Food Fight with Grandma

Part 1

Last evening my niece Megan and her husband Greg took me out to dinner at The Park restaurant in Angelino Heights in Los Angeles.  One starter on the menu was mussels enclosed in a beignet.  They were delicious.

That lead to my recollections of eating oyster stew every Sunday at my Grandmother Anna’s home in Portland, Oregon when I was a child.  This Sunday dinner was served around a big oval table in the spacious log house that Grandpa John, my father Harry and his brother, Ward, built in 1926.   (This log home was sold and dismantled in the 1990s and reconstructed on the Oregon coast somewhere.)

I liked the stew which contained milk, potatoes, lots of salt and white pepper and some onion, but I did not like the oysters.  Pan-fried oysters, as they are prepared in the Pacific Northwest–dipped in egg batter, then dredged in corn and white flours, then quickly and lightly fried–are what I prefer.  Canned smoked oysters are also good.  Raw oysters-yuk!

Megan, my sister Merrie’s daughter, asked:  “If oyster stew was served every Sunday when you were kids, how come it wasn’t passed down in the family?”

Because our mother, Cora, never prepared oyster stew.  It never appeared on the table after we moved to Spokane.  Oyster stew, in fact, was a symbol of why our parents, Harry and Cora,  made that move to Spokane.  They were tired of Grandma Anna’s demand that all her children and grandchildren come to her home every Sunday.  It was part of  the inward facing family clan effect: family as friends.  My parents wanted a separate life with their own friends, their own interests, their own activities. 

Then my father got work on one of the Columbia River dams, so my parents moved to Spokane.   Where we ate roast chicken for Sunday dinner.  Cora also made pot roast, mashed potatoes, canned peas, canned corn, tuna casserole, hamburgers, fried eggs, waffles, chocolate chip cookies–all the basics of WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) cuisine.  Cora, to her credit, also prepared a yummy curried lamb.   Harry cooked up a mean chili that took two days to prepare.  He slow cooked the meat in the oven for the first day, added tomato sauce, lots of chili powder, lots of salt and pepper.   There may have been some onions in the chili, too.

I only learned about the issues with my father’s family in Portland–not to mention the other problems that had to do with religion and my mother’s family–much later.  My memories of Grandma Anna are of a large laughing woman in billowing dresses.  She had a slight lisp and used a lot of “Pennsylvania Dutch” idioms, as did my father.  She loved to play canasta with her grandchildren.  She had white hair and wore it in braids wrapped around her head.

There was a certain irony in my parents’ move to Spokane.  One of the reasons my grandfather, John, had moved his family from Pennsylvania to Portland, Oregon was to get away from a domineering mother-in-law.

More childhood cuisine to come…

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)