SUMPTUOUS SUNDAY SUPPERS

 

I’ve always wondered about the people who had Sunday Night Suppers.   When I was a child and teen, those were portrayed in magazines and TV commercials and cookbooks as a meal apart from any other, with chafing dishes and pale trays of Welsh Rarebit and Chicken Veronique cooked and served right there on the coffee-table by chic women in Hostess Gowns.

Even the attire was special---long robish Auntie Mame dresses  sweeping  the floor as the ladies daintily stirred and arranged the food, floating past their smiling, well-groomed children in a cloud of Chesterfield smoke, while they all conversed or sat neatly awaiting Disneyland on their pale-ivory Jetson TVs. 

My Mother had a robe kinda like that, a long pale pink quilted one, a gift from Aunt Cilla, and I longed with my heart that she’d wear that some Sunday night and we’d cook in the living room, all fresh food for special, instead of the perfectly wonderful leftovers from the good Sunday Dinner we’d had right after church.   

Never happened.  Though the books and magazine were couched in terms of "taking the trouble out of all the planning," for those special weekly evenings, our own leftovers WERE certainly perfectly good.  Even a Day of Rest could leave you too tired to cook again, and Mother would no more have worn that robe to cook in than she’d fly. 

 I loved those pictures, and coffee-table cooking or serving, in those rooms of stick-legged furniture amongst the knotty-pine walls and pyramid lampshades and drifts of Arpege seemed an exotic thing to me, like people sitting cross-legged on carpets in India or Arabia, around an ornate communal dish.  And of course, Sunday Night Suppers were even more elegant.

 Instead of being in Church for the fifth hour that day like me, in the same clothes and with the same folks---neither of which were as fresh or bright as their first appearance at Ten O-clock Sunday School, I imagine.

And that all the classy folks were home on Sunday nights, freshly dressed for Supper and graciously anticipating that gentle, rich fare.   And it always happened at Six O’Clock.   Nobody told me that, and I didn’t read it.   It just WAS, somehow, the Right Time.

All the magazines listed small, easy-to-prepare egg or chicken or cheese dishes, some with their own specific bread or biscuits, and sometimes the almighty TOAST POINTS to serve as cushion beneath those lovely concoctions.    Things with sauces were lavishly portrayed, as were NESTS of things---rice or grated potatoes or mashed potatoes or chow mein noodles, to cuddle all those splendid sauced things in.

After all, chafing dishes were invented especially so you could put a can of mushroom pieces and a jar of paminna in most any chicken dish, and call it a la King.

There were often crepes, one time savory and another, sweet.  And THAT one I had a hard time getting.  I’d MADE crepes, and you certainly didn’t rely on the iffy Fahrenheit of a Sterno can, not if you had a dozen crepes to turn out, and then the sauce besides.

Anything in a casserole dish that you could nap with white sauce and brown was perfect for a Sunday Supper.  Extra points for a little Colman’s in the sauce.

And always, always, the green peas.  Everything required peas.  And never had I ever seen such a green pea in my life---the bright fresh color in the pages was tiers above the gray-green softness in the School Day can, and even the short-term crop of English Peas we grew in the Spring were shelled and boiled and creamed into canned-pea gray.   I guess if I’d peeked into the pot, somewhere between TWO MINUTES and BABY FOOD, that heavenly color might have shone for an instant.

Things in Rings were immensely popular, and that's all I have to say about that.

There was usually a light, colorful dessert of daintily cut fruit or fancifully-molded sherbets or Jello.   Both salads AND desserts were of the fiddly-poo sort, with nary a normal cake or pie in sight.   And they had NAMES.   The above is called "Cut Glass Salad," and it's usually made with several different colors of Jello, made separately, cut into cubes, and then folded into whipped cream or Kool Whip with more Jello to make it set.  And all cooks know that that lady above had to go around and wash the face of every pee-diddly cube of that Jello up there to get it to show through.

Perfection salad also comes to mind (though seldom voluntarily), and though I like every one of the ingredients, together it seems a misbegotten match, too much like putting Italian dressing over marshmallows and beets.  This one, like most of the others of my childhood, reminds me of a mother Horta and her babies.  

There always seemed to be a plate somewhere of tiny weenies on picks, or crab puffs and exotic-sounding devils-on–horseback in the timer-set Tappan as you took your ease, awaiting a mere TING and a graceful bend and sweep to waft them to the living room.  

