An excerpt from “Just Walk Away – a memoir of growing up in the Midwest”
Mom and Artie had a habit. Every morning as we sat at the breakfast table they would be discussing our next meal.
Artie says, “What are we going to have for lunch?”
Then at lunch they would be invariably discussing dinner.
Mom says, “What do you want for dinner?”
Our lives seemed to revolve around food. Well, it just seemed that way. We did many other things and focused on lots of stuff that didn’t involve food. I guess. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just wish everything didn’t revolve around food, but that it really did.
Food was nourishment but it was also satisfying. A well-made dish got special attention when it was especially good. We remembered these dishes and traded around recipes written on 3 x 5 index cards that would go in a little metal recipe box. It didn’t have to be only home cooked food. We also zeroed in on good restaurants and cafes anywhere we went and remembered where the good ones were so we could go again. Dad had his special Italian restaurants. He loved the Steak de Burgo that he got at Johnny and Kay’s in Des Moines for example. Steak de Burgo was a beef tenderloin pan seared and covered with a sauce of garlic, butter and Italian herbs. There wasn’t much to choose from in Marshalltown but what was there was good old-fashioned American food. I’m 100% positive that life wouldn’t have been as wonderful if it weren’t for the good food we enjoyed.
Let me get one thing straight: we weren’t gluttons. Only mom and my brother got fat. Mom got fat from having kids and not losing the baby weight. Rol got fat after he left home and went to work at the Watchtower in Brooklyn, New York. I guess they had cafeteria food there and he didn’t get very much exercise. Our food wasn’t what one might call health food but it was healthy enough and the vast majority of it was home cooked. Back then even restaurants cooked from scratch. There wasn’t the Sysco truck pulling up with pre-made foods. We also didn’t have fast food, and I doubt we would have eaten it very much if there was.
My first memory of food was from the apartment on North Street. Mom made homemade noodles from a simple recipe that she learned from my German grandmother. It was my first favorite thing to eat. It was simple because the only ingredients were flour, eggs, a pinch of salt and water. My mom piled the flour into a mound on the table, plopped the eggs in a shallow well she made in the center of the flour and then proceeded to mix it all with her hands gathering flour from the edges and incorporating the eggs into it gradually. I watched. It was pretty cool how she did it. When it was all mixed adequately, she would roll the dough out thin with a rolling pin, then roll up the flat sheet into a long tube. Then she cut through the dough to make long thin strips. To the strips she added more flour to keep them from sticking together and then she spread them out on the table to dry. She made chicken and noodles or just served them boiled plain with plenty of butter. The noodles were chewy and delicious and there was that delectable sauce. My dad called me The Noodle Kid because I would eat and eat the noodles Mom made. I was 3 or 4 years old.
We didn’t have Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers. We didn’t have frozen pizza rolls from the dairy case either. They did not exist nor were there any kind of frozen pizzas so the only time a kid could have pizza was when their folks took them to the pizzeria. Our only nod to convenience foods were saltine crackers and canned Campbell’s soup, cold cuts from the butcher – usually bologna. The Fareway store had and has the best deli counter in the world outside of New York City and I loved to go in there and look at all the amazing cold cuts. Baked ham, roast beef, pickle and pimento loaf, chopped ham, mortadella, cotto salami, olive loaf and more. Mom loved liverwurst. I hated it.
Sometimes we would have cookies – usually sandwich style with icing in the middle like Oreos. Mom liked the almond windmill cookies, and we ate them dipped in milk. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and later some friend showed me how to spread the bread with butter then spread the peanut butter after that to keep the peanut butter from sticking to the roof of my mouth. In those days nothing, not even hydrogenated oils, had been added to the peanut butter. It was a disconcerting feeling to have the peanut butter stick to the roof of your mouth. Not necessarily easy to get it out. You had to work at it with your tongue. The butter did the trick, and I still use it even though peanut butter is made with a new-fangled recipe these days and doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth. Some people are grossed out by this technique.
Once Artie got a live turkey as a Christmas gift from Lennox where he worked. He knew what to do with live game because he was a hunter and fisherman, so he took the turkey out to the back yard to slaughter it. Then, as I watched in horror, he chopped the head off the turkey with a hatchet and let go. The turkey flopped all over the place spewing blood. It was so gross. I guess he then defeathered and gutted it, but I had already beat a hasty retreat back to the house, so I missed that part. All I remember is the flopping. Artie was a hunter trained by his own father to hunt and fish so we had a lot of wild game on our table.
