College Food — October Memoir Challenge
This is my eighteenth post, for age 18, of the October Memoir and Backstory Challenge hosted by Jane Anne McLachlan. My previous posts: Baby Speed Eater, Two Tales, Curls, Most Magical Christmas, Kindergarten, Places, Mental Health in 1969, The Boxcar Children, The Little House Books, Too Thin, Four Square, Curls: Take Two, Scouting, Schools, Sophomore Year, 1979 Book Review, and Library Assistant.
Joy with Mrs. Bump on the step of 6 Ordonia, the day I left for college.
In the only picture I have of the day that I went to college, I’m holding a box of trash bags. Trash bags were my mother’s equivalent to the towel in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, proof that you were prepared for any mess that needed to be cleaned up. Also, for a rain storm — cut a hole in the bottom for an instant poncho. When setting out on any adventure, especially college, one wants to be prepared for messes and rainstorms.
That’s Mrs. Bump with me. She went along to keep my mother company on the drive. At that time, it was over two hours each way from Louisiana, Missouri to Washington University in St. Louis.
I only went home three times that first semester. Once for Homecoming at Louisiana High School, once to see my brother playing Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady during his senior year, and once for Thanksgiving. For the second trip, I brought a friend from college.
In a letter I sent before the second trip, I helped my mother with food planning.
How to Feed College Freshmen
That sounds more demanding than it was. I was answering a question about what we wanted and, on the other side of the page, I told her not to worry if those things didn’t work out. I knew my audience. Dad would be amused at the specificity and Mother would find it easier to plan around a concrete list than vague generalities.
I’d forgotten about this list until I was reading the letters my mother saved. But I remembered the green beans. My mother got a huge kick out of a request for steaming hot green beans and told that story many times over the years. These were the days before salad bars were ubiquitous. If I wanted veggies at college, my best bet was the warming table in the cafeteria where the green beans were lukewarm or cooler. As much as anything about home cooking, I missed that food in my mother’s house was served hot.
Fortunately, I can get real cider in St. Louis now. Back then, the bottle was labeled cider, but contained juice. Not at all the same thing when you’re used to cider fresh-pressed from the orchard.
Gone-all-afternoon stew was a favorite recipe of my mother’s from the days before slow cookers were popular.
What food did you miss from home when you moved out of your parents’ house for the first time?
My mom made something called “sausage souffle,” an ironic title because there was nothing light about it. It was made with McGarrity’s sausages, potatoes and stewed tomatoes. Somehow that combination still works for me. I also liked her lemon bread, drizzled icing always does the trick!
My daughter packs much of her stuff in trash bags when she goes back and forth to college these days. I’m amused to think of them as the equivalent of the Hitchhiker’s towel.
I missed tomatoes and strawberries. My mother is very particular about them and never bought the tasteless grocery kind–she would ferret out farm markets and find good ones.
Ah, yes. Where would we be without our mothers preparing the way. Brought back memories I’d forgotten of my mom helping get me ready for college. Great post!
Oh, I missed the home-cooked food, too! My grandmother was the main cook in our house–not that my mother couldn’t, but my grandmother dominated the kitchen. There were always desserts because my dad was a meat and potatoes and dessert man. Cafeteria food just didn’t cut it, but there were few places to go out in our small college town. Wonderful memory, Joy!
No one made pies, either fried or baked, like Grams. Also chicken and dumplings, buttermilk biscuits, caste-iron cornbread, pressure cooker green beans-onions-new-potatoes-bacon, ham-hocks and beans, wilted lettuce, home canned jellies, jams, preserves, and relishes…Southern Illinois really is Southern.
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I love the trash bags paragraph! So funny!
I missed my mom’s baking. Her pastry was to die for. I never learned to make pastry, because I knew I’d never make any that good. Even after I got married, Mom would make rolls of pastry and put them in my freezer whenever she came to visit.
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