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Stories from Around the World
Childhood Meals
The taste of childhood is candy, and lots of it! Chocolates in fancy boxes or chocolate bars. We would eat pancakes for breakfast with fruit. Easy fruit to go down. We would have fruit like apples and oranges and everything.
Lunchtime meant homemade noodles. Mom would have them drying all over the place: on the dining room table, the kitchen table, even the kitchen counter. Mom would put them into chicken noodle soup. Our family friend was Italian. He would bring over sauce he made and it was so good. It tasted like a professional made it. He learned the recipe from his mother. I never knew what was in it.
Afterschool Mom would make us sweetback, which was bread with butter and cinnamon sugar on the top. She would make this often for the kids to eat afterschool. The house would smell like cookies. Well, not all the time because Mom was a nurse. But she liked to bake and would do it when she could. Often on the weekends.
Another snack was cheese glasses. Little glasses only a few inches tall filled with a small amount of cheddar cheese or pimento cheese. We ate it with a piece of celery – it was so good! We saved the glasses. Dad would bring them out when we had company and didn’t have enough wine glasses. He would drink from the cheese glass. Mom would put flowers in them to decorate the table.
When the meal wasn’t good, my mother-in-law would use the good china. Our kitchen table was always full of food. The fancy meal was on Sundays at noon. Mom would decorate the table every Sunday with a damask table cloth. Our kitchen had a wood burning stove. On the side of the stove was a water reservoir. You could climb into the reservoir from the side. My brother did this, and burned his behind! We eventually moved the wood burning stove to the basement. One winter, the power went out and we had to use the stove. We didn’t have enough dry wood to burn, so we had to go out and shuck corn kernels off of corn cobs to burn to cook with and keep us warm!
Meatloaf was for supper, always. Served with homemade biscuits with honey and butter. Mom would make delicious meat and potato dishes. All the kinds. We would grill out for the kids. Children like things that go on the grill like meats and hamburgers.
My favorite pie was sour cream pie with raisins. Everyone made them because they were so cheap to make. I would make peach pie. Once I made pumpkin pie. I thought it was being so good for Mom and Dad because we would have pie for dessert. It did not bake well. Mom had to tell me that pumpkin pie doesn’t have a crust on the top.
Our family would always have duck or goose on Thanksgiving. The stuffing was special and unlike most people’s stuffing. Ours was sweet with apples and raisins. The goose had enough grease to make it alright, not dry like turkey. Though, it did made it hard to make gravy with the grease.
Thanksgiving would be the big family celebration. The house would be full of family, sometimes 20 or so people. The cousins would come in and hunt with my brother. It was nice to see everyone. Christmas was more of individual families.
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