This wonderful post, and all of the interesting replies, made me think of a much derided figure in my family, "Aunt Marg." Aunt Marg was my grandmother's aunt, in the old home movies she was in from the 20's that I saw, she was always busy at the food tables during the picnics. She was famous for thinking of the next meal. I never met her, of course, she was long dead by the time I was growing up in the 70's. In my family, to be called an Aunt Marg was a great insult- it meant you were obsessed with food and would wind up being the most horrible thing, a single fat woman. You could be called this just for talking about dinner at breakfast. I just grew up thinking that if I were to plan a few meals ahead, and to think about it out loud, I had to first offer this disclaimer: "Not to be an Aunt Marg, but..." Well, at some point the light dawned and I have been apologizing in my head to my specific Aunt Marg and to the Aunt Margs of the world ever since. Feeding people takes planning and preparation, and time consuming work. And clearly it's contemptible work. When I think of how blithely Aunt Marg was criticized for doing the labor of planning (and sometimes actual labor, they had help too, they were a big family), just so everyone else could swan around and just show up to the table to eat and feel superior without thinking about the process at all- well, I am so sad. It was so mean. My great grandmother, Edith, probably ate a lot of well cooked fresh food, the kind that Michael Pollan probably had in mind when he had that simplistic little thought snippet. But Edith didn't lift a finger to do it, because she had a sister and servants she could get to perform the labor for her.
I have always hated the "eat like your grandmother" rule. For a start, many of our grandmothers would not have recognized food from foreign cultures as appropriate. My great-grandparents came to the US from Eastern European shtetls and spent their lives cooking in tiny NYC apartment kitchens, once they made the move up from tenement flats with no sanitation. They certainly cooked--my maternal grandmother in particular talked about how even in the depths of the Depression, her mother prided herself on being a balabuste who served full meals every day. But was it easy? No.
As a kid, going to my grandmother's house meant full brunch spreads and stacks of bakery boxes and home cooked meals for dinner. For her, that was also for making up for the dinners she hadn't been able to cook when my grandfather died and she had to go run the family store.
I have their recipes, and I still make them. It's delicious food, but it's not how people eat today. It's the cuisine of poor people who didn't have fresh vegetables for 7 months a year. A lot of it is really heavy (potato kugel made with schmaltz, it's to die for). Some of it is a pain to make--the reason nasty jarred gefilte fish exists is that making it from scratch takes hours and involves boiling fish heads. And the irony is, Pollan would probably say my grandmother's food isn't healthy anyway.
My great-grandmother gigged frogs in rural Wisconsin to keep my grandma and her three siblings alive during the Depression so, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and enjoy every single meal (processed food and otherwise) that doesn't require us to consume amphibians in order to avoid starvation.
I'm also in a different generation than Pollan, but my great grandparents were early fans of McDonald's and any and all convenience foods. More importantly, I really appreciate you reminding us of everything that went into eating in previous generations and how little choice some folks had about their role in it.
I remember seeing red once when I heard an interview with Pollan where he drew a distinction between "real" spinach and frozen, as if frozen spinach is somehow inferior to buying spinach in a pre-packed clamshell. Pollan's view of how people "should" be eating is insanely elitist. I have no idea how my great-grandmother ate, but my grandmother on my father's side ate a ton of canned food and store-bought white bread, so I don't think he would have approved of that either.
Arrgh! Just lost two paragraphs because my phone switched to low power mode. I’m re-typing in Notes – that’ll show her. 😡
Anyway, what a fantastic essay, Virginia! Many times in the last few months I’ve read Burnt Toast and thought, wow, this is her best yet, and then you outdo yourself again. The personal history of your families was a delight to read, especially the contrast.
It made me think about what I heard growing up from my parents about their childhood meals and mealtimes. They had different foods and norms, but I don’t believe either of my grandmothers like to cook.
My maternal grandmother made dinner for the family pretty much every night (7 children and a full-time job as a bookkeeper, 1940s-1950s Chicago). She had a few specialties that were legendary, such as fried chicken in beer batter, but she was not a particularly good cook. Her scrambled eggs were notoriously dry (think yellow pellets of solid egg). Mom’s parents had a rule similar to one you described, in that there was little tolerance for food preferences and picky eaters. No way Grandma was making more than one dinner. If you didn’t like what was served you didn’t have to eat it, but there was no going to the kitchen and making yourself a sandwich, either. You ate something from what was offered. My mother was an extremely picky eater from cradle to grave and there were nights she (and sometimes her younger brother) ate ketchup sandwiches for dinner.
