Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (16 page)

PEOPLE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE SWEETS/IVINS
commitment to the five-second rule might never have returned to a meal at Molly's table had they known about our “oops” moments. Both the “get the shrimp off the floor” and the “rinse the blood from the onions” incidents were reminiscent of the Sweets Family Thanksgiving Dinner Secret. It moved Molly to feel culturally deprived, since the Ivins family apparently lacked a history of such moments.

Melba Sweets, my mother, belonged to an organization called the St. Louis Committee on Africa. In the late '60s and early '70s students from sub-Saharan Africa were often left on their own on holidays, so committee members invited students without plans to share the holiday.

One year Mother invited a woman from Egypt, a man from Ghana, and another from Ethiopia. The best china was hauled out, the linen tablecloth was ironed, and matching napkins were appropriately placed for a seating of ten.

We had a turkey roughly the size of Vermont, and because my father didn't like turkey, we also had a standing rib roast. Both were the focal points for a full-court press of Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, oyster dressing, plain stuffing, braised carrots, collard greens, and a sweet potato casserole laced with orange zest and pecans.

Did I mention the family dog, Chips, a boxer of considerable size?

Remember Chips.

My grandfather, my mother's father, always arrived for these celebratory dinners in an already slightly schnockered condition. Inebriation notwithstanding, he was the designated table-blesser. Our guests, accustomed to according their elders more deference than we did, punctuated Grandpa's
long-winded prayer with an occasional “amen,” which only egged him on to pray longer. Just then, a sound not unlike like that of gumbo falling from a refrigerator shelf emanated from the kitchen. One of my brothers immediately interjected a resounding “Amen!” at a pause that permitted Grandpa to hiccup and my mother to hastily retreat kitchenward.

There she found Chips with the entire rib roast in his mouth, his escape stymied by a locked screen door that prevented him from absconding altogether into the backyard. In a preternaturally soft voice, Mother summoned me. “Ellen,” she said sweetly, “could you help me, please?” Inherent in her tone was a requirement to respond instantly. As I cautiously opened the swinging door leading from the dining room, Chips was reluctantly relinquishing his loot. Mother retrieved her miraculously unbroken Noritake platter, rearranged the kale leaves, and shot me a look that said, “Not a word of this.” With a few more flourishes, she returned to the dining room, all smiles, bearing a perfectly browned turkey surrounded by wine-poached pears on the big platter. I, trailing close behind, carried the roast on the smaller platter, tooth marks camouflaged beneath butter-laced whole mushrooms and decorative sprinkles of freshly chopped parsley.

I never uttered a peep about the Sweets Christmas near-disaster either—until I wrote about it for the
Denver Post
a few years ago. That Thanksgiving dinner, like the gumbo dinner Molly and I laughed about for years, was a resounding success. At both meals there was much laughter and conversation. Everyone went home sated and none the worse for partaking of food off the floor.

Food memories formed most of the glue that held our friendship together, Molly's and mine. The more we talked about remembered meals, the more we realized what an important role food had played in our respective lives, albeit entrenched in very different social strata. She was to the manor born. Her father, whom friends all called Big Jim, was an attorney for Tenneco, one of the world's biggest oil companies at the time. By Molly's account he was a paid-in-full member of the Houston power elite—rich, powerful, racist, and mean.

Her brother, Andy, the youngest of the three Ivins siblings, has more positive memories of cookouts in their River Oaks home. Andy recalls backyard barbecues in particular. “Around 1964 we got a barbecue pit with a rotisserie and Big Jim would cook chicken on it,” he said. “It was outside by the pool and we had a park-type bench where we would eat in the evenings.

“We'd have hamburger steaks with onions and a side dish of mushrooms. We always had a salad that came between the main course and dessert and only had oil and vinegar as the dressing and never anything else. We'd have baked potatoes with butter and salt and pepper and paprika, but never sour cream. Even at restaurants we would have to go through hell getting the chef to give him paprika.

