The little garden in the back was very small when all was said and done, but there were vegetables, vegetables, vegetables, and the herb patch, of course, and the compost heap. The compost heap was where
every
fallen leaf,
every
plucked faded flower,
every
scrap from the kitchen,
every
onion peel, everything except animal fat and citrus went. Once a week, on Saturdays, my grandfather would turn the compost. In those days everybody had a little patch of garden somewhere in the back.
Everything in my early life was concerned with fine foods and wines, with gardening. I was in a kitchen and at a table forever. My grandmother and grandfather were really passionate gourmets, being European and both coming of small-town families who spent two and a half hours at the table for each meal, between wine, food, and conversation. And if you want to be a good cook, you have to be a good gardener; it all works together. My grandfather would pick the salad two minutes before it was going to be washed and dressed for the table. If we were going to have corn on the cob for lunch, my grandfather would go out in the garden and my grandmother would put the water on to boil and watch the pot. She would never let Rebecca cook that corn. When she saw bubbles forming on the bottom of the pot, she would go to the window and say, “Now.” My grandfather would grab those ears off the stalk and shuck ’em and pass ’em through the window, and she would throw ’em in. Then: everybody at the table. The country butter lady would have arrived on Monday with the country butter, and my grandmother would get the crock from the icebox, where we kept the blocks of ice, the white wine, and the country butter. Then everybody would have their fresh corn on the cob with fresh butter. It was a religious experience. As my grandmother never ceased to explain, the minute you shuck it, the flavor, the sweetness, starts to go. It’s something you can’t measure or see, but it’s there. So that’s why it should be dropped into not overboiling but boiling water the minute it’s undressed. I haven’t had corn like that in a long time because I haven’t been near corn plants.
We did fresh radishes the same way. My grandfather said, “Their soul flies to heaven within an hour after they’re picked.” So they were brought and plunged into a bowl of cold water with perhaps a sliver of ice. Then they were washed off. Quite often we ate them as the French do, with the leaves. And this was to experience the truth of the radish. “Sad as a store-bought radish” was one of my grandmother’s favorite expressions.
Then, the first speckled lima beans, the first speckled butter beans, the first little snap beans, was like a little rite. The first spotted limas—those pale green limas with purple spots—were considered one of the high points of the season. Whoever got to market first would grab enough for a friend because they didn’t last long. The first ones were gone in a minute. They came in a covered dish to table, a first course by itself, with butter and the pepper mill. It’s that French thing of
la première,
or the first little carrots, the first little turnips. It’s a little festival all on its own.
The table was terribly serious, and the garden in the back was terribly serious. My grandmother lived for her kitchen and dining room. She believed in setting a superior table.
I never heard “We don’t have anything for supper” or “I don’t know what we’re going to do for lunch.” There was always something. And plenty of it. Because there was a garden. And there was a butler’s pantry with bottles of wine and bottles of beer and bottles of preserves and big jars of rice and big jars of grits and big jars of flour and big jars of brown sugar. And there was this sense of a household.
*
At my grandmother’s house there was a daily ritual which began when the cock crowed. My grandmother would get up in her wrapper and these flat-bottomed bedroom slippers. When the morning started, the first sounds you heard were these bedroom slippers. Slap-slap. Slap-slap. Slap-slap. Down the main hall of the house. Down the little hall from the dining room to the kitchen. Then you’d hear the iron stove being rattled. Rattle, rattle, rattle. Shaking the ashes down. You could hear this from every house in the neighborhood. The whole neighborhood would go rattle, rattle, rattle. I wish someone had recorded it. This was before radio and television had taken over the world, so what you heard were these household sounds. And you’d hear some kindling wood going in. Clink, clink. And you’d hear a couple of pieces of a big oak going in. Bong-bong. And you’d hear a match struck, and then you’d hear this delightful sound that a fire makes in an iron stove—a little gentle good-morning roar. A sort of “There you are, here am I, another day is beginning.” So you heard this little symphony. Some composer should write a symphony of all those kitchen sounds.