My dad grew up on a farm in 1950s with his dad and granddad working the farm most of his childhood. My grandma’s meal planning was designed to accommodate her other responsibilities, such as housework and later, a job off the farm. Mondays were bean soup nights, because Monday was laundry day. A pot of navy beans and ham hocks could sit on the stove and simmer unattended all day, while she wrestled laundry for a family of 5 into that mammoth machine that counted as a household convenience on the farm (something like this - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/a7/7d/daa77db22fd18603ccc12f9126f9db38.jpg).
My mom did not learn to cook growing up, and when she and my dad were deciding to marry, she says she warned him she couldn’t cook. He said that was OK, he’d do all the cooking. That never happened, and made us kids laugh when Mom told us. I rarely saw my dad cook, beyond the occasional big weekend breakfast. My mom learned to cook mostly from her mother-in-law; they lived on the farm with his parents for a year or two when they were newlyweds and I was a baby. There’s many more food stories about that, but I’ve dragged you far enough down my memory lane!
Thanks again for this essay, Virginia, and the fun memories it triggered.
My maternal grandmother gleefully kept a chest freezer filled with Lean Cuisines and other frozen delights for when my sister and I visited. My paternal grandmother delighted in feeding us with all of the sugary cereals and cookies that my mom forbade, in their unique ways I suspect this was their response to growing up in the Depression and having to eat god knows what. Which is all to say, screw Michael Pollan
Nov 9, 2021Liked by Corinne Fay, Virginia Sole-Smith
The majority of the meals I remember eating at my dad's parents house were mainly crafted out of multiple cans of food mixed together because my grandmother much preferred to spend her time sewing or baking cookies for her church. (Also the pineapple casserole was DELISH.) The ones at my mom's parents house were all scratch cooked, yet my grandmother suffered from severe depression and often didn't sleep and wasn't allowed to do the career she dreamed of. As you say, the context always matters and those snippy one liners miss all of it.
My maternal grandmother had her kitchen remodeled to remove the oven and stove at some point before my earliest memories of her house. She hated cooking! When she babysat me, she made me peanut butter and jelly on white bread, and cut the sandwiches into the shapes of houses and sailboats. I loved those sandwiches! She catered to my pickiness and used only smooth peanut butter. She also always had a jar of York mints or Sunkist fruit gems and didn't limit how many I could eat. I'm quite happy to eat the way I remember eating at her house :)
Thank you for this! My grandmother, who is about to celebrate her 101st birthday, is a historian, and like your grandmother, dutifully made dinner for her family for years but never enjoyed it. Her classic move was to do all of her cooking at 5am, and then put the food in the oven on warm all day. She had better things to do. When she and my grandfather moved into assisted living, my sister in law asked “Nana, do you miss cooking?” She said, “I liked cooking (not true, I don’t think) but I LOVE not cooking”
You rightly point out that the majority of women hated to cook back in the day. It involved drudgery, penny-pinching, and also, being treated rudely by the local male greengrocers. butchers and fishmongers. Nowadays, we romanticize the small shopkeepers of the past, but in reality they were often contemptuous of their female customers. And if you were the 'wrong' race or nationality, they would refuse to serve you. When supermarkets opened, women flocked to them. Critics (men and privileged women) decried them, but ordinary women loved their impersonality. Cooking by women is always taken for granted and belittled. It's no wonder most women ditched it as soon as they had the chance.
My great-grandparents were mostly dirt poor farmers, sharecroppers, and miners, and even the ones that were 'middle class' still had to feed five children during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Some of them would have been super jazzed to see the food I eat, even if they didn't recognize it, just because it was there! And half the stuff wouldn't be familiar just because I live in a multicultural city, and cook and buy food from countries they wouldn't have thought of with ingredients they'd never heard of. I love me some potatoes, but if I stuck to this rule that would basically be all I ever ate.