I developed a disgust for all the game that my dad hunted and killed, which my mom then cooked and served at our dinner table. It didn’t help that Artie would allow us to watch as he skinned and disemboweled the animals right before our very eyes. Ok, yes, this is the “natural” order of things, but nobody explained this to me or helped me overcome it. As a matter of fact, no one ever explained much of anything to us kids. I don’t know why. Maybe it just never occurred to them that anything needed to be explained. Adults came and went and did what they did how they wanted to do it. This was not shared with the children. We would just have to figure it out on our own.
I was especially repulsed by having to pick buck shot out of a squirrel or rabbit leg that lay on my plate. I’d take a bite and then refuse. Nobody forced me to eat it, which was quite humane of them and I’m glad they didn’t, otherwise I might have had an even worse eating disorder. I wonder what Artie thought about my refusal. His own dad, my grandfather, would have never accepted that kind of disobedience because they had grown up in the Great Depression and food was food and not always readily available. But Artie accepted it from us kids. However, Mom further encouraged my distaste of wild meats. When lake fish was served which was regularly because Artie was a great fisherman, she would harp, “Watch out for the bones. Watch out for the bones. You might choke on the bones.” This was her litany especially when we would go to the fish frys at the Isaac Walton League south of town where Artie kept up with his archery skills. At first, I thought I would like the crunchy fish deep fried and then the beans or cole slaw on the side. I can’t remember if they also had French fries but when Mom started in then all of sudden I was not interested in the fish. OK, thanks Mom, I’m done with the fish now. It took me years to realize that I wouldn’t choke, and then I could eat it even though I’ll always hear her voice chiming away in the back of my mind.
The majority of our food was home cooked from scratch. Mom never bought prepared boxed meals or sugary items at the grocery store, for example. I envied kids who had Sugar Pops or Frosted Flakes in their cupboards. If Mom did buy boxed cereal, it would be Wheaties or Wheat Chex. Oh, my god, mom! You are no fun at all! Mostly we had the hated old-fashioned library paste flavored oatmeal. (yes, I knew what library paste tasted like because I sampled some once and only once). To make it tolerable we added butter, heaps of brown sugar and a little milk. Tasty not pasty. Have I told you about the scrambled egg sandwich she would foist upon me as I was going out the door to catch the bus to school? I would take it because there was no way she would let me refuse it and then when I got out of sight of the house, I would throw it in the gutter or down the storm drain. I was bound and determined not to suffer the embarrassment of eating a sandwich on the way to school in front of all my friends!
We didn’t have desserts in our house except for the occasional grocery store brand Fastco ice cream that came in a square paper carton. It was most often vanilla, and it was terrible but at that time we didn’t know better and accepted it. Once in a while she would come home with Neapolitan ice cream, in the Fastco box, of course, which was strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in sections. It was good enough and we ate it. We had nothing to compare it to after all. No Haagen Daz. No Breyers.
Some lucky kids had fudgsicles in their freezers and, boy, did I envy those kids! Mom considered these items extravagant, so we never had any. The most daring thing mom got were the almond windmill cookies from Keebler. They were ginger flavored I guess and there were little bits of almonds in them. They were in the shape of, you guessed it, windmills. While we’re on the subject of cookies, once I came home from school and Mom was not home. I must have been 8 or 9. When I looked in the cupboard for a snack, I saw some boxed coconut cookies covered with chocolate and caramel. What is this? Why are these here? This is very strange and completely out of the ordinary! I was terrified to eat one, this is how rare it was. I thought, “Maybe they were put there by bad guys and they’re poisoned, and they want me to eat one, so I’ll die.” I closed the cupboard and walked away even though they looked incredibly good. Then I obsessed and obsessed about them but kept my composure. I kept going to the cupboard to check if they were still there. They were. Eventually Mom came home, and they turned out to be legit. They were Coconut Dream cookies, and a friend had given them to her. Such was a child’s experience in a home devoid of sweet treats.
Artie’s favorite pie was Lemon Meringue and when I got old enough to bake, he would ask me to make one for him. I made the crust from scratch with Crisco and the meringue with whipped egg whites and sugar, but the filling was some Jello thing in a box with a little yellow gel tab filled with yellow dye that you pricked with a needle and that colored the filling. Grrrr-oss! Other than that, I don’t remember any actual desserts until the hippie days and then my mom made a killer carrot cake that was to die for.
