April 13, 2015
Max’s Musings
By Max Molleston
The first month or two of this year, I discovered a recipe book, part of a vast collection. We were sitting with the grandkids with nothing to read. I needed to find a recipe for meatloaf. I have a slow learning curve on that wonderful dish. Food for two is still a chore, and you fifty plusers sharing house duties with the kids gone understand this. The found meatloaf recipe is in a 1942 very complete (with pictures) Betty Crocker book.
My big find was the book titled “White Trash Cooking.” Our daughter told me our son Rob bought it and brought it to my daughter’s home during college days in Iowa City. The cook book reminded him of the refrigerator at that house. Page 26 produced “Mary Linder’s Washday Soup.” That is my poem this month. I featured Ted Koosers’ newer poem “Splitting An Order” in December, and it’s form was printing on a page, no stanzas. Here is Mary Linder’s recipe.
Put Navy beans in a big pot of salted water to soak overnight. Put on with the wash water about six in the morning, with bacon or ham. Let cook uncovered on low burner. Clock between loads of wash. Add one large onion finely minced, when you are blu’ing the overalls. At nine have a quick cup of coffee, and dump a half cup in the beans if you want. Add one-half cup finely minced carrots at bleach time (about eleven). Serve at noon with soda crackers and slaw you made the night before. For washday this is a pretty good deal.
That’s it! A cup or two for measuring. No salt, or pepper, or garlic! I don’t know what “clock between loads of wash” means. Some of you readers may. Next page this recipe.
POOR FOLK SOUP
For a light supper, crumble soda crackers in warm milk.
Salt, pepper and eat with a spoon.
Hooka tooka my soda crackers?
Does yer Mammy chaw tobaccer?
If yer Mammy chaw tobaccer then
Then Hooka Tooka my soda cracker?
The poem looks and sounds like a say’n to me, and is a bonus. I enjoyed crackers with cold milk as a youngster, and I still do.
I prepare meals, probably a dozen each week with no recipe. Sliced onions and maybe something else in the skillet, and often fried bacon, so the pork, beef or chicken gets a flavor boost.
Lots of meals, at home or eaten out, are thick with cheese of varied types, and what is that but milk processed a different way. ( I know it’s about fat in milk we call cream.) Traveling with wife Rhoada some years back, we consumed evening and breakfast meal at Debbie’s Diner in Harry Truman’s home town.
I wrote a poem about the joint and the evening meal. The last two lines: “My mother and mothers like her, made millions of meals just like this one, and we loved that food.”
Mary Linder’s Washday Soup is a little more “down home” than Debbie’s, but not much. Mary didn’t contend with restaurant food regulations. I have high confidence notes on meal creations like Mary’s soup are filed away in your brain or in some box with your other treasures. Even before Mary’s Navy bean suggestion, I am “moving into” that legume for my next bean and ham soup adventure. Navy beans have a deeper flavor which stands on its own: to me it is tastier, nuttier and maybe more fulfilling.
April showers bring May flowers, or at least the big box potted plants are easily available. This column will be available in May, should you desire more poetry.