One of my chief memories is the sound of the coffee mills in every household. Since there was no air-conditioning, the windows were all open, so you could hear those coffee mills cranking all over downtown Mobile at six in the morning. Nobody would dream of coffee that was already ground up, and they may have even roasted the beans that morning, because coffee was a ritual. In very cold weather, my grandfather always gave everybody in the household a thimbleful of the best cognac with the morning coffee. You could dump it in or have it alongside, whatever you liked. It warmed the bones.
A lot of people kept iron cookstoves even after they had gas stoves. My grandmother had both, side by side in her fairly big kitchen. All of those ladies who were serious about baking swore that really good biscuits, really good breads, really good cakes and pies, had to be done in that slow-burning, wood-fueled iron stove. And they all knew, having learned from black cooks as a child, how to put their hand in the oven and say, “Not yet.” Put in another piece of wood, and after a few minutes put their hand in again and say, “Not yet.” Go on about their business and finally put their hand in and say, “Now.” It was that old school. They’d say, “Not yet,” “In a minute,” “Now,” and put in the pies, the biscuits, whatever. They didn’t need thermometers. They didn’t need dials. They just knew. They could feel it. And I guess that’s why they always took off their rings when they were baking. Their rings always sat in a little dish, like a porcelain saucer or butter dish, on the kitchen table. And when they finished baking, they put their rings back on.
When Rebecca arrived to make the biscuits for breakfast, the stove would be ready. You’d hear this car—chug-a-chug-chug—outside, hear a door slam, and hear Rebecca saying good-bye to her husband. He was a minister in a church in Prichard, and he’d bring her to work and come pick her up at the end of the day. Then you’d hear this whup-whup-whup from the kitchen. That was biscuits being beaten with a wooden spoon and elbow grease. Pies were also made early in the morning, covered with cheesecloth to keep the flies off, and put in the butler’s pantry.
My grandfather would have his breakfast at the big wooden table in the kitchen before walking down to his office on Water Street, but my grandmother and I would be served at the dining room table in the dining room. Breakfast was a serious meal, as was the midday dinner. Quite often we had fried plantains and hot biscuits or some hot sweet roll. And then we’d have little bits of fish, little ham steaks, bacon, scrambled eggs, soufflé, or grits. Quite often a little tiny breakfast steak wrapped in bacon, and something sweet, like a peach pie.
You had to eat. Because people walked and worked and gardened. I think part of the problem with cholesterol now is that people don’t do anything. They don’t bend and stretch and dig. So all this about eating light is quite right if you live in New York and the most exercise you get is pushing the elevator button. But if—as we all did, as I still do—you really work in the garden in the hot sun, you don’t want a salt-free diet. Because you sweat it out. And you want salt. I think that’s why the Southern diet of pork sausage and pork chops and roast pork and ham and bacon obtained. I have this little song I sing about cholesterol: “Without you, darling, where would I be?” You know the famous Southern saying “We eat everything of the pig except the squeal.” Well, you can do that if you go right out in the garden after breakfast and work for an hour, as my grandmother and I did.
Then Rebecca and Ma-Ma, as I called my grandmother, sat down and had coffee and did family. I never wanted to hear it. They did a lot of that “You can’t understand anything men do. Men are not to be understood. Oh, well. Men.” You know. “Men. They’re all alike. Oh, men are all alike. Men are all alike.” Rebecca’s line was: “Ain’t that like a man?” And my grandmother’s was: “Well, you know what men are like.” My grandmother would say, “I wonder if there’s ever been a man who picked up his dirty drawers off the floor?” And Rebecca would say, “Men won’t do it. Can’t train ’em. Won’t do it. You can train ’em to do a lot of things,” she said, “but you can’t train ’em to pick up their dirty drawers off the floor. Same with dirty socks,” she’d say. “They’ll hide their dirty socks on you. Now why would they hide their dirty socks? Just like a dog with a bone, they’ll hide those dirty socks. Find one under the chair and one under the bed. Ain’t that like a man?” I suppose it’s true: a great many divorces are based on the fact that ladies think men should learn to pick up their drawers. It’s one of those things that men can never learn to do. It’s not in the nature of the male to pick up his dirty drawers. But I didn’t want to hear it. I thought that was their game.
