Dinners

Food was a big deal in my family.  We always had “sit down” family dinners.

On Sunday we would go to church because we had to.  My grandfather was the minister. My cheeks would be pinched by childless old ladies wearing stoles made from dead animals, who, most probably, had unrequited crushes on my grandfather. I would sing songs about people in faraway lands that had words like “bosom” in them.  On the drive along Franklin Avenue to the Hollywood church, there would occasionally be a man selling fresh lilacs at the corner of  Hillhurst. My father would stop the car and buy a small bouquet for my mother to pin to her jacket.

And afterwards, once home and back into comfortable clothes, we would have a big dinner. It never crossed my mind how much work this must have been for my mother. There would be pot roast with carrots and onions, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, roast lamb covered with crispy strips of bacon, pork chops with applesauce or those red colored cinnamon infused apples cut into slices and green beans with bacon made in a pressure cooker that always frightened me.

We also had liver and zucchini.  These I did not like.  I developed the skill of shifting the limp sections of squash around the plate, into my lap and into a recession under the table.  When my parents finally bought a new dining room table and the old on was being carted out, petrified zucchini rained down onto the carpet.

As we ate during the midweek repasts, we learned that if we asked a question my parents did not know the answer to, my father would leap up and go to the newly purchased set of World Books. We also learned to never ask for salt on our food.  “I have seasoned it in the kitchen.”

My two favorite meals were spaghetti and chili.  The spaghetti was made from a Lawry’s powdered packet mixed with tomato sauce.  The chili was very much the same, and only made if my father was doing the cooking. These dishes were deemed “fattening” and we rarely had them.

As the 50’s became the 60’s, my mother’s cooking changed and expanded. Chafing dishes and beef Stroganoff replaced the fried chicken, aided by the invention of Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken.  My mother practically beatified him. We were introduced to cream cheese and words like “frappe”. Shish kebabs, bulgur wheat, red snapper, ratatouille, Armenian “pizzas” and freshly made string cheese were added to the mix. We were taken to Niesi-town in downtown Los Angles to try tempura and to Chinatown to sample hom boa. Because my mother’s brother had traveled to India, we now were eating prawn curry, albeit very mild and very unauthentic. Chopped hard-boiled eggs, sliced green onions and peanuts were the condiments, along with Major Grey chutney, which seemed quite exotic. And salads now contained mandarin orange slices from a can.  Surely, there were still Tater-Tots and Sarah Lee in the freezer, but things were a changing.

My parents enjoyed entertaining.  At a dinner party, my mother produced one of the most captivating dishes I had ever seen.  She hollowed out the core of a purple cabbage and put “canned heat” into the center. She skewered “Little Smokies” onto bamboo sticks, lit the flame (which perfectly matched the color of the cabbage), and each guest got to cook their own sausages.  Another food introduction during this time was “rumaki.”  My parents would spend the afternoon stuffing dates with water chestnuts and wrapping them carefully in bacon secured with a toothpick, where they would await the grill pan. 

But during the week, there was the new thrill of Chung King dried noodles in a can.