In hindsight, I am glad that we never had many sweets. I think that having very little sugar helped me have good teeth and not get overweight. As a matter of fact, unlike everyone I knew I absolutely loved going to the dentist. Dr. Warrington would come in the exam room, take one look in my mouth and exclaim, “You have such beautiful teeth!” I was a vain young child easily overcome by flattery, but it was true. My teeth were straight, and I didn’t have any cavities. I never had to endure the agony of braces like many of my friends. I even had the added advantage of having a little gap between my two front teeth that I could squirt water out of to annoy my friends at the swimming pool. Later on, the gap closed, and this was perfect because it helped my teeth to stay straight, I guess. Room to move, you see.
It’s not that we didn’t have our indulgences. Just down the street from 15th Avenue there was a small grocery store called Twin Foods with a bakery in the back. It was called Twin Foods because the proprietor thought that milk and bread went together, and they probably do. You went down the street to the corner of Fifteenth Avenue, then you would hang a louie on Nevada (Nuh-Vay-Duh not Nuh-Va-Duh. Remember this is Iowa!) In a couple of blocks, you would arrive. There we would buy frozen Snickers bars and Slo-Pokes in the summer. They also had the best white bread baked in their own ovens, golden crunchy crust and soft chewy white inside. One of my favorite snacks was two huge slices of that bread with as much Miracle Whip that I could get on it so it skooshed out of the sides when you pressed the bread slices together. Of course one had to lick off the skooshed out MW. Only Miracle Whip. Nothing else. Not mayonnaise. Not butter. Only Miracle Whip. People who are not from Iowa or the Midwest don’t understand the attraction of Miracle Whip. Everybody in the Midwest uses Miracle Whip and I’m pretty sure they still do. It was an ingredient in just about every recipe you can think of. Deviled eggs don’t taste right without it. Turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving don’t taste right without it. Potato salad doesn’t taste right without it. Coleslaw doesn’t taste right without it. Waldorf salad doesn’t taste right without it. Macaroni salad doesn’t taste right without it. Hamburgers don’t taste right without it. I like mayonnaise now but when I was young it had to be Miracle Whip.
We also fried bologna to put in a sandwich and ate hot dogs raw and uncooked. My brother lived on Franco American spaghetti out of a can or Campbell’s tomato soup with half a package of saltines crushed in it. On Sunday mornings we had pancake eating contests while Artie flipped pancakes as fast as we could eat them. “Who wants another pancake?” he would yell out. “Me!” we would yell back. These were silver dollar sized pancakes mind you. Not the ginormous restaurant size. You could eat a lot of silver dollar sized pancakes.
On Sunday night Mom might make Swiss Steak cooked in the pressure cooker and serve it with mashed potatoes. She’d get a cheap cut of steak, dredge it in flour and then pound the dickens out of it with a meat mallet, so a lot of flour was mashed into it. Then she would chop carrots and onions and pour a can of chopped tomatoes on top of the meat in the pressure cooker. Then we watch in fascination and fear as the little bobble thing on top of the pressure cooker would let off steam. Would it explode, or wouldn’t it? We never knew if it would, but it never did.
When it was all done, we would pile a mountain of mashed potatoes on our plates and then put a big piece of tenderized meat on top and pour the gravy over the whole business. You could eat the meat with a fork it was so tender. No knife was needed. My lifelong enjoyment of liver and onions also began here. I don’t know how Mom made it, but it was never dry or chalky. Of course, we drowned it in ketchup. And, oh, the onions! You had to have a mound of pan-fried onions, slightly caramelized on the whole she-bang. Sometimes she made what she called Neapolitan macaroni which other people call American Goulash. This was cooked elbow macaroni in a sauce of cooked hamburger and canned tomatoes all mixed up. This, too, was good eatin’!
When we went out to eat, which was not often, we had some choices and one of the choices was a café near the Third Avenue bridge that had a bar in the front and a restaurant in the back. It was kind of seedy, but we didn’t care. Their signature dish was a dinner plate size pork fritter with French fries. The bun was this ridiculous looking tiny thing in the middle of the giant pork fritter which had a couple of dill pickle slices and a dollop of yellow mustard. The pork itself was pounded wafer thin, breaded and deep fried. Mostly breading and a little meat. You would eat your way to the bun and, boy, did we love it!
