A FROG n A COW n A LOBSTER ALL CAME TO DINNER

Sometimes I Armchair Travel back into the 'Ports of the Past' via a Diary Ticket!  I stop off at all Ports of Call that mention Food!  These Ports that I revisited today offered Ancestral Food History, as well as a peek at Future History...how could I resist!
                 Home Port of St.Louis  and Vacation Port of Boston.   

MORNING MUSINGS   2 DECEMBER 2012 

REVISITED 5 MAY 2017

I am running behind so much this morning that the afternoon is moving into my morning musing time zone!

The following three morning musings seem to occur often enough that I think there must be a hidden message in them.  Of course all three involve a parental family history tale. 

My mother is the only person in my family who liked frog legs.

The only one!  I believe she had access to these when she worked for Harvey Restaurant Chain in downtown St. Louis.  Along with the frog legs, this seems to be the place my mom served political persons.  According to my grandmother, she was liked by everyone.  Years later, she received  Employee of the Year when she worked as a cashier at Arlans, now history itself.  It was similar to Walmart.  She received a certificate and a television.  Being so popular with the customers, alas, also meant that they came to her long checkout line to enjoy her love of people of all ages.

My father is the Man behind my first biological-anatomy-scientific weekly observation carried on in the kitchen sink of my small childhood home. There, on Friday eves, in a dented aluminum pan, were brains soaking in city water.  I didn’t know ‘whose’ brains.  At the time, having limited cuisine knowledge to draw on, I only was aware of cows as a possible source for what I was looking at.  In time, my mother, thank god, would take this strange looking glob to the stove and fry them in the skillet.  Believe the fat to fry these came from bacon, hence, the pig family.

It was only two days ago while conversing with a grocery store food demonstrator who was passing out samples of
pork tamales, easily accessible on street corners here in south tejas, that I realized my dad was also the Only one in my entire family that ate tamales, in St. Louis!

These were not cooked on the stove in the kitchen like the brains, but were sold my a vendor pushing a cart down our dark street around 9:30pm on Saturday nights.  We knew he was in the neighborhood by his cry of ‘TAMALES  TAMALES’.  I do not recall going outside with my father to get these; actually my mother probably did the buying.  What I do recall is standing looking outside into the dark being barely able to see the cart.  I certainly never saw the vendor.  Tamales!  Where did that come from?  My dad was Irish and grew up in south saint louis.  Restaurants there had Italian and German food.  Mexico was still not a household word as it is now. The next morning, Sundays, a young man came down the street using what looked like the same cart on wheels selling the Post Dispatch Newspaper.   I wonder. 

Family History Update. A few genes have carried forward. I had 'a' frog leg caught and cooked by my husband’s brother while visiting his family in Ohio, near Defiance. Naturally.

I have never had, nor will ever have, brains of any sort of any animal cooked in any way.

It seems tamales are as difficult to figure out how to eat as are lobsters!  What a surprise to learn that, unlike the burrito tortilla wrap, you are not suppose to eat the corn husk wrap that the tamale is cooked in!  It should be as avoided as the green stuff in lobsters. I Have eaten lobster but only under the expert supervision of an east coast native. 

As the Afternoon looms into my Morning Musing, I shall end with this.

I never had rice until I lived in the Philippines; never had spaghetti until I lived in Italy; never had lamb until I lived in Turkey.  I am beginning to think unraveling my family history of eating may be as complicated, but much more fun, than unraveling the DaVinciCode!