Donis here. What wonderful entries my blog mates have offered lately. I love reading about the little things that make a novel real and relatable, like having animals as characters and keeping the action tight. One thing that has always interested me in any story, even noir-ish thrillers, is food. How a character relates to food tells me a lot about them. It also tells me a lot about the times in which the novel is set. I had just started writing my very first Alafair Tucker novel when I realized about ten pages in I was going to have to write a whole lot about food. That series is set in farm country in the early 20th century and features a mother of a lot of children. What was her daily life like? It revolved around food – growing or raising it, harvesting, butchering, preserving, planning, cooking. Feeding a dozen people three times a day every day until the end of time. No Safeway, no running water, no electricity.
I made a cake from scratch recently. I used one of my mother's recipes that really couldn't be done with mix. When I finished, I was hot from having the automatic oven on and tired from beating the batter by hand. What a bunch of wussies we modern cooks have become.
My grandmothers were both expert at American-style scratch cooking, which is what I write about. My mother was no slouch at scratch cooking herself. But when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, scratch cooking was considered oh-so-old-fashioned. The modern Mid-Century American Housewife as encouraged by all the smartest lady's magazines to utilize the latest time-saving canned and packaged foods to save herself needless hours in the kitchen, presumably so she could put on her shirtwaist dress and pearls and meet her man at the door with a dry martini and a delicious meal on the table when he came home from work.
Since my poor young suburban '50s mother wanted nothing more than to be hip to the times, that's the kind of food I was raised with. I shudder to remember what we grew up eating. But even though it wasn't health food, it was delicious.
How I occasionally long for a nice sit dish of Uncle Ben's instant white rice mixed with a can of undiluted Campbell's cream of celery soup to go along with my Hamburger Helper goulash. My aunt was particularly fond of magazine recipes. Every had a mayonnaise cake? How about a Coca-Cola cake? One of my mother's specialties was Ambrosia. Drain a can of fruit cocktail (those little chunks of peach and pear, tine green grapes, unnaturally red cherry) and dump it into a tub of Kool-Whip. Mix it up nice, maybe with some packaged shredded coconut, and scarf it down.
There are so many thing you could do with Jello that I don't have the room to go into them all, so I'll just hit the highlights: Emerald salad (lime jello, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, maybe some grated cucumber), broken glass pie, made with two or three bright colors of Jello, set and cut into jagged pieces, mixed with Kool-Whip and maybe a can of evaporated milk, poured into a graham character christ and chilled. How about an orange Jello salad filled with grated carrot and a served with a glop of mayo? Lemon Jello with crushed pineapple and little marshmallows.
One of our party staples in the 1960s was lime punch. Dump a quart of lime sherbet in a punch bowl and pour quarts of ginger ale or 7-Up over it. When I was old enough to throw my own parties, I went through a stage of making tiny cheese ball appetizers out of grated cheddar mixed with cream cheese and rolled in crushed Doritos.
And now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go rummage around in the cabinet and see if I can find a box of Jello.
