Feeding People is in My Bones

There’s a photograph on the cover of our cookbook from around 1965.

My mom would have been nine or ten years old, sitting at a formal family dinner for her Grandma Robinson’s brother and sister. The table was set with china, crystal and silver. In the foreword she wrote for the cookbook, she talks about how different that table could look depending on where the family was gathered. Sometimes it was china and crystal. Sometimes it was pink melamine plates and stainless flatware that came out of a Red Star flour bag at Grandmother Couick’s. Sometimes it was paper plates and red Solo cups at Uncle Harold’s on the Fourth of July.

But there was always a table. And there was always food.

I suppose it makes sense, then, that food has always been at the center of our home, too. It came from all sides of the family. Maybe that’s just family. Maybe there’s something about growing up in the South. Either way, when I think about the places and people that made me, there’s almost always food somewhere in the picture.

Easter was at Mema’s, where we’d set up folding tables on the mauve carpet in the living room of her double-wide and eat the Honey Baked ham Uncle Ron brought.

The Fourth of July was down at the lake at Uncle Harold’s. Hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill, kids running around, a couple of beers for the adults and one heck of a fireworks show off the end of the pier.

Thanksgiving was at Grandmomma and Granddaddy’s, followed by naps on the couch to the sound of whatever football game happened to be on. Christmas meant breaking out all the casserole dishes because we were making dressing for a crowd.

And then there was the everyday stuff.

Saturday nights during the summer when I was a kid, cooking fish for whoever happened to be around. Supper at home promptly at 6 p.m. Helping with the big church dinners, where feeding a few hundred people somehow seemed like a completely reasonable undertaking.

And everybody had their thing.

The Zion UMC Chicken & Dumplin Supper. The Shiloh Church Pork BBQ. The Unionville Elementary BBQ, where, yes, we were given tickets to sell as second graders. Even the local volunteer fire departments got in on it and sold Boston butts.

None of this started with my generation. It was happening when my parents were kids, too. And their parents before them.

Looking at that photograph from 1965 now, I think that may be part of what I’m actually trying to preserve with this cookbook.

Of course I want the recipes written down. I want someone to know how to make the dressing and the biscuits and the things we’ve eaten around our tables for generations.

But I also want to preserve what those recipes meant.

They meant there was room for another chair. There was enough to send a plate home with somebody. There was something hot waiting when you walked through the door. There were folding tables when the regular table wasn't big enough and casserole dishes when one pan wasn't going to feed everybody.

Feeding people is just in my bones and my roots.

It’s how we take care of people.

It’s how we show we care.

And I think, somewhere along the way, I realized that's what this cookbook was really about.