Good Luck on that, with the folks that I knew.   Knew personally, that is, for I never doubted that there must have been people named Carstairs or Langdon or Van Something who surely enjoyed such sumptuous evenings. 

And of What They Were Watching:  Moire non.

THE POPPIES BLOW

White poppies on a friend’s blog just now set me on one of my little hunts for histories of interesting people—it had me running over the verses of Flanders Field in my head, and looking up some of the last words, I found the poem inscribed in a young woman’s handwriting in her Nurse’s Daybook, and that just captured my heart.

 

Her name was Ella Osborn, and she worked at Mt. Sinai in New York, I believe, before she took  up the flag and volunteered for work right on the front lines in France---they were right under the bombers and felt the wounds and damages of the ordnance, the searing sting of the floating mustard gas, as they stood in their operating rooms or repairing rooms, hands deep in the wounds of soldiers, til sleep almost swept them off their feet.

She copied the poem on pages in and amongst numbers of lost patients, hours at the operating table, and recounting the small simple joys of an outing away from the melee into a town for a bowl of soup.  Her fieldbook/daybook/nurse’s notes held the diary of her days, from her term of service there, January 1918 to April 1919.  A year and some-odd of a Hell no one could imagine.    She wrote once of an unthinkable reprimand:  “I went for a walk but had to come back early to a lecture given by the colonel who gave us quite a raking over, and said in a nice way we would have to come under Army Discipline.”   (I’m trying to imagine what kind of rank and courage and confidence it would take to dare bring reproof to such a group of heroic, dedicated young women as those battlefield nurses).

 

And I just held her to my heart, with the absolute kinship of family tragedy, with my Dad’s two oldest brothers, 5 and 7, dying within a week of each other in the Flu Epidemic of 1918, before Daddy was born.  The thought that she might have been standing there, energy spent, in bloodied clothes from several soldiers she had helped repair or comforted as they whispered away, when our little boys breathed their last on their bed in that faraway little tenant house, it's beyond imagining the two scenes of such hope, pain and sorrow rising to Heaven.   

I spent lots of hours scribing my finger along the grooves of the lettering on their fading small stones, oldest in our family section of the cemetery,  and then such searing pangs as a Mother later, of how in the world my Mammaw made it through that, pregnant with Daddy’s sister born two months after their deaths, and then Daddy’s birth a year later.  Finding her words was a sort of "she was there doing THAT and my family was here in grief over THIS" in a time frame of mutual hardship.

 

Mammaw also lived through a rattlesnake bite in the pea patch when Daddy was a teen---he drove her in their old Ford five miles on dirt roads to the doctor, as his sister held onto her in the back seat.    She “swoll up fit to pop,” but she made it, circling the century and living another fifty-five years until 1987, within months of her 100^th birthday.   

 

 I’m delaying lunch to ferret out more on such a hero as Ella Osborn.    I pray her life was a sweet reward for all the sacrifices she made and good she did in those months of unspeakable trials.   And I hope there are poppies where she rests. 

Another reference that came up just now:  Her trip to France and her service there.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/847fad150ae74ff2a8e8e2df09d4a891

To Soothe the Savage Breast

 For anyone who hasn't seen The Shawshank Redemption, I can from my heart recommend this movie from WAY BACK---I can remember my own modest Mother, whose work ethic was strict and of high resolve, one day when she had gone to lunch and failed to return at her usual five-minutes-to-One to take over so I could go home. She called to say that she had settled in the den at noon with a sandwich and glass of tea, happened upon the first few moments of the movie, and just HAD to see "how it came out."

If you have not experienced this wonderful movie with its perfect cast and gifted actors, plus the absolutely sublime Stephen King writing---DO look it up.

In one of the brightest spots in a grim-spotted movie, of prison and of gray and of the beating-down of the humanity within, there are incandescent moments of LIGHT so bright they feed your soul. My favorite is when Andy Dufresne, convicted of murders he did not commit, had been given the task of administering the prison library.

He took on the small, dim space, with its creaky book-cart of handworn, many-times-read books and its dusty corners, and by writing to organizations and pestering the state legislature with something like a letter-a-week requesting funding, he was finally sent a few boxes of used books and records.

On one particular day, the guard stepped out for a moment, and Andy took out a big old slick black record from its worn sleeve, set it on the turntable, started it playing, and turned on the intercom/public address system for the whole prison---house and yard.