The other treat was the Maid Rite sandwich. Can I write an ode to the Maid Rite! You bet I can! When I was older and had come from California for a visit, we saw that Hilary Clinton was on the campaign trail and headed for Marshalltown. We dropped everything for a glimpse of the famous person and there she was with her big bus pulled up to the courthouse lawn. There, up on the stage, the first thing out of her mouth is, “I’ve been to Taylor’s Maid Rite! And I can tell you they’re made right!” brr-rump-chi! Yeah, right, Hilary, tell us something we don’t know. You could see all the Iowan eyes in the crowd rolling in their heads. After her speech I pushed through the crowd to shake her hand, and it was kind of a limp rag and soft. I guess I might get that way having to shake thousands of hands a day.
The Maid Rite was and still is a white hamburger bun piled high with ground sirloin cooked until it fell apart in crumbles. My sister Toni once made a very good and reasonable facsimile of a Maid-Rite but generally it is a secret recipe, and no one really knows exactly how they do it. Roseanne Barr, the comedian, called it “loose meats” and had a café in her TV series that served them. Loose meat is a terrible and stupid name for this delicious sandwich. Calling it that makes it sound perfectly revolting because it’s really perfection on a bun with pickle, chopped onion and yellow mustard. NO ketchup mind you. In classic Maid-Rite land this is not allowed. Ketchup had been pulled from the menu in the Great Depression because bums would come in, sit themselves down at the counter, order a cup of hot water then proceed to add a bunch of ketchup for a strange kind of soup. I’ve heard that ketchup is now on the menu but in those days, we did not want or need ketchup.
To go with your Maid Rite, you had to have one of their amazing, malted milk shakes. A spoon would stand straight up if you stuck one in. It was a heavenly taste, the Maid Rite along with a slurp of chocolate, strawberry or classic malt flavored milk. They did not serve French fries. It was perfection just those two things.
Sometimes on a hot and humid summer night dad would say, “Let’s go get ice cream.” And then we’d pile in the car to drive to a creamery in Tama (Tay-ma). We’d be driving in the dusky evening light along highway 30 and I’d look out the car window at the miles of corn fields with billions of lightning bugs flashing and wonder why there was so much corn. I didn’t eat that much corn. Why was there so much corn? I didn’t figure it out until much later that everything in the world is made from the miracle plant and also fed to cows to fatten them up. Corn starch, corn syrup, corn oil in various shapes and forms going into just about everything out there. Adhesives, cosmetics, batteries, textiles, and soap. You name it. If you find the modest little plant out in the wild that modern corn was developed from (teosinte) you wouldn’t believe how they could keep going through trial and error until they got modern corn. Modern corn bears almost no resemblance to ancient “corn”. The power of human persistence and ingenuity.
Sometimes we’d go to the Tastee Freeze south of town on highway 14 and get soft serve ice cream that was dipped upside down into chocolate and the chocolate would then harden. You’d eat a hole in the top of the chocolate and then suck the soft serve out while your tongue was trying to keep up with all the ice cream drips down the side of the cone. John Mellancamp immortalized the Tastee Freeze in one of his songs called “Jack and Diane”. “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze.”
On the north side of town on highway 14 was the A&W root beer stand. The car hops would come out to your car and take your order and then come back with your food on a tray that attached to the side of the car. That root beer came straight from heaven. I kid you not. The mug had been in the freezer, and the sides of the mug were frosted over. Maybe there would be a hot dog alongside the root beer, but you didn’t really need it. The root beer was outstanding all by itself. No other root beer is as good. I tried making root beer once, but it didn’t taste anything like A&W. True old-fashioned root beer tasted very different from the recipe Mr. Allen and Mr. Wright developed, then broke the mold, and threw away the key in 1919.
Another summer excursion would be a trip to the outdoor drive-in to watch some cowboy movie and go to the concession stand and get a bag of their terrible salty popcorn which, of course, I loved. We’d park next to the speaker which was attached by a long wire cord to a pole. Mom would take the speaker off the holder and hook it over the door window. The sound was awful, all grainy and crackly, but that didn’t matter. It was all part of the drive-in experience. We’d watch until we fell asleep in the back of the car and then somehow arrive home and wake up in our own beds the next morning.
