Every summer my grandmother planted a garden in the back yard, nestled between the brick garage and the apple and pear trees my great-grandfather planted when he built the house. The ten square feet of garden, surrounded by a wire fence for the beans to climb, produced an abundance of tomatoes, green peppers, snap beans, summer squash and other vegetables for her table.
When we came to dinner, if it were still summer, I followed my mother and grandmother out into the backyard, through the entrance flanked by giant sunflowers to the garden, alive with buzzing insects on a hazy afternoon, where I “helped” them pick string beans from their climbing poles, putting some in my grandmother’s apron and the rest in a brown paper bag. We would take the long, slender beans back to the kitchen.
Sitting around the dinette table in the kitchen, we pulled the strings and snapped the ends from the beans tossing them into a cooking pot. I did my best to help, until, lacking patience for this kind of work, as most boys do, I got bored and wandered off looking for my father who was usually working on the family car or talking with my grandfather, leaving the two women to finish preparing our dinner.
Whether it was an ordinary week night or a holiday, we could usually expect her version of “hamburger,” which was more like pate, with bread for filler and held together with egg, served on a plate, slathered in thick, creamy gravy dotted with brown bits of bottom of the pan goodness. Served with mashed potatoes and the beans picked from the garden, we sat down at five o’clock sharp to dinner.
In the waning days of summer, she could be found in a kitchen filled with clouds of steam emanating from a strange looking pot on the stove, which I was told was for canning. Old fashioned looking Mason jars, their lids and rings stacked on a towel, waited for their turn in the hot water bath. This was canning day, when she put away the bounty of summer for cold winter days.
In later years, I would tag along when my parents took my grandmother to the supermarket, watching as she browsed the produce section, carefully checking the cantaloupes and grapefruits for ripeness. It was customary for her to have fruit with her breakfast. Sometimes, my mother would see a shopper rush into the produce department, grab something without checking its freshness, and rush to the checkout line. She would say, with some exasperation, “people will buy anything today.” I could see those hurried customers had lost the knowledge my grandmother had, the knowledge she handed down to my mother, and to me, happening as people have steadily became more ignorant of food and cooking.
She had grown up working on local farms in Maryland, as an “orphan” of circumstance. She milked the cow each morning. Worked in the fields with a steam thresher. Although she carried scars of her hard life being farmed out, I can’t help but think it gave her an understanding of where food comes from that is utterly lost on most people today.
As a child, I would always check the refrigerator when coming over to grandma’s house for the Velveeta. There was always a can of Crisco somewhere to be found, substituting for lard when pork fat had gone out of fashion. She would make me lunch and once I had finished, she would give me permission to leave the kitchen and walk into the backyard to pick a pear for dessert, any pear I wanted, from one of the trees my great-grandfather planted. Although my grandmother grew up in the era when factory foods were introduced, I was introduced to a food culture where processed foods were the exception rather than the rule, simply because they were expensive or superfluous. I can’t remember seeing a can of green beans in her kitchen.
It was through visits with my grandparents that I was exposed to the mysteries of the garden, the glories of fresh produce, the magic of cooking. I learned, from an early age, what it meant to pick vegetables from the kitchen garden and eat them for dinner the same evening. I watched my grandmother cook from “scratch” using elemental ingredients, meat, fish, vegetables and fruit, flour, water, salt, sugar, eggs.
I grew up watching Julia Child on television, at a time when Americans were becoming more interested in taste and sophistication in food and the term “foodie” eventually came to describe those passionate about food. I always struggled with the meaning of foodie. It seemed to me that a foodie was someone who took an interest in their food, not “reserved for an exclusive club of chefs and discriminating diners” who worry about tiny differences in taste. As I struggled with my identity, I wondered what I was, a foodie or something else? When I looked back on my childhood, I found the answer, my grandmother was a foodie.
I would like to believe everyone is a foodie. For a time, it was rumored, that the term “foodie” had been banished from the vocabulary of food writers for being too snobbish, but the term is slowly surfacing again, as more people take an interest in their food. The meaning of “foodie” is changing, from a description that was once exclusive and discriminating, to one that includes people from many walks of life, returning to the meaning I have always felt in my heart. This change comes with the democratization of interest in food. A recent Washington Post article (As Food Becomes a Cause, Meeting Puts Issues on the Table) takes note of the change. Although I find the it somewhat bizarre to hear the people taking part in this resurgence of interest in food as being “revolutionaries,” it is a hopeful sign. My grandmother, the foodie, would have laughed at the idea her gardening and cooking were revolutionary.
–Steve Knoblock
