Food Links a Person to Their History

A few weeks ago, my wife, our grandson, and I were visiting family in Texas. We spent the vast majority of our time hanging around with our three Texan grandkids and their mom. While little Asher played with his cousins and Karin knit, I talked with our daughter-in-law, Gabby. She was always busy with washing clothes and chasing after her toddlers. At some point in the day, she started cooking supper. One day she decided to make corn bread and pinto beans. She told me that it was one of her favorite meals from her childhood.

That made me think. Why did she eat corn bread and beans as a child? The short answer to that question was that corn bread and pinto beans were cheap, and her parents had an extremely tight budget. Gabby also said that they ate a lot of Hamburger Helper. I assume that they could afford hamburger that required help. She mentioned that she and her siblings ate a lot of ramen noodles, cereal, and grilled cheese sandwiches.

I asked Gabby if she ate fried bologna when she was young. Her answer was “yes” to that. I also ate fried bologna as a child. Her answer made me remember other foods that I ate when I was kid. Most of them I don’t eat any more, but I still recall what they were. I have a good idea why my family ate what they ate. It wasn’t necessarily because they liked the food.

I am convinced that in many instances a person’s choice of diet is dictated by money, or lack of it. It was like that in my family of origin, and it was like that in my parents’ families. They had to make the weekly paycheck stretch, and they looked for bargains. What showed up on the kitchen table was often the result of making difficult economic choices.

For instance, corn bread is cheap to make. My mom didn’t make cornbread, but she made polenta, which is a boiled cornmeal dish that she served in the form of a loaf. Polenta is an Italian food, but we weren’t Italian. Our people were originally from Slovenia, which is a tiny Slavic country right next to Italy. So, in our house we ate foods that were from Slovenia, or from the neighboring ethnic groups (Germans, Hungarians, Italians and people from the Balkans). With rare exceptions, these dishes were meals that peasants would eat.

I had six younger brothers, so whatever my parents cooked needed to plentiful. Stews and soups fit that criterion. We had goulash. We always had pea soup right after Easter. In the spring, my mom would put in the pot whatever scraps were left over from the Easter ham, along with the bone, and let the soup simmer until every particle of protein was dissolved in the soup. We ate sarma, which consists of ground meat of some sort mixed with rice and wrapped in sour cabbage leaves. We ate sausages and potatoes and sauerkraut. Regardless of what was served, there were rarely if ever any leftovers.

My dad’s family took the strict budget diets to the next level. They used to eat “paprika speck.” “Speck” is the German word for bacon. Paprika speck was lard, plain and simple. It had microscopic pieces of bacon embedded in the fat. They ate it like butter. They spread it on bread and sprinkled a spice, like paprika or pepper, on it. That was lunch for them. Lard was also used for any kind of frying. There were no cooking sprays. My mom had three big containers in her kitchen. One was for flour, one for sugar, one for coffee, and one for lard.

They also ate cheap cuts of meat: hearts, livers, kidneys. They had a garden and ate whatever was in season. In early summer, they had big lettuce salads with oil and vinegar for a dressing. Later in the season, they ate whole tomatoes like they were apples. My grandparents and my mom did a lot of canning. They bought fruits and vegetables when they were plentiful and cheap, and then they preserved them for the winter. My dad made sauerkraut in the basement. It smelled like an animal had crawled into the house and died in a corner.

My family had a root cellar to store potatoes, onion, and apples. My dad hung chains of sausages from the ceiling in the cellar so that they would dry out. Our family was not the only one to do that. I had a friend whose family was from Sicily. His folks would hang up pepperoni and salami to dry and harden. My friend joked that you could tell if a salami was hard enough by testing it. If you could drive a nail into a wooden board with it, it was ready. When sausages were rock hard, a person could slice them paper thin and then put them on a piece of bread. That’s how you made them last.

Would I eat these foods now? Some I would. Like pinto beans and corn bread are for Gabby, there are some childhood foods that I remember fondly. I like to eat fresh tomatoes. I like pea soup with ham in it. Food links a person to their history. Maybe that is the important thing. 

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Frank (Francis) Pauc is a graduate of West Point, Class of 1980. He completed the Military Intelligence Basic Course at Fort Huachuca and then went to Flight School at Fort Rucker. Frank was stationed with the 3rd Armor Division in West Germany at Fliegerhorst Airfield from December 1981 to January 1985. He flew Hueys and Black Hawks and was next assigned to the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, CA. He got the hell out of the Army in August 1986.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.