As early food memoirist M.F.K. Fisher once noted, when she was writing about food, what she was really writing about were larger things - "about love and our need for it." I happen to be one of the lucky ones for whom food memories are happy ones, with love being one of the main ingredients.

I was actually nurtured through food, unlike many friends over the years who relate unpleasant associations around food, like fights around the dinner table, verbal or sometimes physical, or body image that made eating no fun, or even bad cooking! I was blessed with pleasant gatherings, feeling fat, but not enough to undermine my great pleasure of eating, and good cooking - from both parents.

So I am expecting that while some memories may surface that are not Leave it to Beaver-perfect, I will be writing about happy times when food was fresh and people were kind and families were central. And maybe I will surprise myself and find that my childhood and even early adulthood were not so idyllic, and that's okay too. I am ready to find out.

 

PART II - Around the Table

Though we only ate at the mahogany dining room table of my childhood home for special occasions, mostly Christmas and Thanksgiving and always with other relatives joining in, I always sat in the same seat. My position, to the immediate left of my father, who sat at the head of the table to carve the inevitable turkey, always felt like a privileged place to me. In retrospect, I'm not sure why, because there was nothing inherently special about sitting beside Daddy, but maybe from the perspective of a little girl who adored her father and who loved the ritual of turkey-carving, it was special to have a front row seat.

The other advantage to my position was that because the plates were passed around - turkey first, then clockwise with every person spooning onto the fine china brought out for special occasions from whichever bowl of bounty was before them - mine was the very last plate served. Now you may wonder why this was an advantage, but southern manners dictated that you would not dare lift your fork before everyone was served, and beyond that, until the hostess lifted her fork, so when Mama saw that I was set, she lifted her fork from the end of the table opposite Daddy, and we all dug in. While everyone else suffered from the delay as the smells of the spread before them teased and tantalized, I merely had to wait a few seconds for the go-ahead.

The macaroni and cheese was always the dish that was placed in front of Mama, and it was the one dish that never got the skip order. Someone may say no thanks to the butterbeans or corn that had been "put up" on a summer day in July when we did the freezing and canning of the vegetables straight from the farm, but Mama's macaroni and cheese was a must have. (I never failed to have pangs of guilt when I served my children "store-bought" mac 'n cheese over the years, having been raised at the feet of the master.)

The other thing no one ever turned down was the wine jelly, a generations-old family recipe that was basically jello made from wine. The children felt very grown-up to get to eat something made with alcohol, and the adults simply loved it. With whipped cream, it still can't be beat as a complement to coconut cake or chocolate pie, and it still appears at every family gathering all these decades later.

Conversations around those holiday dinners usually entailed some variation of updates on what outrageous thing Cud'n Fanny Mert had said or when Brother Doan would get out of the hospital. But the story that never failed to be trotted out was the one about our great-grandfather John coming home from the Civil War.

John Manning was “mustered out” in Wilmington and walked the more than one hundred miles home to Martin County, NC, where he passed the home of his sweetheart, Sarah Margaret, whom he had left behind several years before. Finding her rocking on the front porch as he passed her house, he nodded and said, “Hey, Miss Sarah Margaret, I’m home.” And she said, “I’m glad, John.” And he said, “See you Saturday night.” And she nodded, and that was that.

That table got shipped to England when my niece moved there, and it was put into storage when her home was under renovation. She bought a new table and our childhood one never found its way back to the family. My generation still routinely gathers for holidays with the next generation and now even the next. We can faithfully recreate the menu and have a grand time, and we can miss the mahogany table that brought us together so long ago. But the irreplaceable components we will never stop missing are the turkey carver and the macaroni and cheese maker and the alchemy the two of them created when they set that dining room table.

 

Part III - Kitchen Table Catastrophe

One Saturday long, long ago, Mother made one of her big mid-day dinners we called "boiling the pot" because fatback, collards, and potatoes all went into the pot to be served alongside cornbread, with a cherry cobbler and a dollop of vanilla ice milk for dessert. We had arranged ourselves at the table, and my 4-year-old niece sat beside Daddy to his left and she put her glass of milk over to her left. Daddy reached over and moved it to a position almost out of her reach to her right - a position more in line with Emily Post etiquette, but also calculated to be unlikely she would knock it over.

Within a few minutes he had knocked it over himself. It was perfectly placed so the milk ran through the crack between the leaves of the table right onto his leg. That would not have been a catastrophe except that he had on his plaid golf pants because every Saturday he was picked up like clockwork at the final lick of the cobbler plate for a golf game with Dr. Himmelwright and Dr. Llewelyn. I am not exaggerating when I say that was the maddest I had ever seen him, and his response was to jump up into a crouched position like a warrior poised for battle and say, "stink, stink, stink." A gasp could be heard around the table at this egregious breach of decorum, followed by stunned silence.