My Most Memorable Meal
Food. It’s
essential for life. It is also a way my
family shows love. From the time I was a
little girl I sat on the kitchen counter, watching my mother flour cubed steak;
helping my daddy make his secret recipe pecan pie; and making sure my
grandmother patted out biscuits just right, always with a “baby biscuit” for me. The kitchen has long been my favorite room of
the house. It is functional as the place
to prepare meals, but it also holds memories, family stories, and recipe tips
that include, to quote my little Granny, “You just don’t tell everything you
know.”
Many “meals of a lifetime” take place just the once in
a lifetime. I’ve eaten escargot on a
Bahamian cruise, fish and chips in London, blackberry crepes in Paris, and
drank sangria at a Flamenco club in Madrid; but none of this fare can hold a
candle to the special occasion meal I was raised eating. I have never eaten anything comparable to my
grandmother’s fried chicken.
While she stood only a petite 4’9”, my Granny was a
giant. She supported my grandfather with
his “real” job and farming on the side.
She raised my mother, her only child, to be a strong, independent lady. She took care of her in-laws, and later her
own parents, in their golden years. For
the last 40 years of her life she owned and operated a farm equipment business. Long before she became a wife, mother, and
businesswoman, though, my grandmother was a the oldest of four siblings. Their father was a mechanic who struggled
with alcoholism, and often was without a job.
Their mother was the breadwinner, working as a supervisor in a sewing
factory. One evening when my great-grandmother
came home from work she found her daughter, then less than ten years old,
standing at the stove cooking a full meal for the family. When asked what she was doing, Granny simply
replied, “We were hungry, so I decided to cook supper.” From that point forward she was responsible
for cooking, and it has served six generations of our family, from Granny’s
grandparents to my own little boy, and all in between. I’ve heard Granny’s sisters and brother talk
about her pulling a chair up to the stove so she’d be tall enough to see what
she was doing.
As I stated, Granny’s fried chicken was our go-to
special occasion meal. Of course, for
each family member’s birthday she’d make their favorite dessert—my grandfather
liked coconut cake; my mother’s favorite is lemon pie; my father will eat
anything sweet; my sister prefers egg custard; my brother likes Granny’s “log
cake”; and my choice is red velvet cake—but we all always requested the same
main dish.
The Christmas after I graduated from high school my mother
gave all three of her children family cookbooks for our grandmothers to write
their recipes in. We made a list for
both Grandma Jones—Daddy’s mother—and Granny.
While Grandma had 22 grandchildren, Granny only had we three. One of my aunts helped Grandma finish our
cookbooks, but Granny meticulously wrote each recipe we requested in each of
our books. It has been a year now since
Granny has passed, but all these years later my cookbook filled with her recipes
is one of my greatest worldly possessions.
My most memorable meal was not a one-time experience,
but rather 34 years of love displayed by my grandmother. As she aged it was not as easy to fix a
complete meal, so we went from having fried chicken with mashed potatoes and
gravy, and something green, varying depending on whose birthday we were
celebrating to simply fried chicken and cubed potatoes, deep fried. It was in no way the healthiest meal we ever
ate, but it was always one prepared with love and enjoyed by all. Granny had a reputation within the family and
community for being the best cook any of us knew. It was an indisputable fact. I have eaten all over the western hemisphere,
but nothing, not one meal, compares to the love and devotion that was Granny’s
fried chicken.
