Tip It! (6 page)

W
hen it comes to food, hon . . . Wait, I know in these PC times, you’re not supposed to call people “hon.” But at a restaurant, when I want something, I can’t help it. I say, “Hon, can I have a little more wine?” I know I’m not supposed to, but I’m old-fashioned. So sue me.

Anyway, back to what I was saying. When it comes to food, I like all kinds. Italian, Mexican, Polish, Chinese. [
Polish?
]

The number of foods my dad mostly ate, though, you could count on one hand: beef, potatoes, bread, cabbage, and turnips. Steak on Sunday. [
Grandpa has six fingers now, Mom
.] My mom was a good cook, but because my dad was a very basic eater, she was a pretty basic cook. He wouldn’t eat turkey, pork, or chicken. Nothing green, no vegetables. If my mother wanted to make something like salmon croquettes for us, he wouldn’t touch that, so aside from the croquettes she’d have to make a pot roast just for him. If she made a beef stew, she’d make a separate one for us that had carrots and peas. For someone who made simple food, it could get a little complicated.

Me in the kitchen, stumped over a recipe. Will it turn out?

Hey look, my dad worked like a horse, and he wanted the stick-to-the-ribs meal he liked. I loved watching him eat his beloved boiled potatoes. Mom would put them in a bowl, and he’d chop them up, slather butter all over them, and then top it off with salt and pepper. It always looked so good! He lived to be ninety, so that tells you what a good eater he was. But he never changed his tune. After my mom died, I got a taste of what she had to do on the days I’d have my dad come to dinner. If it was Thanksgiving, there’d be turkey for me, Johnny, and the kids, and a little pot roast for him.

There were some things my mom made very well. She could bake a rich, hearty Irish bread with thick crust that went down so well with a lot of butter and jam on it. Add a nice cup of hot tea and you felt like you’d had a meal. Her pancakes were wonderful, too.

But when it came to trying other kinds of food, we had to go to other people’s houses. My girlfriend Rae was Italian, and when I’d be over there, her mom would feed us when we were hungry. That’s where I had spaghetti for the first time, and it’s become my favorite dish. As my sisters and I learned about more kinds of foods, we’d occasionally say to Mom, “Can we cook tonight? Let us try something different?”

She’d say, “As long as the old man’s taken care of, that’s fine by me.”

Then we’d set to work, making Jell-O salads, or sprucing up candied potatoes with marshmallows on top. Mom thought we were such good cooks because we were making fancier stuff. Our brothers, though, took after my dad with a lot of our experiments, and flat out wouldn’t eat what we made.

When I got married, my poor husband suffered some, because Johnny’s mother was a good cook. He was used to seeing different kinds of meals. So when I was learning how to put food on the table—taking tips from my mom, my sisters, and my friends—he endured his share of experiments. The great thing was, he’d never say, “Mag, this is terrible!” I might be the one complaining that something had no taste, but all Johnny would say was “Mag, don’t bother to make this again.” I thought that was very gallant. And I knew that was the end of that dish.

One time during the war when we were living in Spokane, Washington, in a little studio apartment in a big house, Johnny, who was in the army at that time, said he was going to bring some soldiers home for dinner. Now, these were guys who if you gave them bologna sandwiches, they’d think it was wonderful. They were just happy to be away from the base! So I was going to make the usual simple thing, spaghetti or hot dogs, but for a special treat, I thought I’d make a cake from a recipe I cut out of the newspaper. I hadn’t had a lot of luck making cakes from scratch, and this was a special type of cake, so who knows what I was thinking trying something new when I was just starting out as a home cook.

Well, of course, at a certain point the older woman who ran the house we lived in said, “Gee, it should be rising by now.” Oh boy, what a farce this turned out to be. The cake came out, and each layer was only a half-inch thick! It was also as heavy as a rock. Don’t ask me what happened. I did everything I was supposed to do. I probably didn’t have the right ingredients. I was just crestfallen. I really wanted this to be a surprise for the guys, you know? Well, this woman’s grandson was there, a kid about twelve years old, and he started making fun of the cake. He kept saying, “Mrs. Griffin, you know what? You’ve found synthetic rubber!”

Ha ha ha. I was ready to kill that kid! [I
hear you, kid, wherever you are
.]

I got better as a cook, though. When I started having kids, I learned how to make hamburgers, pork chops, turkey, roasts. I could turn out a nice beef stew. When it came to vegetables, my kids weren’t eating cabbage and turnips like I grew up with, so I had to learn how to cook carrots and green beans. I will admit for a long time I used the canned stuff, but then you get a little better, and you say, “Let me try some fresh things.” That said, the children weren’t really vegetable eaters. I would fix whatever and hope they’d eat it. You push the better food, of course, but kids are foxy. Hide spinach in the potatoes and they’ll notice.

And if they didn’t want something, they had their ways of making it look somewhat eaten, usually by pushing carrots and green beans to the edges of the plate, or scattering them around.

My cakes improved, too. I used to make lots of cakes and pies. I was a great cake maker. I made a wonderful chocolate cake with white frosting, a nice white or yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Chocolate chip cake was another of my specialties. And my lemon butter bars, which I made from scratch, were always a hit. My brownies, too.

I Did Cook!

KATHY:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mom. Are you really trying to convince everyone that you cooked?

