By Neal Wooten
My meals always consist of one thing only. If I cook pork chops, that’s it. There are no mashed potatoes, no mac-and-cheese, no potato salad, no side dish at all. And I have no set time for any meal. I eat when I’m hungry, and I eat at the computer.
It was a lot different growing up in a large family on Sand Mountain in the 60s and 70s. Suppertime was when Mom called “Supper!” and we all sat at the table to eat. There was no going to eat in the living room to watch TV, and we didn’t have computers. It was just one of those things we did on a regular basis as a family.
When you grow up doing something a certain way, you think of it as normal and assume everyone does it the same. The first time in my adult life when friends invited me to dinner for spaghetti, I was surprised to see the noodles and dark brown sauce in separate servers. Mom’s spaghetti was all mixed together with sauce and meat when we got to the table, and it was orange. Seriously, it was orange. But man, was it good.
When we ate hotdogs, we used loaf bread. Buns were too expensive. To this day, I don’t buy hotdog buns. It’s not that I can’t afford them; they just don’t taste right after eating plain bread with wieners for so long. And when we had chili dogs, we would lay a slice of bread on a plate, add the cooked wiener, mustard, ketchup, and onions, then smother it with regular chili and eat with a fork. The first time I saw a chili dog in a bun with actual hotdog chili on it, I thought someone was playing a joke.
Pintos and cornbread was the most common meal we had. And although it wasn’t my favorite dish back then, it must have become embedded in my DNA because now it is my favorite thing in the world. It might be because I rarely have it, but a plate of pintos with crumbled-up cornbread with raw onions and a glass of buttermilk is like heaven in my mouth.
Of course, there were some things my mom made that I have never seen anywhere else. Salmon patties, for example, were kind of odd-tasting, but we were thankful for whatever we had. But never in my life have I had a friend call up and say, “Hey, we’re having salmon patties tonight. Wanna come eat?”
I hope most families with children still have suppertime and all eat at the table. It’s not the food as much as the unity…quality family time.
