Eat, Memory
The food staff on their fondness for holidays past: epiphanies, friendship, near-disaster, disaster, and always a full plate
By Virginia B. Wood, Fri., Dec. 24, 2004
The Things We Fear at Christmas
My Mother attended junior high in Tahoka, a cotton-farming community south of Lubbock. Her most vivid memories from those years were the lessons imparted to her by the home economics teacher she revered. I can't remember the woman's name now, but I will always think of her as the person who taught my Mother to fear meat. Meat cooked in our house came one way very well done as "Mrs. Fright" had instilled in her student a life-long fear of any wee beastie, bacteria, natural juice, or flavor morsel that might still lurk in its tissues. The lessons on pork must have been particularly frightening, because we never ate a ham that hadn't been baked to a fair-thee-well, with Mother muttering about trichinosis. Stuffing in the turkey was forbidden by both tradition (my Grandmother Walden) and instruction (Mrs. Fright said the bacteria could kill you). Fresh fish was out ("I don't know how to tell if it's done enough"), gifts of venison were verboten ("too wild, uninspected, too gamy"), and such cuts as lamb and veal were just too exotic. There was plenty of well-done beef, ham, and dry poultry.
Once we'd grown up and begun cooking for ourselves, my older sister and I made what I consider great strides in meat cookery, considering our home conditioning. When Ann and her young family were living on a rice plantation in the Arkansas delta, the family journeyed to her home for Christmas. Many things about that visit stand out in my mind: The weather was dismal, the dog died, and we all came down with the flu. But those things pale in the light of what Mother did to the lamb and the ham. The night we arrived, Ann had prepared an impressive feast, complete with a medium-rare leg of lamb paired with vegetables canned from her own kitchen garden. She was beaming with pride in her carefully decorated home, her two adorable sons, her delicious dinner. Once everyone had been served a slice of meat, Mother disappeared into the kitchen with the platter, ostensibly to make more room on the dining table. In reality, she couldn't wait for the opportunity to pop the remainder of the lamb into a 400-degree oven and roast it beyond recognition, all in the name of saving our lives. Those of us who ate the first succulent slices of lamb judiciously avoided the charred leftovers, which Mother staunchly defended. We thought she'd surely done her worst, but Christmas dinner was yet to come.
Christmas Day dawned dreary and cold. Running a 102-degree temperature, my brother-in-law buried his beloved German shepherd, Deuteronomy, while Ann prepared the Christmas feast. An elderly gentleman on the farm had slaughtered two of his prized, hand-fed hogs for Christmas and brought Ann a fresh ham for the holidays. I was amazed with the novelty of so many new meats in one weekend and impressed with the great ham, all rosy pink meat and mouth-watering aromas. Mother could barely control her horror fresh ham, trichinosis, family annihilation! She nagged at Ann to cook it longer, fretted when it was sliced and served, pushed a piece around her plate, but I never actually saw her eat a bite. It was heavenly: tender and moist, perfectly marbled. (This was, after all, the early Seventies, before the fat police ruined pork.) Once the huge meal was over, most of us collapsed, some with flu symptoms, others with regular holiday torpor. Mother took charge of the cleanup. When we finally stirred in early evening, looking for leftovers, Mother was proudly presiding over slices of the recently incinerated ham ... dry, flavorless, utterly safe. Down with flu, Ann was too weak to protest that particular travesty. But all Mother's efforts to the contrary, I'd finally tasted properly cooked lamb and pork and lived to tell the tale. There was no going back for me. I started stuffing Thanksgiving turkeys the very next year.