“Big Jim also made serious Sunday breakfasts—fruit, cereal, eggs, coffee cake, bacon, and sausage. We'd all eat at the round table outside by the pool. Mag [Margot, materfamilias and Big Jim's wife] started cooking more when we moved to Maryland.” Like Molly, Andy remembers not only his mother's turnip fluff, but her “goody-goody grits,” both dishes that she added to her
Joy of Cooking
–based repertoire. Molly's menus
français
came later.

The Sweets and Ivins families had at least one thing in common: Andy remembers the family's 1950s-era meat grinder. My brothers and I fought over who would get to press solid chunks of raw beef through the top of ours and watch it squish through little holes as ground beef. Apparently Andy had the same experience in reverse—except as the lone male with two sisters, he got left out.

“We had a crank machine that you put some cut of meat in and it came out hamburger. I think that was Sara and Molly's job, but I remember watching and thinking what a great deal it would be when I got my turn to crank. The other thing I remember is that Molly and Sara were in charge of doing dinner dishes. Sara would always remember when she had either washed or dried last.

“Molly always got screwed on whose turn it was to do what 'cause she didn't bother to remember. My job was to empty the garbage.”

While Molly's father was part of an elite power structure, my dad was the struggling publisher of a black weekly newspaper that frequently pissed off the power structure.

My family was also part of that demographic that never gave two hoots for heart-healthy calorie consciousness. Today only a pariah would suggest the kind of breakfast meal my aunt Jen used to prepare on Sunday mornings. She lived in Chicago, midway between our home in St. Louis and a black-owned farm in the middle of Michigan—our standard summer vacation destination throughout the 1950s. It was someplace we could go without the hassle of wondering where we could eat or sleep. We knew we would be welcome, for example, in Benton Harbor, dominated by an amusement park owned by the House of David colony, a religious sect that did not engage in racial discrimination. Sometimes we went to the Wisconsin Dells, another safe vacation place.

Aunt Jen's rolls were known throughout the Windy City. Her breakfasts of baked chicken, bacon, sausage, buttered rice, scrambled eggs, and those wonderful rolls are the stuff of favored reveries. In fact, almost everything warm and wonderful that I remember about growing up revolves around food. Aunt Jen and the Johnsons' farm put the soul in “soul food.” So what the hell: Let's hear it for pariahs.

For the most part, Aunt Jen just cooked for herself and Uncle Howard. But on Saturdays, when she and friends had their penny poker nights, she might whip up a pot of chitlins, spaghetti, greens, and some cornbread. The smell of chitlins (you can call them “chitterlings” if you want, but folks will laugh
behind your back) drove the kids to the barbecue joint around the corner, where ribs and chicken were generously served atop mounds of potato salad and coleslaw.

But Aunt Jen's rolls and baked chicken were an absolute Sunday-morning treat. She cut a couple of good-size fryers into pieces—chickens didn't come shrink-wrapped on a Styrofoam tray back then—dredged the pieces in salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika, placed them in a roasting pan, and topped each piece with a pat of butter. She then whisked together maybe a half cup of flour with about 2 quarts of water, poured it down the side of the roaster and covered the pan tightly.

She baked the chicken at 275 degrees for about two hours, or until the incredible aromas emanating from the oven proved too much for empty stomachs to bear. As the liquid evaporated in the roaster, the flour from the chicken and the flour in the water melded with the butter and chicken fat to form a light gravy. This was served with a choice of rice or grits, sliced tomatoes, and eggs, sunny-side up or scrambled.

The Johnsons' farm was another world. Food preparation there was geared toward the farmhands who did real work, not the vacationing pretend-workers we city slickers were. Sometimes the table was filled with homemade sage-and-pork sausage served alongside apple pancakes made with fruit from the Johnsons' trees. Thick slabs of sliced bacon came from hogs slaughtered and cured on the property. The Johnsons dug their own potatoes and hand-chopped them into little bits before adding onions—also grown on the farm—for hash browns. Chickens that had clucked noisily in the afternoon were crisp, golden-fried drumsticks, wings, breasts, and thighs by evening.

