My Deprived Childhood

As I read other food blogs, I am impressed and touched by the warm influence of parents on food bloggers’ recipes and memories of food from their childhoods. This leads, naturally to memories of my own childhood food and cooking experiences and well, it’s kind of sad, actually…. let’s just say that cans and can openers figure prominently.

I am surprised I am just realizing this now, well into adluthood (some would say past) but this shocking truth is just now ocurring to me: I never ate a fresh vegetable until adulthood. That is, a vegetable cooked from a fresh specimen; this excludes the iceberg lettuce/tomato/cucumber salads my Aunt Jeanne made for family get-togethers, and possibly an ear of corn a few times a year.  I had encountered fresh vegetables at the grocery store with curiosity but my entire vegetable eating memories until age eighteen are associated with the opening of cans. (I am reminded of a pet cat I had who came running whenever she heard the can opener being vaguely touched.)

Think of it: mushy olive green peas and carrot cubes with no crunch; soft chunks of corn in a creamy salty bath; stringy asparagus as limp as wet cardboard; green beans so soft you could eat them without teeth; spinach as weak and nondescript as wet tissue. And yet, somehow with such scant input, I differentiated the flavors and textures and loved them all (except beets.)

Lunch every day also involved cans - soup, either tomato, vegetable or chicken noodle, with a bologna  on white bread sandwich. A special treat was grilled cheese (slices of processed American cheese on white bread with margarine spread).

Fresh fruit was also strangely absent from childhood. All I remember is fruit cocktail (canned) or pears in a heavy syrup (yes, canned). My Dad worked at Nabisco so our sweets were of the Oreo and Chips Ahoy! variety. Other kids thought this was heaven, but I never really liked cookies — until I tasted homemade, sometime in my twenties I think, and understood finally, the allure of a good cookie.

I don’t mean to discredit my mother but I think there are 2 types of people in the world, those that view food as energy for the body and otherwise irrelevant, and foodies - those who notice and enjoy the look, smell, texture and taste of food, and eat not because they are hungry but because eating is so much fun. My mother was of the “food as simple energy source” school of thought and found canned and other prepared foods an easy solution to her energy problems and those of her children.

Dinner was always a predictable triumvirate of meat (don’t ask), canned vegetable and mashed potatoes. Due to the fact that my mother’s parents were from Ireland, potatoes at least, were always real potatoes, or we would have been excommunicated I think. Potatoes were almost always mashed but occasionally baked or oven-roasted with roast beef (those potatoes - quartered, brown and crisp on the outside and tender and soft on the inside — were my Mom’s best culinary effort and one I am still attempting to duplicate.)

Now of course, in the bitter irony that is parenthood, my children both prefer packaged mashed potatoes… I don’t know where they found out about them but I will admit I now purchase these easy and quick packages and serve them (but don’t eat them myself) in a pinch as a quick side (all right, once they were a full meal.) My mother would fully approve, I am certain.