Another Thanksgiving for the Record Book

Thanksgiving 2014 brought a new first to the Sampson Clan--food poisoning--plus food memories from Jon, Sam, Dave and me.

     Sandy and Johnie hosted a passel of relatives, a total of 17 adults and two pre-schoolers.

Sandy's beautiful traditional feast included a ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, creamed spinach, sweet potato casserole, fruit salad, classical Caesar salad, deviled eggs, relish trays with celery, carrots, green and black olives and scallions, and chips dips, prosciutto rolled around cream cheese, rolls, butter, tamales, pies, pumpkin, mince with a lattice crust, and peanut butter and cream cheese with chocolate ganash (Frosting, in English) topped with whipped cream, of course. Oh, and champagne, San Michelle merlot and its 2012 Chardonnay. 

      Tradition has it that we forget to serve at least one dish, but we escaped that, but we had a different mishap. Within 24 hours, Meghan got wide-eyed and beat feet for the bathroom. Mark figured it was the oysters she'd eaten for lunch. Jan Foley (Meghan's  de facto mother-in-law) declared that she'd never eat oysters because they'd put her in the hospital once. She kept an eye on her husband Mike, but over the night, he, among another 8 were struck, and they hadn't all eaten oysters. The odds of getting a bad egg are low, but the likeliest culprit was salmonella from the raw egg in the Caesar salad. Luckily for Sandy, Johnie and me, we were too slow through the chow line to get any. But it was a great feast while it lasted!

Jon, David, Sam and I had a discussion of food that started with an internet essay on "slow food:

Dave says: I was a slow food fanatic, but we didn’t have dinner as a family every night.  Dad was rarely home in time.  We always had breakfast together ... until I got old enough – and big enough – that I just stayed in bed if I wanted.  I don’t know about Sam and Arnold as I was in the army by the time they were old enough. 

                                Subject: Remember "Slow Food?" - I Do

'Someone asked me the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?'

'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up, I informed him.

'All the food was slow.'

'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?'

'It was a place called 'at home,'' I explained.

'Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it.

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, never wore Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never traveled out of the country or had a credit card.

In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears & Roebuck.

Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer.

I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow).

We didn't have a television in our house until I was 10.

It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God; it came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people.

I was 19 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called 'pizza pie.' When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had.

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers-- my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 2 cents. He had to get up at6AM every morning.

On Saturday, he had to collect the 42 cents from his customers. His favorite customers were the ones who gave him 50 cents and told him to keep the change. His least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

In response, Jon  rhapsodized over some of his favorite dishes:

Sue, remember 'Lick Maid' at the Keri Kone (a Dairy Queen type drive-in with a walk-up window, located right outside the elementary school)  in Florence?  It was in a little packet about half the size of a Kool Aid packet.  You could tear off the corner (or open it) and pour the different flavors directly in your mouth.

I still have Mom's old stove-top pressure cooker in which she made many a pot roast.  The 1&1/2 inch roast went into the pot which was hot and was seared on both sides (to seal in the flavor), then covered with some pressure to cook the meat, then toward the end, potatoes, carrots, onions, etc., were added to barely cook them.  The meat you could cut with a fork, and the leftovers would last a while.

Mom used to serve tamales every so often, and I really liked them, but don't remember what (or if) we even used a condiment.  Remember scalloped potatoes?.  I loved those suckers!

For party fare out at Woahink Lake, we used to barbeque half a salmon over half of a 55 gallon drum, or an open fire pit, (on re-used refrigerator grates), with corn on the cob, etc.  The meal was ready about the time the cook fell in (or tripped over) the fire.

Ahaha...the 'good old days!'

I could reply:

Sure I remember most of that! I don’t recall “Lick Maid,” but the Keri-Kone was where I got to spend my nickel on either a chocolate ice cream cone or penny candy: Wax lips, miniature Tootsie rolls, and Sugar Daddies. I got a Sugar Daddy stuck in my school desk. It was months before I could pry it loose and finish it off.

