed the menu; I had peas and salisbury steak while sis had corn and meatloaf.  When my generation took up parenting we went one step farther and began serving a varied menu to our families but this time cooked from scratch.

• Roof-top Antenna and then Cable TV:  Replacing the elder male at the head of the table, the television gradually became the centerpiece of the meal.  We substituted Pa and his stories with Walter Cronkite and the News.  I will tell you, that man's stories were far from positive; rather than assuring us that all was well and ordered in the world; old Walter brought the horrors of war, space launches, and assassinations directly to our dinner table.

• TV Trays sealed-the-deal and dragged all of us away from the dining room.  Our individual TV dinners were laid out on colorful but wobbly fiberglass trays - no conversation between us at all with our eyes transfixed on the TV and the specter of world events.  

The dinner table stories died a slow and painful death; suffocated by the inventions and technologies mentioned above.  The passing of food; breaking bread if you will, ceased to take place - this gesture of sharing has been mostly snuffed out only to raise its head in restaurants or during Thanksgiving dinner.  The dining room actually has been physically and architecturally eliminated; replaced by a family room with a 55 inch LCD TV.  While the TV trays are out of vogue, all can now sit at the kitchen counter on stools or lounge on the floor while we watch CNN's Wolf Blitzer bring the Syrian conflict plop into the middle of our home.  Eating is somehow a secondary activity.

I am now 65 years old and Sally and I always try to sit down for a meal together at our little round Bistro table.  Whenever we have guests or relatives we revel at the opportunity to gather at our rather large dining room table - it is really neat.  But inevitably the children are not very good members of the CLEAN PLATE CLUB with gobs of food left on their plates.  Their parents do not even think of bringing up the masses of starving children in Africa with them.  The kiddos dismiss themselves from the table without so much as a word; they proceed to run around or roll on the floor and the stories that attempt to get told by the adults are short-lived - interrupted by the need for one or more to sneak a look at the text messages that came in during the meal.  Story telling and story listening is a lost art. 

And so we can't go back to those more ordered days and I've really stopped trying quite so hard.  When visiting our house, I still subject my family to the sit-at-the-table ordeal and they do their best to put up with it... I appreciate that.  Humoring the elders is acceptable for them and for us - especially when I still have my wits about me and know it's happening.  

That said, I am going to try an experiment... Sally and I will soon sit down for a very special meal where I will ensure the menu includes meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and frozen Green Giant Niblets.  I will put on some old 60's rock ballads, turn off the TV, and we will tell stories.  When the food is fully consumed we will continue to sit and tell more stories.  After dinner I will fire up NETFLIX and we will watch an episode of Lucy... and then... and only then, all will be right with the world for just that one night.

If Only Nanny and Pa could come back and put things back in order.  "Nanny, does the fork go on the left or the right?"