This wonderful post, and all of the interesting replies, made me think of a much derided figure in my family, "Aunt Marg." Aunt Marg was my grandmother's aunt, in the old home movies she was in from the 20's that I saw, she was always busy at the food tables during the picnics. She was famous for thinking of the next meal. I never met her, of course, she was long dead by the time I was growing up in the 70's. In my family, to be called an Aunt Marg was a great insult- it meant you were obsessed with food and would wind up being the most horrible thing, a single fat woman. You could be called this just for talking about dinner at breakfast. I just grew up thinking that if I were to plan a few meals ahead, and to think about it out loud, I had to first offer this disclaimer: "Not to be an Aunt Marg, but..." Well, at some point the light dawned and I have been apologizing in my head to my specific Aunt Marg and to the Aunt Margs of the world ever since. Feeding people takes planning and preparation, and time consuming work. And clearly it's contemptible work. When I think of how blithely Aunt Marg was criticized for doing the labor of planning (and sometimes actual labor, they had help too, they were a big family), just so everyone else could swan around and just show up to the table to eat and feel superior without thinking about the process at all- well, I am so sad. It was so mean. My great grandmother, Edith, probably ate a lot of well cooked fresh food, the kind that Michael Pollan probably had in mind when he had that simplistic little thought snippet. But Edith didn't lift a finger to do it, because she had a sister and servants she could get to perform the labor for her.
I have always hated the "eat like your grandmother" rule. For a start, many of our grandmothers would not have recognized food from foreign cultures as appropriate. My great-grandparents came to the US from Eastern European shtetls and spent their lives cooking in tiny NYC apartment kitchens, once they made the move up from tenement flats with no sanitation. They certainly cooked--my maternal grandmother in particular talked about how even in the depths of the Depression, her mother prided herself on being a balabuste who served full meals every day. But was it easy? No.
As a kid, going to my grandmother's house meant full brunch spreads and stacks of bakery boxes and home cooked meals for dinner. For her, that was also for making up for the dinners she hadn't been able to cook when my grandfather died and she had to go run the family store.
I have their recipes, and I still make them. It's delicious food, but it's not how people eat today. It's the cuisine of poor people who didn't have fresh vegetables for 7 months a year. A lot of it is really heavy (potato kugel made with schmaltz, it's to die for). Some of it is a pain to make--the reason nasty jarred gefilte fish exists is that making it from scratch takes hours and involves boiling fish heads. And the irony is, Pollan would probably say my grandmother's food isn't healthy anyway.
My great-grandmother gigged frogs in rural Wisconsin to keep my grandma and her three siblings alive during the Depression so, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and enjoy every single meal (processed food and otherwise) that doesn't require us to consume amphibians in order to avoid starvation.
I'm also in a different generation than Pollan, but my great grandparents were early fans of McDonald's and any and all convenience foods. More importantly, I really appreciate you reminding us of everything that went into eating in previous generations and how little choice some folks had about their role in it.
I remember seeing red once when I heard an interview with Pollan where he drew a distinction between "real" spinach and frozen, as if frozen spinach is somehow inferior to buying spinach in a pre-packed clamshell. Pollan's view of how people "should" be eating is insanely elitist. I have no idea how my great-grandmother ate, but my grandmother on my father's side ate a ton of canned food and store-bought white bread, so I don't think he would have approved of that either.
Arrgh! Just lost two paragraphs because my phone switched to low power mode. I’m re-typing in Notes – that’ll show her. 😡
Anyway, what a fantastic essay, Virginia! Many times in the last few months I’ve read Burnt Toast and thought, wow, this is her best yet, and then you outdo yourself again. The personal history of your families was a delight to read, especially the contrast.
It made me think about what I heard growing up from my parents about their childhood meals and mealtimes. They had different foods and norms, but I don’t believe either of my grandmothers like to cook.
My maternal grandmother made dinner for the family pretty much every night (7 children and a full-time job as a bookkeeper, 1940s-1950s Chicago). She had a few specialties that were legendary, such as fried chicken in beer batter, but she was not a particularly good cook. Her scrambled eggs were notoriously dry (think yellow pellets of solid egg). Mom’s parents had a rule similar to one you described, in that there was little tolerance for food preferences and picky eaters. No way Grandma was making more than one dinner. If you didn’t like what was served you didn’t have to eat it, but there was no going to the kitchen and making yourself a sandwich, either. You ate something from what was offered. My mother was an extremely picky eater from cradle to grave and there were nights she (and sometimes her younger brother) ate ketchup sandwiches for dinner.