Then she and my grandmother would consult seriously about lunch. “First crowder peas is come, Miss Annie,” Rebecca might announce. “Well, Franz says there’ll be a boat from Ecuador today, and we’re going to have some fresh bananas,” my grandmother might say. “And we got those little pork sausages from Conecuh County, those baby ones that Millydew brought back last week, that are on ice. We shouldn’t let them sit around too long. So we might have baby onions, steamed, with a clove in each one, and Conecuh County sausages, and those crowder peas. That’d be a real good lunch.”
But if a fishing boat had pulled up, my grandfather would telephone from downtown. Often my grandmother would have something cooking, and the Bell system would ring, and my grandfather would say, “Anne-Elizabeth, I got a wonderful red snapper from a fishing boat that just came in.” There were a lot of little fishing boats then, and whoever had offices or businesses downtown would come out to see what was in the fishing boat, because they would sell their catch to anybody. So right away my grandmother would get the pan ready, get the lemon, get the butter. Plans changed. She would put aside whatever. I remember once a boat came in with some huge deep-sea crabs, and my grandfather just closed his office and said to his first in command, “Do this, do that, answer the telephone,” and he just came home with that crab. That was the event of the day. So there was all this serious to-do about what should go on the luncheon table. And if you are raised with that kind of interest and enthusiasm for both gardening and good food, you can’t help but end up at the stove. I’ve always been a greedy-guts. Diet is a four-letter word. There’ll be a voice from my tomb after they’ve closed it saying, “What’s for lunch?”
After lunch was decided, my grandmother went to her desk, where she would do her household accounts and her grocery lists and write her letters. But by ten o’clock every morning she was sitting on the front porch in her rocking chair with a palmetto fan.
*
In my childhood, the porch was a concept as well as a place, and people used them. Everybody would sit on their front porches shelling peas and exchanging the neighborhood gossip. Nowadays, nobody is friends with anybody. You never see anybody gossiping on the front stoop because there is no front stoop. There are no front porches. We have air-conditioning instead. And there’s no neighborhood gossip because nobody knows their neighbors and everybody’s watching television. And worst of all, nobody has time to shell peas anymore. But the Mobile I grew up in was a place where human relationships were all-important—before the almighty dollar had taken the place of God, and where, above all, people had time to talk and tell stories, where people grew things and had animals. The old downtown front porches were like open-air parlors.
And there was furniture: a whole world of wicker or rattan chairs and divans and tables and plant stands and swings big enough for three people. How I wish some young composer had heard, as I, the different sounds of porch swings. Everything from rattle-squeak to crunch-budge-tink. With a bass accompaniment of shuffling feet, often bare.
If my grandmother sat facing the street, that meant that she would “receive.” Other ladies across the street, next door, or passing by could come up on the porch and talk to her.
“Mary Winston, get off that hot sidewalk. Come up here and rest in the shade a minute. Want some iced tea?” my grandmother might say.
If she sat sideways, in profile to the street, it meant that you could greet her and speak to her from the sidewalk but not come up on the porch. If she sat with her back to the street, she was invisible. It meant that she was reading the paper or hadn’t done her hair yet. You wouldn’t say anything to her. That was the whole downtown code. Nobody knows how it developed—that was just how it was. All the ladies were like that.
And there was a whole lady language of gestures and pantomime because ladies don’t shout from across the street. I can see old Mrs. Marx passing—“I’ll call you at two o’clock”—she would say without words, only gestures. There was an entire gesture language dealing with stoves, ovens, telephones, shopping, the end of yesterday’s rumor. I remember Mrs. Austin appearing once in the porch of the house catty-corner from us and, after waving for attention, simply nodding vigorously. It turned out she was affirming yesterday’s rumor of a pregnancy.