Literature-Essays
Another Helping of Beans-Meals of the ‘40s
In Shelbyville, Tennessee in the 1940’s the Trolinger family would not have been considered poor, but then certainly not rich either. Most of my childhood friends were roughly “in the same boat”, with a few better and a few worse off. Our family almost always ate three meals together, except for daddy, who commonly came in too late from work to eat supper with us. Although we never went hungry, food standards were drastically different then, and my family stuck to a fairly rigid, predictable diet. The cost of an upscale restaurant meal today, even after taking inflation into account, would have fed my family for a month, maybe more.
We had hamburgers on Saturday night, fried chicken on Sunday and mostly beans, potatoes, and fresh baked bread the rest of the week. When daddy came in late at night, his meal consisted of standing and eating the slightly warm beans right out of the big pot still sitting on the stove.
Mother was using Hamburger Helper many years before it was a product. A pound of hamburger meat, mixed with enough flour and corn meal, produced two, somewhat crunchy, hamburgers each for the entire family of six. My first “bought”hamburger was a greasy, mushy disappointing experience for me. It had a very strange unfamiliar texture, and I never liked “bought” burgers as well as the ones we ate at home. Even when McDonalds finally took root everywhere, my impression was that the Big Mac inventor should have consulted mother to make this thing palatable.
Breakfasts sometimes included eggs with bacon or ham much of which came from my grand parent’s farm. Partially carved, salt cured hams and shoulders hung in the open air on our back porch year round. The Sunday meal was more like a reward we got for attending church with mother, and I always looked forward to the fried chicken, which came fresh from our back yard. There was no such thing as left over chicken. A breast was reserved for daddy whether he was present or not, mother ate the back and neck (supposedly her favorite pieces), and the kids divided the thighs, drumsticks, and wings. While we thought we were lucky that mother’s favorite pieces were the ones none of us wanted, only later did it dawn on me that the real luck was having an amazing, fibbing, angel for a mother. I thought she must have some secret hidden way of coaxing the extra taste out of these very bony pieces. Perhaps a loving mother’s seeing her children eat the best pieces really does make the bony pieces delicious. Only a mother would know.
When it came to dessert, the ever present family ritual was started by whoever cleaned his plate first. With the gusto of an academy award winner he would ask, “What’s for dessert?” Then everyone would look at mother, knowing in advance exactly how she would respond. And we all laughed together when she said, “Get yourself another helping of beans.” The loving ritual still made us laugh even after a thousand repetitions.
Mother baked cookies, cakes, and pies, but those were reserved for Sunday or special occasions. She created a few really special desserts that were unlike any thing I have had since then. The most memorable of these were fried peach turnover pies made scratch from fresh peaches picked from two trees in our back yard. She would serve these jewels steaming hot, right out of the skillet, and you had to wait for it to cool to eat it. Oh, my God, was it wonderful!
Sometimes on Saturdays, my granddaddy, Onman, would come to town to sell honey on the Shelbyville square. He would find a parking spot near the square, open the trunk of his 49 Oldsmobile, and sell jars of honey right out of the trunk. Coming to town, shopping, and hanging out around the square was a ritual for many people, so there were always crowds of potential customers for his honey, and he usually sold out by noon. Then he would show up at our house for lunch. The added benefit to the kids was that our meal would be a step up from beans and bread and would always include a dessert since Onman had a sweet tooth. He loved ice cream, and mother would splurge and serve it for dessert. Ice cream was a rare treat in my early years.
Candy and sweets, in general, were rare treats reserved for truly special times. One of the most exciting features of Christmas, even as exciting as the gifts, were the bowls of candy, fruits, cakes, and sweets sitting around in unlimited quantities for almost the entire day, the only day of the year with such a privilege. The location of Christmas in the house added elegance to the whole event. Our living and dining rooms, which, although making up a full third of the floor space in the house, were closed off and unheated to save money, except for special occasions. They were like a different, more elegant house, and sitting before a warm, open fireplace in this formal, somewhat strange and different, usually taboo, room surrounded by gifts and candy was a one day a year visit to heaven.
My grandmother, Mattie, was a legendary cook, and few times a year she would put on a feast at their country home. These were special events, not just meals. The big farmhouse was filled with wonderful aromas and especially the kitchen, where she cooked on a wood fired stove, was hot and smoky and wonderful with a table covered with elegant preparations. It seemed like flour was on every surface and all over grandmother.
The meal was served in the dining room on a huge table that was completely covered with bowls of food, including chicken and sometimes a second meat, four or five different vegetables, sauces, fruits, pickled things, slaw, potato salad, deviled eggs, tomatoes, salads, and multiple kinds of bread. Most of these dishes came right out of her garden. With no limits on how much we could eat, I always ate until I was in pain. The meal included not one, but several, out of this world pies and cakes and sometimes home made ice cream. For an hour after the meal the kids lay around in pain from eating way too much. I never had this problem with the normal, beans and bread meals.
Fast food had not yet been invented. It would be many years before McDonalds would hit the scene. Fast food entered my life during mother’s shopping trips to Nashville. The eating ritual, my own highlight of the trip, included gobbling up four tiny, $.12 Krystal hamburgers. I think I loved the very first one I ever ate. The Krystal was a tiny place by today’s standard, just wide enough, about 15 feet, for a counter and a single row of counter stools, no tables; about 50 feet deep; it could seat about 20 people at a time, and it was always packed. This was to me the greatest restaurant ever invented.
We would enter the Krystal and take a position behind someone already at a stool eating. I didn’t mind waiting because I loved watching the chef turning out thousands of square hamburgers on a large grill facing the wall directly behind the counter. He would take a foot long block of burgers from the freezer, spread them across the hot grill in a cloud of steam and begin turning them almost immediately. He followed this with a spread of onions that raised yet another cloud of steam complementing the meat smell and stimulating my hunger more than ever. These guys could scoop up and flip four or five burgers at a time then simultaneously cover all of them with buns. A continuous stream of burgers came off the grill and within a short while, almost starving by now, we would grab the seats in front of us as they were vacated.
Our diet was very simple. Except for Saturday and Sunday I ate exactly the same thing almost every day. A huge pot of beans would last several days and by the time it was finished the beans had been reduced to more of a mush. School lunches added a little variety to this but not much. It was also simple, including a lot of beans, potatoes, macaroni, and other simple vegetables like yams and carrots.
While the diets of the 40’s would not win a health contest, almost no one struggled with being overweight. Nobody talked about dieting. We didn't need to diet. We didn’t need diet cokes and low fat milk. My school classes often had one chubby kid in the lot and a lot of skinny ones. I was one of the skinny ones.
Today, I eat out a lot and, unlike all of my kids, I think that the food as well as the ambiance is always much better at home. When I do eat out and the waiter comes near the end to ask who wants dessert I am always tempted to say to him, “bring me another helping of beans”.