Time and What to Eat

All types of background go into the what make the type of cook and presenter you are. We mostly ate at the kitchen table close to the stove. It was also the organizing place for canning peaches or plucking chickens or grating cheese for pimento cheese sandwiches for funerals. On Sundays or if company, we ate at the dining room table complete with a white linen table cloth, good china and silver and flowers of the season as a bouquet. Since my dad often had ag scholarship boys caught at the college over a weekend or holiday, the meals suited men’s taste:real meat, potatoes or rice, an acceptable vegetable (no broccoli), hot rolls, and a fresh from the oven pie.

So I learned to cook like my mother. Breakfast was fresh brewed coffee, toast, eggs, and bacon – one needed the grease for seasoning vegetables. Lunch was the big meal of the day, cooked early while the kitchen was cool. Daddy came home for lunch and took a nap. Supper was leftovers or “scraps.” That serves me in good stead now when I am the only partaker and have to shop on line once a week.

A one time I collected cookbooks, Remember this was before looking up a recipe for some exotic offering. When I moved, a widow and an aging woman, I weeded out, keeping my favorites for emotional reasons. My Better Homes and Garden cook book given as a wedding gift, A dessert book bought in Alabama at a family wedding and a Baton Rouge Junior League offering given me years ago by a student because I brought cookies for the class at recess. Food is more than a social gathering. It is mentioned from Elijah and ravens to the woman who kills a calf to prepare a meal for Saul, to Martha’s feeding 12 men who appear for supper, to Jesus choosing a meal for the last contact with his disciple, And to us, the commandment to see hunger and provide food.

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,^[a] you did it to me.’

Matthew 25: 35,37,40