Those meals are cherished components of family reminiscences to this day—just as the entire family remembers the time I broke my arm when I fell off the back of a moving truck (don't ask; it involved a game of “chicken” where the winner was the idiot who could jump off and onto the bed of the pickup truck the most times and I was the only girl and had to prove I was as dumb as the guys) or the time a herd of turkeys forced Mom and me up a tree. It had never occurred to me that my mother could climb a tree. Chances are it had never occurred to her either, but there she was, eight feet off the ground, sitting on a limb and clinging to branches for dear life. That Sunday, roasted turkey and dressing were more delicious than ever.

Summer segued into fall, when we made our annual pilgrimage to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, for homecoming. Standard fare there consisted of salad and Aunt Kay's chicken spaghetti. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what made the spaghetti so memorable. Maybe for us kids it was seeing that big pot atop the stove, aromatic steam rising from its simmering contents, knowing, as we did, that the humongous pot in which the spaghetti was made was the same one Aunt Kay used to bathe her daughter and me in when we were little bitty people.

Anyway, for the football enthusiasts, her chicken spaghetti provided welcome warmth after watching a chilly afternoon's football game. All she did was throw five or six chickens into the pot with bay leaves, a pound or two of onions, celery, salt, and pepper. When the chickens were done, they were relocated to a giant colander to cool. The remaining stock simmered as she added canned tomatoes, two whole bunches of chopped celery, several more pounds of onions, a huge jar of sliced green olives (pimientos and all), red pepper flakes, basil, thyme, a quarter cup of chili powder, a bunch or two of chopped parsley, salt, black pepper, and, of course, more garlic.

Once the chicken cooled, we kids got to help pull chunks of meat from the bones and throw it back into the pot. The bones were put in another pot to simmer some more to make additional stock for soup. Finally, Aunt Kay added Lord knows how many pounds of spaghetti. As it cooked, it absorbed the liquid until, finally, the pot was brimming with the finished product. Somehow she never cooked the spaghetti to mush, and it was never soupy or over-seasoned. Of all my food recollections, I don't remember precise measurements as being part of any of them: a bit of this and a bit of that generally did the trick.

Such are the memories of foods eaten in childhood—a childhood where much revolved around Sunday breakfast, weekday dinners, and Saturday meals that always consisted of either a pot of chili or a pot of beans—pig's feet and navy beans; ham hocks and lima beans; red beans and rice with smoked sausage. Saturday was the day Daddy took over the kitchen. The bean of the day was always accompanied by cornbread. Not any old kind of cornbread, but cornbread made with cornmeal, flour, eggs, and buttermilk, with a special addition: half a pound of bacon, cooked crisp and crumbled into the batter.

Daddy poured off most of the bacon grease and put the skillet in a pre-heated oven. When the remaining grease was smoking, he'd remove the skillet,
pour the batter in, and return it to the oven. When the cornbread was brown on top, he'd take it out and turn it onto a rack, like a cake. The result was incredible. It had a crisp brown crust that rendered butter superfluous.

In fact, my father made two incredible dishes. The other was fried corn, which we ate on Sunday, usually with pole beans (cooked with the requisite ham hock and salt pork). He would go to the market in the morning and buy ten or fifteen ears of white corn. He and I would sit on the back porch and shuck it as he listened to a baseball game. Then he'd cut it off the cob and put it in a big bowl. After he heated up some bacon grease in the cast-iron skillet, he'd add the corn, a chopped green bell pepper, some cream, a pinch of sugar, a little salt, and a lot of black pepper (my mother kept a lidded clay pot with the words “bacon grease” atop the stove, flanked by two burners on our old Roper.