My Mother Ate Pigeon Pie, I ate frog legs too.
We are what we eat. I have heard that so much that every bite I take I wonder sometimes if I look like the cream puff or the cheese filled baked potato that I consume at an alarming cholesterol filling rate. But at the age of 50 I have gotten to the point I do not care just how good my butt looks in a pair of jeans, as long as I get my coffee in the morning and my kick of carbs in the afternoon. I am good to go and can do anything. Take it away from me and I will bite off your arm. Puffy, chicken wings arms jiggle around the edges of my t-shirt, spilling out over my half sun baked arms. My arms sort of look like a loaf of baked bread coming fresh out of the oven, brown around the top, part and white and fluffy underneath. . I received the half an arm tanning, from digging up Azalea plants the other day for a friend. I guess I do look like what I eat, I suppose.
Why I decided to write this piece is because the other day my mother and I were sitting around discussing the doctors cutting my fathers salt intake, and hers too. And I realized that the story was more than the salt intake sadness of having foods taken away that you have eaten all of your life. Taken away at a time when you should be enjoying every bit of life that you can because at any moment it will be gone. Food was about my mother’s entire life, she was a housewife and cook for 64 years and she took pride in her cooking. People came from far just to buy her homemade cinnamon rolls and breads at the church bizarre. They called her to provide sweets for funerals and weddings, for bridal showers, baby showers and any other event that was taking place in our small town. Ma’s food was a spiritual event in our home. It also represented our economic status. We ate foods that we had on the farm, provided by mom’s garden, dad’s farm animals, and whatever was available. No such thing as boxed this or that, cookies in a package or wonder bread. I as a child laughed at wonder bread; if you smooched it up it would stick to the ceiling when you tossed it in the air. I wondered how that could be bread. Then there was the oh so mouth watering smell of Tuesdays and Saturday morning when the bread was coming out of the oven. We fought over the crust.
“For Lords Sake.” (My mother always says that) “I am 80 years old and father is 84, what in the world does it matter if we enjoy a little salt on our food, so what our feet puff up and I have to put them up.” Mother said to me.“You know sis (that is what she always calls me) I ate pigeon pie a lot as a young kid. We lived on the farm and never wasted anything, actually it was really good. Grandpa would shoot them and clean the feathers and grandma would cook em just like a chicken and then make a cream sauce, my it was good.”
“ Mom I remember going down to the swamp and catching frogs and bringing them to you and you would fry up the frog legs and we scarffed em down like we were eating that penny candy , remember mom?” I said.
It seems innocent enough sitting there talking about the foods we ate, but underneath the banter there is a reason we ate foods that either now are non existent or have become gourmet (I love that word) It seems every time I turn around a gourmet food is coming on the market and inevitably they are always foods that the poor people ate because we had no choice. We wasted nothing.
My grandma, born into a family of all girls was very poor, during the early depression years she and her sisters almost starved to death. Great –Grandpa drank a lot and mom told me that he would bring cornflakes home and that is the only food they would have to eat. So when my grandmother went to work at a very early age on my grandfather’s farm, she sat at the table and could not believe that they had an entire meal to eat. She had not realized there were people during the depression that had so much to eat.
“Sis, grandma and grandpa lived on a farm when I was born, I did not know what it was like to go without food, and I never realized how poor we were back then.” Mom said.
I, and my years of growing up in large family on a farm knew what mom was saying. I did not realize how awful my parents had it financially, we always had food to eat, and it was good food. Fish from the river that ran behind my fathers land, frog legs and squirrel, deer meat, and best of all was the ring of liverwurst or kentuckalvash. Liver worst is grey in color and is ground so fine and then stuffed in the innards of the animal we had butchered. Kentuckalvash was the boiled off meat of the rest of the pig, that would have been thrown away , because there was not enough meat to do anything with, things like the head and the legs, which was then ground and mixed with potatoes, and onions salt and pepper, stuffed in the innards and then fried up in the skillet. I suppose now some chief somewhere will read this and say ahh grommet , and the rest of the world will pay 100 dollars a plate for what we ate as kids because we lived in a time of waste not want not.
I am what I eat, I am a woman who lived in poverty and did not realize it until the day my mother said “I ate pigeon pie.” I look around my home and the foods I had as a child still permeated my kitchen with their wonderful smells. Goulash, macaroni, tomato juice, hamburger, a little sugar , salt, pepper, a little mustard and wa la ya have a wonderful smell coming from the oven as you bake it a bit. Filler, as we call it, baked beans an l lb of hamburger and a few chunks of tomatoes. Potato salad, mustard, potatoes, salad dressing, eggs, a little sugar, salt, pepper, and kids fighting over who gets to take the left over’s home. Milk gravy, brown some flour and lard in a skillet, add milk and salt and pepper, bring to a full boil as you stir constantly and throw it on some baking powder biscuits. Flour, lard, baking powder, salt cut together, stuck together with a little milk, flattened out and baked in the oven for 15 minutes and WA—la you have a poverty meal you will never forget. Homemade bread tops the cake, no matter what poverty kitchen I have been in. Flour, lard, water, yeast a little sugar and a lot of patients. Need I forget that we ate sardines like they were candy too? Oh and my most favorite food of all frozen hotdogs right out of the freezer. The way my mom tells it, it was dad’s favorite too. If he made a dime as a child he would go buy to hotdogs from the meat market down the street.
You can call it gourmet if you wish, I call it memories of love and hard work and honest to goodness down right poverty. The kind of poverty that causes a person to realize how good life is when the smell of home made bread is coming out of the oven, and you can beat your brother to the crusty piece of bread at the end of the loaf.