    Mom had a pressure pot, too, and cooked wonderful pot roasts that same way. However, the pressure gauge on it failed and the safety valve blew and the pot sprayed gravy in a hot geyser up to the kitchen ceiling where it struck and rebounded and showered down. I have been extremely cautious about using a pressure pot ever since. I I finally got a beauty at Macy’s that was on sale, and I learned to use it, and like it a lot. It’s good for meal preparation but it isn’t as big as Mom’s: She could can in hers. My son Brook is an avid gardener of vegetables that he cans and an avid cook of apple sauce that he cans in a big pressure pot.

    I still love scalloped potatoes.

    We didn’t have home-made tamales, but we had a “tamale casserole” that started with canned tamales and was topped with canned stuff and heated. By contrast, having lived in the southwest, Jerry became a great aficionado  of tamales. We once attended the Tamale Festival in Indio, CA, near Palm Desert and Palm Springs, then we learned to make tamales. We made a batch last weekend, and I froze a bagful and put them in my suitcase when I flew to Florence for Thanksgiving. I could envision TSA unwrapping every one, but they didn’t even blink an eye as my bag when through the X-ray machine.

    That’s quite a contrast to what happened to us at SeaTac a number of years ago. Before we got through security, I bought a bundle of individually wrapped cheese sticks to snack on during our trip, and stuffed them into the top of Jerry’s duffel bag. They happened to be sitting on top of the cord to Jerry’s portable GPS. The TSA workers got sick looks on their face and called a supervisor over to the X-ray machine. “May we inspect your bag?” the Supervisor asked him. “It’s hers,” Jerry claimed, that fast. TSA went all through the bag. I’m certain they thought they were seeing sticks of dynamite with fuses on them, right out of a roadrunner cartoon. Mozzarella—you can’t travel with it! SueS

Sam starts the jaw breaker story:

Pappy's (Eli's)  development, the Thompson's Tavern and apartments originally had a small mom and pop's market in it.  David was entrusted to chaperone Arnold and me up to the market to get a few things and was given a few pennies to let Arnold and me each pick a treat.  I picked a large round ball candy that upon chewing turned into chewing gum.  We got our stuff and left the market, running as kids always do, back to the house.  When I didn't show up mom raced up the road to find me passed out on the ground about half way back.  She performed a modified Heimlich maneuver on me when David was finally able to tell her what I bought.  I say modified because she picked me up by my feet turned me upside down and pounded on my back until I expelled the offending jaw breaker.  The story goes that she then picked up the jaw breaker and hurled it with all her might across the street and broke out a glass pane in Bergen's greenhouse across the street.  I believe this because mom was an accomplished softball player in high school.  This was perhaps the first recorded instance of brain damage in the Sampson brothers...

David modifies the story, and even Sam thinks he likes it better:

"Aw heck, I like your story better, first I've heard of that rendition though!"

Sue et al,

I have a slightly different story of the jaw breaker.  First, it was as hard as a rock from the surface to the middle; no gum inside.

Second, Sam never passed out, so I guess there was no brain damage or only a very limited amount.  Instead, he walked back to the house under his own power and was standing in the living room of the house nearby the fireplace when he started choking and exhibiting distress.  In a matter of seconds, it went from everybody happy, getting ready to depart for Lakeside for the summer, to a screaming frenzy, fueled by fear as Sam turned beet red in color, and then, slowly, to blue, all while being shaken up and down by Mom who had grabbed his ankles.  Another woman who was there, I don’t know who, at some point pounded Sam on the back 2-4 times or so; with the last one, she hit Sam, who was still hanging upside down, as hard as she could, and the offending jaw breaker popped out.  No Heimlich maneuver was ever used.  In fact, it had not yet been invented!

Finally, I like to think that I played a major role in helping Sam through that ordeal as I was without a doubt screaming in terror twice as loud as anybody else in the house (I don’t remember what Arnold was doing; I just remember 3 or 4 women including Mom and Sam and me at the scene).  Mom, however, did not throw the offending jaw breaker across the street; she just chucked it out the front door.  I thought that was a waste so I went over, picked it up, took it to the bathroom and washed it off, popped it in my mouth and finished it off.  It was both cherry flavored and cherry colored.  Yum!

Dave