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In Mom's Kitchen
Home-Cooked Memories By Greg Downs
As Proust noted, nothing can match food for triggering memories. Anyone who has eaten pizza with a New Yorker or cheese steaks with a Philadelphian or chicken wings with a Buffalonian is familiar with this experience. While you are merely adding to your day's caloric count, your dinner partner seems to be a thousand miles away, mentally re-creating the pizza parlors and delis of their youth.
Like many Southerners, I have no nostalgia for chicken wings or cheese steaks. Now that I live a long day's drive north of Tennessee, the only foods that trigger my memory of my home state are deep-fried pork chops and bacon-flavored green beans and buttery mashed potatoes.
Those are typical Southern foods, the kinds of meals many Tennesseans enjoy once a week. The only thing that makes my story different is that I almost never ate those foods until I left home for college in Connecticut, and yet whenever I see fried pork chops I feel that homeward tug.
My mother, a native Kentuckian, converted to vegeterianism when I was a few months old and, aside from a few inadvertent slips, has not eaten meat since. While she never preached the gospel to my brother or me, she had a simple rule: We could eat meat outside of our house, but she would not prepare meat for us. At home we ate lentil bean burgers and cheese lasagnas and tuna fish casseroles, and at restaurants we indulged in fried chicken and steak fajitas.
This remained true up until I left for college. After 12 weeks at school (during most of which I complained bitterly about the dining hall provisions and spent money liberally at local pizza parlors), I was surprised to see a stack of frozen pork chops in our freezer when I returned home for Thanksgiving.
"Who's this for?" I asked. My mother seemed surprised at the question.
"You, of course," she said. For three days, distracted by Thanksgiving and family reunions, I did not think about those pork chops, but on Sunday morning I woke to the smell of bacon. As I drifted into the kitchen, I saw my mother dipping the thawed-out pork chops into scrambled egg yolks and then flour and then broken saltine crackers. On the stove Crisco sizzled in a cast-iron skillet, while green beans and bacon strips boiled down in a steel pot. Again, I asked what she was doing.