I suppose anyone who has eaten at a country style restaurant knows what a “meat and three” is. It, of course, refers to a meat entree and three vegetable selections. There are still a few places where you can get real country cooking, but they are few and far between. Cooking is sadly becoming a lost art.
A generation ago it was not uncommon for someone to walk into the house and ask, “What’s cookin’?” Those days are long gone, it seems, because nothin’s cookin’ in most homes today. It’s thawing, or being tossed in the microwave, or being delivered, or waiting at a fast food restaurant to be picked up, but it’s not “cookin’.”
Some health advocates asserted in years past that “you are what you eat.” If that is true, those following the baby boomer generation will be largely made up of pizza, chicken strips and ranch dressing.
I contend that those women of the World War II generation and before were great cooks because they “cooked”…a lot…everyday. Repetition is the mother of skill.
Of course a few women never mastered the art of cooking…even back then. My mother’s great-aunt, Martha Brim Bowman, was the least talented of five daughters when it came to the kitchen. Once, her brother - my great-grandfather, Richard Jackson Brim - visited his sister Martha’s home for a meal. As she put the food on the table, she declared, “Eat it as you love it.”
Her brother would later comment, “You had to love it to eat it!”
In the house where I grew up we usually enjoyed a meat and three at least once a day, usually at dinner (that’s what we called the noon meal).
My mother always considered her mother to be a great cook, but was less complimentary of her own ability. But she would often say, “I can keep plenty of good ‘grub’ on the table.” And she did.
I often think back to the days when we had hired hands join us for “dinner.” On those days we usually had “two and eight - or nine or ten.”
By that I mean two meats and a table filled with vegetable plates. The meats could be roast beef, fried chicken, meat loaf, fried tenderloin, pork backbone, pork roast, or fried country ham. The vegetables included, but were not limited to, green beans, pinto beans, pork n’ beans, butter beans, field peas, fried squash, okra (boiled or fried), mashed potatoes, stewed potatoes, fried corn, corn on the cob, boiled cabbage, coleslaw, candied sweet potatoes, and cucumbers in vinegar.
Finally, my mother would open two cans of Franco-American spaghetti to make sure there was, what my father called, “planty” (plenty).
Then she would top that off with two skillets of cornbread and a sheet of biscuits.
Of course, we drank enough sweet iced tea to float a boat.
I often speculated that the high school boys and men who helped us at tobacco cutting and hay hauling time would have worked simply for the chance to eat at our table. Spirits were high, the conversation was lively, and the “grub” was always good.
My great-grandmother Ida Bradford, who raised her family in New Middleton, had four sons and three daughters. She said, “To be a good cook, you had to stay in the kitchen.”
Her boys were constantly bringing their friends home after school and after ball games. Toward the end of her life Ida Bradford was heard to say one day, “I hope when I get to heaven to have a good cook stove and a bunch of hungry boys to feed.”
Great cooks of the past put more than their talent and energy into their cooking. They put their hearts into it. Because cooking consumed so much of their time, it gave them time…time to work out problems…time to lovingly think about those for whom they cooked…time to meditate and pray….time to be thankful.
Speaking of being thankful, as I considered all the great cooking I have enjoyed over the years, it dawned on me. In all my years, I have never…once…gone to bed hungry…not one time. Millions upon millions have lived and died who could not say the same.
That alone should give one pause to have a grateful heart.
Copyright 2024 by Jack McCall