There was only one pizza place in town at the time. Luckily it was and still is the best pizza on the planet. It rivals any pizza you can think of including Chicago pizza, New York pizza, and wood fired pizza. None of them hold a candle to Zeno’s pizza. Am I prejudiced? Only a little bit. I think they use provolone instead of mozzarella or maybe a combination and it was the cheesiest greasiest saltiest pizza on a thin crust you ever had. The atmosphere was great. Everybody had their little booth, and the decor was kitchy Italian with fake grapes and flowers garlanded on the walls. It was a ritual to go to Zeno’s after every football game at Franklin Field. Sometimes it was a place to take a date. You could get spaghetti there, but it was the pizza that everybody loved.
At Shady Oaks restaurant east of town on Old Highway 30 (and if you didn’t know, this was the famous coast to coast Lincoln Highway built before interstate freeways), I would always have a giant wedge of iceberg lettuce with Roquefort cheese dressing poured all over. I thought it was quite special and unique that they brought those triple dispensers of salad dressing to the table with a choice of thousand island, Roquefort and Italian dressing. You could ladle out the dressing to your heart’s content, and this made me very happy. It wasn’t sanitary but that didn’t cross our minds. At home we didn’t have salads. We had vegetables.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Milt’s on S. 12th Avenue. This was a hamburger joint, but the attraction was Milt himself. We kids watched in amazement as he poured our milk into the glass going higher and higher until he was pouring it from what seemed like 3 feet above the glass. When Milt retired the restaurant became a Chinese restaurant and dad would say, “Let’s go get flied lice.” He thought this was funny and didn’t realize how derogatory it was to say it that way. The food was actually pretty good for standard Americanized Chinese food. They had Egg Fu Yung which was smothered in some kind of beefy gravy and pork fried rice as well as Chow Mein. I really liked the Egg Foo Yung and deep-fried egg rolls dipped in the red dye #5, I mean, sweet sour sauce. Oh yeah, and of course, the flied lice. Not your gourmet fare but we had never had anything gourmet, so we had nothing to compare it to.
Everybody in Marshalltown considered that Stone’s under the third street viaduct next to the old train station was the piéce de la resistance and gourmet meal for special occasions. It had to be Stone’s restaurant. My grandmother would ride the train from Illinois to visit us and we would meet her at the station. I particularly remember the gigantic locomotive bearing down on us in a threatening way and pulling into the station while making a hell of a racket. Then grandma would get off, and we would walk over to Stones for a quick bite. Stones was famous for their prime rib and traditional side dishes. It had an old timey feel about it, and well it should have because they had been in Marshalltown since the beginning. If you wanted to wine and dine your business associate or impress your date you took them to Stone’s.
Sometimes we would drive to Gladbrook to indulge in smorgasbord Iowa-style. “Smorgas” is “bread and butter” and “bord” is “table” in Swedish. Gladbrook was a half-hour drive north of town through the cornfields. Smorgasbord in Iowa was/is a Swedish buffet with Iowa favorites added. The Swedish part is pickled herring with sour cream and chives, and then there were cold sliced meats that you could make a sandwich out of, the most important being ham with mustard. Sliced cheese, pickled cucumbers and sliced bread or rolls with butter. Swedish meatballs, warm potato casserole. Beet salad in sour cream and stewed red cabbage. If you weren’t about to explode after eating all that stuff you might be able to get down something for dessert. Jello, brownies, apple pie, and rice pudding sprinkled with cinnamon.
Other times we would drive to the Amana Colonies of the Amish people who lived west of Iowa City and have a meal at one of their restaurants. We’d drive east on highway 30 and then veer off just past LeGrande on to road E66 and then drive east through the Chelsea bottomlands to Belle Paine and then Marengo. I thought this drive was particularly beautiful. I imagined how the native Americans might have lived here and enjoyed it. The Amana Colony restaurants were special because they served everything family style, which meant the side dishes were brought to your table in bowls and you served yourself whatever you wanted and however much you wanted. Not so sanitary but people back then had no knowledge of sanitary the way we think of it today. Pickled beets, sauerkraut, pickled ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls and butter. Only your main course, which might be Wiener Schnitzel or fried chicken, was served individually on your plate.
R L Benoit - Writer/Artist 