When I was a little girl, I never cared much about food.  I learned early on that my dog, Bootsie, a scrappy rat terrier, was a girl’s best friend at the dinner table.

Boots was always hungry, and she positioned herself underneath the most generous person at the blonde Danish Modern dinner table, and that person was me.  Although I was rarely hungry, my mother once discovered me sitting cross legged under that very same table sharing a meal of dog biscuits with Boots.

Mostly, food was a battle when I was little.  My mother served me sweet and sour pork for dinner, then again the following day for breakfast and lunch until I finally ate it.  When I was in kindergarten, I was all elbows and knees, and Dr. Wagner urged my mother to increase my calorie intact.  Peanut butter and milk shakes, he suggested. Wheat germ and bragmeal, ordered Grandma Seilkop. It’s hard to believe now, but it took a lot back then to activate my appetite. I liked novelty in the presentation and delivery of my food.  I remember an afternoon my mother let me eat chocolate chips out of the yellow bag as I watched Ruth Lyons 50/50 Club with her.  I worked hard to be very quiet because, remarkably, my mother seemed to forget my nap that day.  I begged to go to the Teddy Bear on North Bend Road (where a Dollar Store is now), the first fast food restaurant of my memory.  You ordered your food at a window, then drove to the six-foot fiberglass bear, and your sack of food magically appeared in his tummy.  The teachers’ lounge was across the hall from the first grade classroom where my mother taught.

After school when she was in meetings, I’d sneak into the lounge and feast on knuckles and knobs of leftover doughnuts. I was a sucker for advertising, and I yearned for cereal with slices of freeze-dried strawberries that supposedly plumped up when you poured on the milk.  Never got those.  I was obsessed with getting a foot-long hot dog advertised on the A & W billboards we saw out on our camping trip out west.  Never got one.  Jiffy Pop, which swelled to fill a great silver cocoon, I was sure would be delicious. Unnecessary drama, I was told. Coca-Cola, that drink for the fun-loving crowd, rarely appeared in our kitchen except when my parents hosted Card Club.

If there was some left after the company left, my brother and I would get some served in sweating colored aluminum tumblers. My mother was neither an enthusiastic nor imaginative cook.  Salad at dinner was a wedge of Iceberg lettuce (before it was fashionable) dressed with a glob of lumpy homemade Thousand Island dressing.  Sometimes there was green jello with canned pears.  There were always vegetables, though I’ve managed to forget the details about those.  She was a fearless magician with the pressure cooker, from which she ladled green beans and cottage ham or mett and sauerkraut. Slices of Spam adorned with canned pineapple rings quite regularly graced our dinner table.   Perhaps everything would have tasted better if it had not been served on Melmac dishes.  We had a set in trendy colors of orange, turquoise, and black.

I favored the turquoise plates, and dreaded black days.  Mom tried, though, and she put fairly nutritious, if not even slightly delicious, meals on the table every day.  I remember my brother frisbeeing burnt pancakes off the balcony rather than eating them. I did like our Saturday night wieners and beans meals, though, which consisted of pork and beans from a can, dressed up with catsup, mustard, brown sugar, and circles of processed god-only-knows-what floating in the brick red gravy.   Mom heated it in the dented square saucepan and then dished it out on dinner plates. The presentation was lacking artistically and pragmatically; I remember chasing the beans around with my fork.

Only now in telling this story do I feel sorry that I rebuffed Mom’s efforts, meal after meal, to make me relish eating. In fairness, my mom’s cooking probably would have tasted better if she had known when my father would get home.  Dinners were held until he arrived—we never ate without him.  Even when he came grumping through the basement door and trudged up the steps, I knew that dinner was not imminent.  He did some cursory grooming after his day in his filthy foundry, then Mom and Dad had to have a cocktail.  Sometimes before they started drinking, they did this icky kissing thing that never failed to chase me out of the room. My dad wasn’t a gourmet cook, either, but he knew how to add enough fat and sugar to food to make pedestrian fare delectable.

Sundays after church he made bacon and eggs.  First he dipped the bacon in milk then dredged it in flour to hold in the fat as the bacon sizzled in the cast iron skillet.  The final product was crispy, flat bacon that was the same size as it was before cooked. Then Dad fried the eggs in the drippings.  The eggs weren’t as pretty as those fixed in restaurants, the whites crazed caramel brown, but they were delicious.  I remember making an egg sandwich like Dad did and the horror of discovering the yellow oozing down my chin after the first bite.  Mom and Dad laughed at my foolishnes) and explained that sunny-side-up eggs weren’t the right kind for a sandwich. I felt foolish a lot in my house.   My dad did know his way around a sandwich, yes he did.

Sandwiches always started with coarse bread from the health food store (I can’t believe now how I pined for squishy white bread the other kids had) and a thick layer of real butter on each slice.  Then he added a big slice of onion and limburger cheese or braunschweiger.  Dad liked gross food like Johnny in the Bag (dried blood) with Karo; cow tongue, which seemed to taste me as I tasted it; frog legs; pickled pigs feet.  My dad had a lust for food that I found somewhat repulsive.  He shoveled food in with his hammy hands.  His fingernails were perpetually rimmed with a crescent of dirt from the foundry.  He dripped food down his chin and onto his shirt.  Usually the shirt was a t-shirt, completing his ensemble, as he often sat at the kitchen table in his underwear.

In fact, this is the ensemble he was wearing the first time my future husband met him.  They shook hands at that Formica table in December 1969.

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