Part-5
Back to Brevard & Chef Eddie and the open refrigerator.
I was about five years old & just getting into laser & Einstein’s theories, and had been reading proficiently for about a year. I was a mad scientist / techno geek in the making & an avid devote of my “idol” my Dad, as well as TV and comic books, books in general, (he bought me 100's of reference books & National Geographics & sets of Encyclopedias and so on.) Cookbooks were well ensconced in there somewhere too. Dad was from the old school (literally) and growing up - had been schooled in the best schools of Europe . He was among many things capable of equaling almost any chef in the kitchen.
Guess who picked up the genetic bent to concocting things ? He could whip up a grilled cheese sandwich or a crown rack of lamb or prime rib, but there was something about Mama’s cooking that was every day, nose flaring, tummy growling, forgot to use soap and washed my hands in the now muddy towel - GOOD !
I guess when you’re always hungry it helps. One thing boys are - is - hungry. Just a little too high for full viewing on the kitchen counter was Mama’s electric skillet, that she did all these fantastic things with-that smelled and tasted so gooood.
One day when the grownups were somewhere else & I saw a chance to try it out. I went in the kitchen and pulled up a chair so I would be tall enough to do & see & enjoy stuff. I had pulled most of the eggs & bacon out of the fridge and was busy imitating how I had seen it done before. I remembered the heat settings I had see Mom & others use & put that on there. Reasonably skillfully broken & checked the eggs for bad spots the oiled or buttered(don’t remember which) the pan a little & filled one side with eggs frying “sunny side up’ and had bacon sizzling covering the other side & had even salted & peppered the top side of the eggs already.
Little did I stop to think that the familiar mix of smells that helped whet my ever present two-hollow legged appetite would not stop at the kitchen door. Whoops I got caught. I hadn’t thought about anything but cooking stuff my self, not what to do with it after cooking it, or cleaning up or nothing, just cooking stuff. I am still somewhat like that, but now sometimes plan ahead better.
I think Dad was home, I am no longer sure. However, soon I was to be taught to cook so that I would not possibly ruin all the families food . I don’t remember getting in trouble, but do remember getting trained how to store food after cooking & how to serve it & clean up the kitchen . To me then the sink was so big that it was almost like a swimming pool full of warm bubble bath to play in. In fact when younger I got baths in that same big stainless steel kitchen sink. Garbage disposals & sprayers were considered new things in the little mountain town of Brevard , NC.
Sitting here typing I am trying to remember some of my favorite foods from then I would still eat now. Well for one, rutabagas (the big waxed ones you had to peel & cut in slivers or chunks and stew for a while.) And Parsnips and turnips, mashed potatoes piled high & steaming - flagrant and topped with margarine or homemade dark gravy, whole cooked onions caramelized and savory in dark broth, fried okra & biscuits , sliced store bought bread was good but homemade bread & corn bread & such was lots better. Dairy and meat was plentiful and my Dad’s moto was “eat the fat it makes it taste better” That was before we knew better. Still in the 1950's ,when it was safe to walk to and from school or even across town any hour of the day or night - by boy or girl, man or woman. Most people did not suspect disease in their foods or even know there was a better way to eat than how they had been raised for generations.
The kitchen for me is a place of creation, discovery, culinary passion, triumphs of success and the agony of defeat (not to mention the smell & humiliation incurred when neighborhood starving semi-wild dogs refuse to enter the same yard with much less eat, one my many disasters. Oh well the sewer system still accepts them gracefully . Some of them I should have sold to the military for biologic weapons or exotic alternate fuel sources - if only I could remember how I created those stinking almost radioactive messes in the first place.)
My Mom possibly saw it coming after I mixed some of my Dad’s potent stinky vitamins in a big coffee can and boiled them on the stove. This created a thick dark green, blue, gray foam that promptly flowed down the burner onto the oven jacket where it could not be reached and stayed for the next six to nine months till it was fully destroyed by the heat from the oven. Mama had the flu and was off work, in bed sick as a dog. I ran in squealing the can was on the burner & the burner was red hot & I couldn’t get it off . She reached for her glasses, got up, and wearily got in the kitchen, remedied the situation on the stove-top and I think I got a whipping for that one. The thanksgiving and Christmas dinners smelled really different that year - even though it was summer when I did this escapade. The aroma was reminiscent of B-vitamins, fish oil, burnt popcorn , and a hint of sewer redolently served up on what ever was cooked on that stove for a long time.
Cooking had become one of the loves of my life, but was intertwined with a passion to create the different, the new, the strange and exotic, hopefully the eatable & good tasting ; as well as imitate others. Life was never the same. Even more fun was the back porch, chemistry sets, kitchen ingredients, old or new sheets, scissors, markers, staplers, but that’s another story.
I still wonder what God’s favorite food is ? If I will get to cook in Heaven ?
I am tickled to know that they had chilli in Jesus’s day. They tithed cumin {He said so} - That’s all I needed to know - To Me - they had some form of chilli.
Well enough for now, more later, as I learn how to “sew” with a stapler and set the back porch on fire with sparklers. My parents earned their gray hair.
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Edward F. Sutton
[This message has been edited by Edward F. Sutton (edited October 08, 2000).]
just loooved that kitty story 
Joan
