Homemade

I've never dealt with the front-page comment that angered me on the same day as the Weird-Horrid's first editorial on Judge R.: "There is a revival taking place in our nation that is causing Christian and right-minded people to say, 'Wait a minute. We've gone too far.' " Yeah, but not the way you meant it, you brain-dead bigot, but I will deal with your ilk in aptly dreary January.
And yesterday's paper offered up many streets to wander off on. Renata Tebaldi, Toscanini's "voice of an angel," died at 82. I heard her as Tosca in Minneapolis when the Metropolitan Opera toured, and Toscanini was right, though it's also what I thought of my mother's powerful contralto. Mentioning Tosca, as anyone who's a crossword puzzle addict knows, her major aria, "Vissi d'arte," pops up regularly, especially in The New York Times crosswords. And Puccini is really the secular patron saint of soundtracks, movie scores. Another Later.
A photo was shown of the record-breaking oldest-copy Scarlet Letter, $545,100. In my devotion to creative imagination, for my master's I wanted to write an opera libretto of Hawthorne's most famous work, but the old-bat biddy who was my thesis advisor and later sabotaged my Kazantzakis thesis also had a closed-door mind.
The first cel of Gil Thorp was labeled "In Omaha" and dealt with a pro basketball star complaining, "Why do I have to go to Milford?" and his manager (?) explaining, "Marketing, Babe. Tronix Shoes wants to sell you in the sticks, too." Which had my little reference gnomes running around my upstairs finding all those obnoxious sneers like Denzel Washington's in The Siege dealing with terrorists, "For all of those just in from Nebraska," or The New York Times trashing Alexander Payne's hometown, but that too must give way to the Feel-Good Season.
My option is Oliver's "Food, glorious food." One major change I find funny is the shift from store-bought Ford assembly-line (Henry F. invented this commercial conformist necessity) to home-baked. Store-bought bread, one of the key items in Price Index history, and tinned goods--I'll use the English term because I'll be writing about canning--were expensive Back Then. We townies bought bread, but Grandma baked hers almost daily, as many did, one of the key scents in my aroma closet upstairs, like her later White Shoulders perfume, the cheap Radio Girl perfume I could afford to buy Mom, Jergens Lotion, burnt painted wood from the arson ruining Dad's business, cardamom-scented candy pellets, apple pie, and balsam fir, our Christmas tree. Grandpa was the meat-and-potatoes sort along with most hard-working men in those days when we didn't have to be so health-conscious diet-aware. (It's heartening to learn that our closest British family cousins, the Australians, are fatter than we are, Americans now so heavyweight that airplane fuel costs have risen accordingly and theaters have to replace seats.) Bread is the most essential food internationally, historically, of course. Dad teased Grandma that hers always tasted of kerosene, a joke from the days he was their hired hand who would marry their daughter on a day too windy to pick corn. I preferred then the uniformity and softness of store bread, not appreciating the crusty solidity I crunched into in Greece now popular at Panera's and Great American Harvest, though Mom baked more than I am telling. And during the great blizzardy winter of 1948-49 when Center had no traffic in or out for two weeks, Freddie's Store (and the other two) ran out of bread and milk early, and Mom and the other women kept starter and hoarded milk perforce. My bread machine would've been handy, but the electricity was also off--just like at Grandma's--most of those two weeks.
An occasional (cheap) treat at Grandma's I recall fondly was bread pudding with raisins. (It wasn't until adulthood that I realized how poor we all were coming off the depressed Thirties and headed into World War II rationing.) Grandma also baked rolls regularly, my first introduction to cinnamon rolls and kolaches. The latter are a famous Czech sweet roll with a central dimple filled with prunes, apricots, cottage cheese, a poppy seed concoction, or cherries. My cousins and I fought over the first, apricots too tart, the next two unthinkable (but very Czech), the last rare in her house. To this day if I stop at a bakery in a Bohemian town--Nebraska has several, like Verdigre or Clarkson--I will buy the prune kolaces. That's also the kind I generally bake. Had to change the spelling because I just realized the food co-op my older sister does the ordering for and I and my other sister belong to, headquartered at Verdigre, insists on the authentic spelling, the pronunciation still with the ch.
I grew up helping Grandma and Mom can. That's why we had huge gardens and Grandpa butchered. Grandma's food cellar on the Bloomfield farm was down a rickety stairs into the hillside near the henhouses (Mom's was in our basement). Everything got canned, from peas and carrots to meat. I never liked Grandma's canned beef, too lardy and slimy slick like avocadoes (which I don't like for that reason, though guacamole sauce is OK). Mom loved it. When Grandma needed carrots or beets, tomatoes or even asparagus for dinner, the noon meal, or supper, the six-o'clock meal, we fetched the Mason/Atlas jars full of summer labor. Potatoes, onions, and apples were also down in the cool dimness beyond the ground-level doors. (Years later I warmed from seeing Annie Pavelka's--My Antonia--storm cellar on their farm north of Fairbury.) Such cellars were also for tornado and other storm protection, but we had none of those in our Knox County hills back then, and Grandma's wasn't all that big, the dugout lined with crude wooden shelves, just a walking space down the middle. Oddly, I don't remember the one Up West, but I think it was similar.
Just because we lived in town didn't mean we were entirely store-spoiled. I mentioned our big garden, which Dad would plant and I was expected to take care of, even belonging to a town 4-H gardening group in its short life. Shelling peas was such a nuisance that Mom tried a supposed shortcut using our washing machine. Then it was the wringer type. (Grandma's had a gas motor; ours was electric, our graduating up from washtubs and a scrubboard I still have, the kind hillbilly and cajun bands use.) On our big front porch I was delegated to stand under a sheet feeding blanched pea pods into the wringers while peas zinged all around me like the bad guys' bullets in a western, the sheet corraling them into the big tub. It didn't really work, a nutty inefficiency contrasted to hand-shelling but novel fun.
And Mom began her love affair with pressure cookers, which I distrusted ever after one blew its plug and splattered whatever was inside all over the stove and the ceiling and one exploded alarmingly. I can use one but prefer the simpler way of vacuum-pack submersion. As part of my growing-up regimen whereby Mom determined I was to be totally self-sufficient from knowing how to sew on a button or iron a shirt or put a new end on an extension cord or cook and bake my own meals, I learned much about vegetables from helping Mom and Grandma can, such as never taking the tops and roots off beets before boiling them (their maroon beetjuice bleeds out). When we got to freezers a decade or two later, I learned what was necessary to freeze corn and peaches, which is why I bought a large upright for my apartment's back room and why recently I had to deal with a carpet soaked in thawed sugary peach juice that also ruined the bottoms of several cardboard boxes sitting around.
In the Forties home canning also meant extra money for us children, who spent hours picking chokecherries, wild plums, and wild grapes to sell in Karo Syrup tin pails to the townswomen for their jellies and jams. With the early Fifties, those were the decades not many women worked outside the home, which World War II changed irrevocably, as the movie Swing Shift shows, and food was dealt with on the time-consuming preparatory basis the processing still is, if you start from scratch with produce from the supermarket, as I do, especially in retirement. Ironically it is often more costly to buy the raw shrimp and strawberries and toil them into eatability than to buy them frozen. Same with canned goods. (Nutritionists will tell you frozen is ordinarily preferable to canned: more nutrients.) Now the soccer mom and the working mom have their priorities elsewhere, preferring to buy their expensive, ersatz homemade; and our fast-food franchises circle the globe, McDonald's Golden Arches everywhere despite nationalistic protests. My nephews and nieces are lovin' it, but I'm not. I'd rather make it, bake it myself, thank you anyway.