Food has always played a big part in American life. In almost every great memory, food enjoys a major or, at least, a minor role. As a child growing up in a typical 2 bedroom, post World War II GI bungalow, the tastes and smells of food were never far away.
I remember lazy September Sunday afternoons when an early dinner meant roast beef and potatoes, carrots and gravy, the smell wafting out the windows into the late summer breeze. We ate early on Sundays because Dad worked nights on the railroad and often left after we went to bed. It afforded him some time to digest, read the paper and eat a huge bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert. Sometimes Dad worked the afternoon shift and would arrive home around ten. We, of course, were in bed, but the smell of onions and green peppers frying with bacon tweaked our noses and brought us out of the bedroom to kneel on the dining room chairs, leaning with our forearms on the table while Dad ate a Denver omelet with toast and coffee.
I've always been intrigued by comfort food, which I truly believe is another word for food created from nothing when the pocketbook was empty. My father-in-law, a burly Italian from New York City, had a penchant for one such food. I remember his reminiscence. “Grandma used to save up the heels from Italian loaves, then drizzle them with olive oil, hot water and Italian spices.” He would press all of the fingertips of one hand to his lips and emit a loud kissing sound. “Mmmm-mmm. That was delicious!”
“That was “poor” food,” I said at one point. “You know, when you were poor.”
He looked quizzically at me. “No, that was a special treat.” But I thought I was on the right track. I remember chipped beef on toast or ground beef in white sauce over toast or biscuits. Sometimes we had breakfast for dinner. Bacon and eggs, French toast with maple syrup, always a seemingly creative delicacy to us, but likely a last resort for Mom, resulting from the bleak contents of the refrigerator. Hot dogs, bologna, egg salad sandwiches - all foods created from the last remains of something else. My mother used to make eggsalad/tuna salad sandwiches, which we thought we the best things since, dare I say it, sliced bread. I now realize it was probably a measure to stretch either the tuna or egg salad to accommodate an unexpected lunch guest.
Aroma - the lasting spark for the memory of such things McDonald's hamburgers on a summer night, succulent turkey roasting on a Thanksgiving morn, apple pies baking on a fall day. Sound doesn't play much of a role in food memories except for the sound of the music tinkling from the ice cream carts and trucks that rode up and down the rows of blocks in suburban neighborhoods in the fifties, and sometimes still today. We could hear the music a block away, plenty of time to run inside and yell, “Mom, Mom, here comes the ice cream man, can we get some?” Sure enough, she'd dig around in her purse for change and out we'd go to wait on the curb. The choices were wonderful. Ice cream in a waffle cone, dipped in chocolate and rolled in nuts. Tri-flavored popsicles with raspberry, orange and vanilla from the Good Humor Man.
We had a favorite hamburger stand where I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago - Prince Castle. There they featured the usual fare, but the main attractions were ice cream cones with square-shaped scoops. On summer nights, after dark when Dad was working, Mom would pile us in the car with all the windows down, the warm summer wind in our faces and head for Prince Castle. The flavors were much like the Baskin Robbins flavors of today - Mint Chocolate Chips, Butter Pecan, Very Cherry, and so creamy and delicious I would add an inch to my hips if I ate it today, but I'd do it in a heartbeat.
And Pizza! Oh, the pizza in the Chicago area is renowned. We had two favorites: John's Pizzeria on 173rd and Burnham Avenue and Colucci's at 176th and Burnham. John's pizza was covered in a blanket of finely crumble sweet Italian sausage, with a cheesy, peppery taste. Colucci's was smothered in a succulent tomato sauce with chunks of sausage. But the unique thing was the way the sliced the pizza - one slice across the center, the sliced in two-inch strips the other way resulting in rectangular shapes. Their Italian roast beef sandwiches were out of this world, and I've never found another since that compared to those.
