Close your eyes and remember a trip to your grandmother’s house. Wait … hold on … don’t close them yet! Read the post first. I want you to do some visualizing, but I want you to know where we are going with it. You can even use this as a writing prompt, if you like.
We are going to Grandmommy’s house. Did you visit your Grandmother when you were little? Maybe you didn’t visit your grandmother, so think about a favorite grownup in your life when you were a child. Imagine the trip there. Perhaps you went over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house … or maybe your Grandmother lived in a third floor walk-up on the lower east side. No matter. Once you got there, I’m betting that a special food comes to mind.
Think about that food, and I bet you can almost taste it. Perhaps you can even smell it? OK, go ahead and close your eyes for a minute and think about it. I’ll wait.
Hmmm … hmmm … hmmm … (I’m humming while you think) … hmmm … hmmm … hmmm … (it’s off key, you don’t want to know) … hmmm … hmmm.
You back? OK. It’s your turn in a minute. I want to tell you about my Grandmommy’s house ( you knew I did).
My Grandmommy lived in Oak Cliff, which most people today think of as just a part of “Dallas.” If you want to know more about the place, visit Oak Cliff Yesterday for some wonderful insights on the way it was.
Anyway, when we arrived, there were always wonderful foods cooking, but my favorite treat was one that Grandmommy gave us when we watched television in the evening. She liked to watch the Lawrence Welk Show, because she thought it was “wholesome entertainment.” Perhaps you remember that musical variety show? “Wun’erful, Wun’erful,” as Lawrence Welk would say. Well, not so much. Can you say, “eeeewwww!” If you never had the “experience” of watching it, visit Go Retro! for a detailed description (and some YouTube videos).
Now, y’all, even as a very tiny child, I was intelligent enough to know that this show was not “cool.” My Momma owned a record store, for Heaven’s sake, so I was accustomed to music that really was “wun’erful.” My siblings and I groaned at the thought of having to listen to Myron Floren play accordion again (do a Google search, if you must, because I’m not showing it here) and watch dancers in jelly bean colored costumes with fake smiles plastered on their faces. How could anybody smile when they had to do those stupid dances? To shut us up, Grandmommy gave us root beer floats! Of course … they were full of bubbles!
Start the bubbles, boys
We sat cross-legged on her nubby, forest-green couch (which felt like sitting on sandpaper) in the darkened living room. It was very difficult to make snide remarks about the show while we shoveled ice cream in our faces and fought the bubbles going up our noses. Therefore, we tolerated the show for as long as the root beer and ice cream lasted.
Yep, now and then I have to experience a root beer float, and drift down Memory Lane. I can almost hear an accordion …
Now, it’s your turn. Tell me about the food on your visit to your Grandmother’s house. I bet you’ve got a story. Here we go, fellas. And ah-one, and ah-two…
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{ 9 comments }
I didn´t meet (or know?) my grandparents. But I remember my mother´s cook. Now she´s passed away, I´ll never taste such a wonderful dessert (dulce de harina) as she used to cook with so much love.
.-= Lola´s last blog ..Arcoiris =-.
I tried to look up dulce de harina … I know dulce is sweet, but I can’t imagine the dessert! Were your grandparents from Cuba? For some reason I was thinking you came to the Canary Islands from there. When I looked up the dessert, it seemed to be Cuban in origin.
As may have been mentioned a time or ten, I went to 21 shcools in 12 years so I was ALWAYS going somewhere. The only consolation is that my mother and her five sisters could COOK. We are talking just paste it on your hips, down home Southern, if the fat isn’t dripping it’s probably not food cooking followed by desserts that would produce moans of ecstasy from a cloistered nun.
These days as I dutifully steam darn near everything for minimum calories and maximum nutrition there are times when the nose goes somewhere divine involving fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and cream gravy.
I will now go eat the steamed broccolli and cry.
.-= Jamie´s last blog ..What’s Inside The Box =-.
Put some bacon on that steamed broccoli. Oops. Sorry. Just dream about bacon.
“produce moans of ecstasy from a cloistered nun.” I’m going to have to steal that.
I grew up with my maternal grandparents -lived with them from the day I was born until the day each of them died. So no big trip going to Grandma’s house ya know. But, the one aroma I definitely remember and it is a favorite of mine to this day, was the one that wafted through this old house when I arrived home from school on the days that Grandma was baking bread.
I could smell that raw bread dough as soon as I walked in the house! And I immediately launched my own “search and destroy” mission to find where it was that Grandma had it hidden that day. For a long time, she would always have it wrapped in towels and old blankets and perched on the one long radiator in the living room but because of my habit of dipping into the raw dough and plucking myself off a nice tasty morsel, she started trying to find other places that would be warm and toasty for her bread to rise but also that it would rise in peace -without the grubby fingers of little tomboys, just coming in from a hard day at school, and who knows where those hands had just been!
The best hiding place she ever found was when she started putting it in the basement laundry room beside the old bucket-a-day coal stove that heated our hot water. It took me a long time to find it hidden down there but once a hiding place was discovered, she had to look for another place. Unfortunately, by the time she used the laundry room, she had also used all the other available nooks and crannies warm enough to entice bread to rise so she was then relegated to going back to the radiator and I was happy as I didn’t have to hunt high and low for that precious bounty -raw bread dough!
.-= Jeni Hill Ertmer´s last blog ..Finding a Match =-.
Raw bread dough was always a favorite of mine, too. Although the Grandmommy in this story did cook bread occasionally, it was my Mamaw (the grandmother on the other side) who was know for that delicacy. Baking bread is another trait I didn’t inherit. But, I can make a root beer float!
Wow, flashbacks happening here! My parents watched Lawrence Welk every Sat. night and since we had only one tv . . . yup, we were stuck. I am all-too familiar with Myron, et al. My husband had the same experience. Every once in awhile we catch a glimpse of those old shows on PBS & ROFL. I remember when Lawrence and the gang came to Lodi and headlined at the Lodi Grape Festival. Ooooooo . . . that was big stuff, donchaknow. Yes, my parents dragged us along to the show.
As for my grandmother, I do have fond memories of visiting her in South Dakota and savoring Norwegian delights, lefse being my all-time favorite. I wrote about those foods here: http://www.jhsiess.com/2007/02/10/sunday-scribblings-46-yummy/
.-= JHS´s last blog ..Manic Show and Tell Monday =-.
I am so sorry you were subjected to him, too. Norwegian “delights?” Is it as delightful as German cooking? I have always maintained that “good German food” is an oxymoron!
P.S. I went to your post, but comments seem to be closed (or I am stupider than I thought). The lefse do look like tortillas … and I have inherited one of those rolling pins with the ridges. Wonder if someone in my family was Norwegian?
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