The men elbow-deep in hot laundry suds stopped their labor; the kitchen cooks and the machine shop grease-monkeys and the floor-moppers and the guards all looked up in wonderment as those silvery notes floated out over the gray walls and bare-trodden yard, as if they were seeing the very angels in the air who voiced the melody.

And Red, who was Andy's best friend---a pragmatic old lifer played by Morgan Freeman (imagine that rich, honey-syrup voice narrating the words), says:

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it.

I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ8ZHilxdm8

DUCK, REDUX

Way back in the nineties, we lived in a ground-floor apartment on the back of a building, with an entire vacant parking lot and great green lawn with picnic tables all to ourselves. We could have parties and great numbers of guests accommodated better than we could have in another wing. And there was another duck incident, but not of our own flock---well, not really, but the fact that the first two, Maurice and Velveeta, beat a path from the little fake-lake to our apartment door twice a day DID bring it about. The little couple then brought a banshee-bird with them, who squawked insistently for breakfast at our open bedroom window beginning at 5 a.m., day after day. We named her Miranda, just wishing she would remain silent, etc.

 THEN, the crowds grew, and we had go to the used bread store for enough to keep them fed, and when they brought their babies in little bobby lines, our lawn began to take on the look of a lakeside latrine. We tried stopping the feeding sessions. They gathered, muttered to themselves---probably dark and dire things about US, then began a clamor that the neighbors could hear, I’m sure. Radio Free Europe could have heard THAT lot.

 So we gave in on the bread, and hosed down the lawn twice a day, for we knew we'd be moving soon. When we moved to the third-floor apartment over by the lake, they STILL gathered under our balcony, and we’d Frisbee bread down, especially when the lake was frozen, so they’d have something to go in their little bellies. But while we were still on the ground floor, I would go out and sit on the patio with my earliest cup, while the birds gathered. There were probably sixty or seventy by then, all mingled with some white ones which had been there from when the place was built. 

 One morning, as I sat on the concrete, a white one appeared in the crowd, and got fairly near me. I could see a big tangle of fishing line all curled and snarled around one leg, so I coaxed him nearer with some bread. He got right up to my lap, so I stepped on the line and hugged him with both arms. He went into squawk-and-flap mode, with me struggling to get up off the concrete with my arms full of irate duck. I went in yelling for Chris, who came running to the clamor, stark naked and soaking wet, just out of the shower and thinking marauders had me. 

 We DID get the duck into the house for the snipping of all that cord, and I’m sure somewhere there’s a Candid Camera crew bewailing the fact that they missed out on the sight of two hefty middle-aged folks, one wet and naked, the other hanging on for dear life and laughing hysterically, cutting 15-pound test off the leg of a squawky, flappy duck.

MY FRIEND OLIVER

I'd dearly love to hear my dear, dear neighbor from Mississippi at his Steinway, playing Liebestraum and Pavane for a Sleeping Princess and Moonlight Sonata and the mystical, haunting Traumerei, which he always played for me after a hard day at work or when the boss’ mannerisms had been especially harsh. I would sit in his Mother’s little gooseneck rocker, and he would hand me a dainty glass of Tawny Port; I would rock and dream and it would soothe away the day, and by the end of the Schumann I was almost melted into the chair like a spent snowman, dwindling in the sun. My dear pianist friend’s fingers spilling forth Rachmaninoff’s Variation on a Theme from Paganini the first time I put the music in front of him---he sat down and it just channeled out and up, like leaves swirling against a wall. And the look on Chris’ sweet face at our wedding, as those same notes rang golden into the Summer afternoon, and I came around the corner of the lawn in the beautiful dress he had designed for me. I severely regret the misplacement of a plate-sized reel of tape during one of our various moves; I’ve had no way to play it again, as we have never had a reel-to-reel machine, but just the having of it was enough. It was the pinnacle of my friend’s career as an artist and teacher, playing The Age of Anxiety, with Bernstein conducting. And just to hold it in my hands would be a miracle, of sorts---all that talent and those gifted hands and minds condensed and graven into that fragile, spinning hoop of vinyl and dreams. I will never forget that sweet friend, purveyor of magical music, friendly welcome, and Southern charm. He was a fourth-generation pupil of Liszt, mentioned just once in passing, and his time and place were quite the anachronism to his great talent. His name was Oliver Manning, and he'd be 105 now. After his passing, his family had a yard sale, and my Mother bought me his plaque for the 1938 piano award from Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where he later taught, and a little bronze baby shoe---treasures I cherish for the memories.