Tag: dailyprompt-2129

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Away, Away With Rum by Gum

Daily writing prompt
What are your family’s top 3 favorite meals?
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My wife is a night shift nurse, and the last thing she needs after a tough shift is to get home and face cooking a holiday meal. So I am in charge of all holiday cooking. I don’t do anything too fancy. Turkey on Thanksgiving, a roast beef on Christmas, and a pork loin on New Year’s. Some family holiday tradition gets thrown in here and there. In my family, you never eat a fowl ( chicken or turkey) on New Year’s. The tradition has it that fowls scratch for their meal, and if you eat them at the beginning of the New Year, you’ll be scratching for money all year.

Gingerbread

So the main meals are pretty standard, but then there are the holiday special foods. This year, we are planning a gingerbread house event for the family. It’s fun to watch a kind of lopsided gingerbread house transform into a mini palace of candy and decorations. I get to bake the gingerbread and then sit back and take photos.

Poppyseed Bread

Next on the agenda is the holiday Hungarian poppyseed bread. This was my Hungarian grandmother’s specialty. She never taught anyone how to make it, and when she died, it was thought that the tradition died with her. In place of the poppyseed bread, the family debated how they thought it was made. After years of fruitless debate, I decided to experiment. My early efforts were filled with, “No, not this, it’s too much like cake,” or” The filling is off!” At last, with the internet, I was able to comb through recipes and combine methods until I got, ” That’s It!!!” So, once again, the family gets to enjoy the Hungarian Poppyseed bread.

Fruitcakes

The final item is our rum-soaked fruitcakes. I do not mean those nasty, dry as old bones, crack your teeth, excuses for fruitcake. Mine is rich, moist, and tasty. I’ve been baking them since the last time Bell Bottom trousers were popular, and I was a fresh sprig just returned from the Boreal reaches of the Northern Coast…OK, enough hyperbole… about fifty-three years. During that time, I have fine-tuned my efforts. This year, I baked 18 small cakes. After baking, they are wrapped in muslin and receive a baptism in rum. Carefully set aside to “marinate,” I open the first one on Thanksgiving to see how the marination is going. Rum is added as needed.

A word of warning about the fruitcake. I jokingly describe it as our “Don’t eat and drive fruitcake.” I doubt that that much alcohol remains in the cake after a few weeks of marination, but I recall that line from the old song Away,Away with Rum:

“Away, away with rum by Gum, with rum by gum. With rum by Gum, with rum by gum…Oh, can you imagine a sorrier sight than a man eating fruitcake until he gets tight!”

Well, if you visit me during the holidays, you’ve been warned, and as we used to say when I wore bell-bottoms, “Take due notice thereof, and govern yourselves accordingly.”

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Eat, Drink, and be Happy…or else

Very little can solve or create problems like food. While doing fieldwork once, I was able to bond with an informant’s family over food. Grandmother wanted me to sample her rice and beans. We spent an hour comparing how her family made it with how my family did. In the meantime, I had a second and third helping of hers. We couldn’t be too different if we could eat a meal together and form a cultural bond.

Having spent hours watching my Hungarian Grandmother make potato pancakes allowed me to appreciate Julia Gelowtsky’s. Julia became my Polish Babchi and created a lifelong bond between our families.

By contrast, my girlfriend Charlotte wanted nothing to do with traditional cuisine and firmly believed in fast food. I would have loved her if she only dressed in Paisley, but not to like rice and beans, potato pancakes, and poppyseed bread. No. she didn’t last past the nasty infection she gave me.

In anthropology, we learn early how food binds family and society together. Not being able to eat with someone can significantly impede other relationships. And disparaging their foodways may earn you the status of an enemy.

Food is not just physical sustenance; it can be the foundation of social relationships.

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Escape

I rarely eat fish anymore. It’s not that I don’t like fish. But the available goods are ages from the water and injected with brine to plump them up. Without a fish market in the area, my expectations are low. As a result, I only eat fish at the coast. Growing up in New York City and living in Coastal New England most of my life, I suppose you might call me a snob for good fish. What’s good? A Finnan Haddie, thick creamy chowder with a small mountain of fish in the center, or a delicious halibut stew

Just writing about this causes anxiety that someone might shove some alien trash in front of me at a restaurant, call it flounder, and leave the bill. My wife dreads the possible disarray in which I’d leave the restaurant and no longer points out that the day’s specials include swordfish.

It isn’t good. Friends down at the coast send me postcards of locally caught fish, hoping to lure me to visit. I begin to plot my escape from Central Massachusetts.