MAGGIE:
I did cook. Who else did? You?

K:
Because I’d really like to know what you thought were your best dishes. Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff, perhaps?

M:
No, no, no, that came later, after you guys were older.

K:
What, then?

M:
You loved the sloppy joes.

K:
That’s a can of Manwich and a pound of ground beef, Mom. Don’t act like you were cutting tomatoes.

M:
I had my own special little touches. But it’s a family secret.

K:
What else?

M:
Dad said I made very good Italian spaghetti for an Irish girl.

K:
That’s not exactly a compliment.

M:
Well, what about my . . .

K:
McDonald’s?

M:
Oh, you kids love making it sound as if McDonald’s was all I ever fed you.

K:
Maybe because one of your “recipes” was throwing cash at us to go down to the McDonald’s. Remember? You’d come home from work . . .

M:
Well, that’s true . . .

K:
. . . and lie down on the olive green couch and say, “Here’s a dollar.”

M:
Occasionally that would happen. If you remember, Kathy, that was a treat for you guys. You loved it when that McDonald’s opened up down the street.

K:
And then everything changed. Fess up, Mom. Tell everyone about Fridays. Why it was “Thank God it’s Friday” for you before there were T.G.I. Friday’s.

M:
On Friday nights, when I worked at the hospital, I’d wait for your dad to come home from the store, and then after I left to go to work, he and one of you kids would go down to McDonald’s and he’d get their fish sandwiches for everyone.

K:
What was it? The Sabbath? Is that what Friday was?

M:
Oh, the fish.

K:
What the hell is that fake Catholic holiday?

M:
It wasn’t a holiday, Kathy. It was a religious observance. On Friday you didn’t eat meat.

K:
But that doesn’t make it appropriate or acceptable to send your children down the street for McDonald’s.

M:
Well, I thought it was okay. Look, when you became the last one in the house with us, I didn’t want to cook much anymore. All right? You were such a pain anyway, so picky. All you’d ever eat as a kid was grilled cheese sandwiches and pizza. That was it. Honest to God . . .

K:
I was vegan! Did you ever think about that? Or thanks to McDonald’s, a pescatarian.

M:
You did like pancakes.

K:
That’s why I didn’t take a crap until I was fifteen, Mom. Because I ate grilled cheese sandwiches, McDonald’s, and pancakes.

M:
You didn’t even like hamburgers.

K:
Was that part of your “cooking”?

M:
That’s my cuisine.

K:
And really, Mom, how many cakes have you ever made from scratch?

M:
I’m not going to talk about that. Look, my cakes from the box were better than my scratch. But they became very good, and even my friends who would always bake from scratch went to the cake mix boxes.

Me with a cake I baked myself. Take that, Kathleen!

Okay, when boxed cakes came along, they were great. But I learned ways to enhance them and make them better. Maybe you’d put an egg in when they didn’t recommend it. Or I’d use a little more vegetable oil. Maybe if I was making a white cake, I might add orange juice to give it a little tang. With something like banana bread, I might put a little bit of applesauce in. It doesn’t hurt the taste and it keeps them nice and moist. I just hate dry cake.

Of course, today I can’t handle rich desserts like I used to. Where before I might be able to eat a whole dessert, I can’t anymore. I have to tone it down. [
Kirstie Alley will pick up the slack, don’t worry
.] Same with some of the heavier meals I always loved, like clam sauce with spaghetti. I almost feel sick afterward. And as much as I adore Mexican food, I have to beware of the spicy dishes. I like them, but they don’t like me.

It’s a different world now with food than when I was growing up. For one thing, there’s more access to cuisines from around the world. Salads are everywhere, and not just in summer. We never got lettuce or tomatoes or cucumbers in the winter when I was younger. Winter was cabbage and turnips. Food was truly seasonal. Now you can get strawberries and blueberries all year round. They might come from Argentina, when it’s their summer and our winter, and you might pay more for them, but to get them whenever you want them is just wonderful. Plus, food has so much more flavor now. Take what people do with vegetables. In my day you put butter on vegetables. Now you might have different herbs on them, and put olive oil over them instead of butter. And hey, they’re just as delicious that way! But every once in a while I’ll grab that pat of butter, especially for something like baked potatoes. I should never have baked potatoes. Between the butter I put on them, the sour cream, and the chives, they’re a whole meal.

Nowadays, people worry about food more. I tell ya, I would not want to be a parent today, the way young girls are concerned about their weight and figure. They’re all so sylphlike now, it’s disgusting. [
Which is why they’re all on the covers of magazines
.] They’d look better, frankly, if they ate a baked potato or two every once in a while. See, in my time we got our vitamins from the food we ate. Whereas today, people get them from supplements, and that can’t be better. I don’t know what I’d do if I was a mom with a young daughter on the verge of bulimia or anorexia. It doesn’t help that they all want to be Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The fetish for thinness is a real problem.

I guess it all started when television came in. That’s one way it ruined the country. [
Don’t talk like that around my Emmys!
] That’s when everybody started to eat in front of the television, and even after dinner. Chips and candy and everything. TV changed everybody’s eating habits. You started seeing more fast food, and that’s when everybody started to get fatter. We were guilty of it, too, in our household. Something good’s coming on TV, and you want those snacks.