A Guy’s Gotta Eat!

My mother was a farm wife on a 400-acre farm in northern Illinois in the 1950s. She could feed a hungry crew during the harvest and could help in the fields, when necessary. This is the environment in which she decided that her teenaged son needed to learn cooking basics so that he wouldn’t need to marry a woman just to eat. It wasn’t a stretch for me. I had stayed at home alone and had managed to feed myself. I could fry a hamburger and follow a recipe. But my mother wanted more proof that I could sustain myself and make meals over the long run.

Like many in our area, the farm produced corn and oats to fatten 150 beef cattle and a few hundred hogs. We also had chickens, horses, sheep, and a mongrel dog named Pup. The nearest neighbor was a mile distant, and the grocery store was seven miles away. Given infrequent grocery trips, staples required long shelf life. Meal priorities tended toward appetite satisfaction over exotic flavors. Sixty years later, I live in an area with access to farmers’ markets and specialty food shops, peopled with discriminating eaters. I typically prepare the main meal every day for myself and my wife, who has a sophisticated palate and appreciates variety.

Feeding the farmers

My own tastes developed among a nexus of family farms populated by mostly Scandinavian immigrant families. Going out to dinner often meant attending the Sunday smorgasbord at the local church. It was a meat-and-potatoes 1950s crowd where meals fueled bodies used to wrestling 60-pound hay bales or throwing down a ton of sileage by fork from one of the 50-foot silos that dotted the landscape. The farm wives who prepared those meals often had chores to do around the farm. Some also had jobs outside the home. That meant time spent preparing the meals was limited.

Food availability was hampered by the logistics of the day. Rather than French cheeses and Italian pastas, the typical farm cupboard was populated with shelf-stable staples: cream of mushroom soup, Jell-O, corn flakes, and canned foods that could be quickly and liberally incorporated into a meal for a hungry bunch of farmers. Menus tended to simplicity and bulk. The limited variety on the Midwest 1950s grocery shelves drove farm cooks to a level of creativity driven by a need to quickly fill stomachs rather than inspire the palate. Preparation needed to be simple and efficient.

Cooking lessons

My first cooking lesson was my mother’s beef stew. And we had a big advantage over today’s households. Like almost every farmhouse, we had a big freezer to take both economic and nutritional advantage of what was produced in this breadbasket. In our case, it was prime beef. At least once a year, we’d select one of the best steers, which resulted in about 700 pounds of beef. For her stew, my mother chose a minute steak, a tougher cut that was processed through the slaughterhouse’s mechanical tenderizer before packaging and freezing.

My cooking lesson meant that my mother supervised while I cut one of those minute steaks into bite-size pieces, dredged them in flour and browned them in a frying pan. When adequately browned, I added potatoes cut into stew-size pieces, along with frozen peas. Then she instructed me to add water and a bouillion cube. I’m not sure of the spices, but the kitchen of the day usually included Worcestershire sauce and garlic salt. After simmering for 20 or 30 minutes, the stew was ready to my mother’s satisfaction.

In the ensuing half-century, my meal repertoire has certainly expanded, but much of it retains the core tastes and memories of those early years in the farm kitchens of my mother and grandmother. I still make stews, but they range from my lamb tagine to a chunky Southwest chili to a Vietnamese beef pho. But at its core, it’s still that original stew recipe.

How did you learn to cook – or didn’t you? Please share you stories in comments below.