My dad grew up on a farm in 1950s with his dad and granddad working the farm most of his childhood. My grandma’s meal planning was designed to accommodate her other responsibilities, such as housework and later, a job off the farm. Mondays were bean soup nights, because Monday was laundry day. A pot of navy beans and ham hocks could sit on the stove and simmer unattended all day, while she wrestled laundry for a family of 5 into that mammoth machine that counted as a household convenience on the farm (something like this - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/a7/7d/daa77db22fd18603ccc12f9126f9db38.jpg).
My mom did not learn to cook growing up, and when she and my dad were deciding to marry, she says she warned him she couldn’t cook. He said that was OK, he’d do all the cooking. That never happened, and made us kids laugh when Mom told us. I rarely saw my dad cook, beyond the occasional big weekend breakfast. My mom learned to cook mostly from her mother-in-law; they lived on the farm with his parents for a year or two when they were newlyweds and I was a baby. There’s many more food stories about that, but I’ve dragged you far enough down my memory lane!
Thanks again for this essay, Virginia, and the fun memories it triggered.
My maternal grandmother gleefully kept a chest freezer filled with Lean Cuisines and other frozen delights for when my sister and I visited. My paternal grandmother delighted in feeding us with all of the sugary cereals and cookies that my mom forbade, in their unique ways I suspect this was their response to growing up in the Depression and having to eat god knows what. Which is all to say, screw Michael Pollan
The majority of the meals I remember eating at my dad's parents house were mainly crafted out of multiple cans of food mixed together because my grandmother much preferred to spend her time sewing or baking cookies for her church. (Also the pineapple casserole was DELISH.) The ones at my mom's parents house were all scratch cooked, yet my grandmother suffered from severe depression and often didn't sleep and wasn't allowed to do the career she dreamed of. As you say, the context always matters and those snippy one liners miss all of it.
My maternal grandmother had her kitchen remodeled to remove the oven and stove at some point before my earliest memories of her house. She hated cooking! When she babysat me, she made me peanut butter and jelly on white bread, and cut the sandwiches into the shapes of houses and sailboats. I loved those sandwiches! She catered to my pickiness and used only smooth peanut butter. She also always had a jar of York mints or Sunkist fruit gems and didn't limit how many I could eat. I'm quite happy to eat the way I remember eating at her house :)
This is the first newsletter I’ve received as a new subscriber and I love it- can’t wait to read more from you, already well worth the subscription <3
Thank you for this! My grandmother, who is about to celebrate her 101st birthday, is a historian, and like your grandmother, dutifully made dinner for her family for years but never enjoyed it. Her classic move was to do all of her cooking at 5am, and then put the food in the oven on warm all day. She had better things to do. When she and my grandfather moved into assisted living, my sister in law asked “Nana, do you miss cooking?” She said, “I liked cooking (not true, I don’t think) but I LOVE not cooking”
You rightly point out that the majority of women hated to cook back in the day. It involved drudgery, penny-pinching, and also, being treated rudely by the local male greengrocers. butchers and fishmongers. Nowadays, we romanticize the small shopkeepers of the past, but in reality they were often contemptuous of their female customers. And if you were the 'wrong' race or nationality, they would refuse to serve you. When supermarkets opened, women flocked to them. Critics (men and privileged women) decried them, but ordinary women loved their impersonality. Cooking by women is always taken for granted and belittled. It's no wonder most women ditched it as soon as they had the chance.
My great-grandparents were mostly dirt poor farmers, sharecroppers, and miners, and even the ones that were 'middle class' still had to feed five children during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Some of them would have been super jazzed to see the food I eat, even if they didn't recognize it, just because it was there! And half the stuff wouldn't be familiar just because I live in a multicultural city, and cook and buy food from countries they wouldn't have thought of with ingredients they'd never heard of. I love me some potatoes, but if I stuck to this rule that would basically be all I ever ate.