
          Cooked Food
          By Bondi, RobertaRoberta Bondi
          Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 8-12
          
          When Benjamin was five, he looked down at his plate one morning at
breakfast. Then he looked up at me and asked, "Mama, when you were a
little girl, did they have cooked food?" "Are you kidding?" I
answered, sympathetically, knocked breathless by the question. Who did
he think his mama was? How many aeons of life does he think mine has
spanned?
          When my own Mama, in Louisville, Kentucky, moved from her big house
on Willow Avenue into her tiny two-bedroom condo on Village Drive, my
two aunts came to help. My mother's sisters, Kas and Suzie, had awaken
early to leave their farms outside Sturgis in Union County. They
arrived after their four-hour trip shortly after I'd gotten up. It was
late in the move, and most of the work of dismantling my mother's
household and reassembling it in a very small space was already
done.
          Immediately, they started in on wrapping the jelly glasses in
newspaper. I tried to stay quiet and absorb caffeine as quickly as I
could. I knew I was in for it when they started to talk about how hard
life used to be, end how my great aunt Blacky who was eighty at the
time still works, and how people just don't work like they used to. Of
course, they were right on all points.
          Life on a farm is no picnic right now, but it is nothing like my
memories of visiting my grandmother when I was a city child. Until I
was eleven I grew up in Bayside, New_York, within striking distance of
my other grandparents who lived in Manhattan. Our home in Queens was a
small, three-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a type of
complex called "garden apartments." To go from playing in the yard
with a flock of assorted children in New_York to a farm in western
Kentucky for three weeks each summer was to enter a world that was at
the same time intensely boring and amazingly terrifying.
          My grandparents' house was old, built around the time of the Civil
War. It was one fairly dilapidated story, white frame, with four huge,
high-ceilinged, long-windowed rooms, and two little rooms. The fixed
rooms were the living room on the front, and the kitchen on the
back. The other two shifted in use. Sometimes the dining room would be
on the front of the house next to the living room, while my
grandparents' room connected the kitchen and the living
room. Sometimes it was the dining room that lay between the front and
back. My uncle Quentin and my Aunt Suzie were not married yet. The two
small rooms were theirs.

          The central focus of the house, however, was the kitchen, and this
is where I remember most of the household work being done. It had
three windows. Two of them on the side almost overlooked a neighbor's
house, which was partially hidden by a rickety and overgrown trellis
covered with sweetpeas. Through the window on the back, over the sink,
you could see my grandmother's grapes, also overgrown, a barbed wire
fence against which blackberry bushes grew, the smokehouse (if you
stood on tip-toes and strained to look to the right), and the chicken
yard containing the terrible out-house beyond it. Straight out the
window were open fields, and at a great distance beyond the fields lay
the low ridge of Dyer Hills that enclosed the landscape.
          My grandmother indeed did work hard in that kitchen. There was an
enormous black coal stove she cooked on, with its kettles and skillets
and dented-up enamelled pan. When she opened that stove, the red light
of the fire looked like hell itself and scared me twice as
badly. Under the back window was a sink with a hand pump for cold well
water at its edge. I still remember the metallic taste of that water
that was too cold to wash in. A great square table with a table cloth
that always seemed mostly worn out stood in the middle. Off to one
side of the kitchen was a cold room for storing canned and preserved
foods, and in the floor of that room, a cold cellar you got to by
lifting a trap-door in the floor and descending into the earth.
          This wasn't the farm my mother had grown up on. My grandparents had
lost that one in the Depression. That former farm, however, was close
enough to the farm of my childhood to make me wonder. How did my
grandmother rear six children and feed all the farm workers? Nothing
anybody ate ever seemed to come easily or cleanly out of that
kitchen.
          Every meal was a hot meal, including biscuits or rolls or corn
bread. I remember taking turns with my little brother Freddie churning
sour butter that I couldn't eat in a tall tapered wooden churn from
unpasteurized milk. My grandmother made wonderful fruit pies, but the
apple pies were made of tiny wormy apples she had us pick up off the
ground behind the house in the long wet grass where the dog played and
the chickens ran. The peach pies had an unspeakable origin: the
half-rotten freckled peaches had fallen from their trees into the
dusty, bare dirt right inside the gate to the chicken yard. Her fried
chicken was heaven, but I think I was nearly forty before the memory
of the smell of boiling water poured over chicken feathers and the
feel of those feathers coming off in my hands began to
fade. Vegetables grown in the garden, eggs from the hen house, canning
and preserving, the smoking of hams and the making of sausage all
boggle my mind and memory.
          Though they most certainly took place, I don't remember large
family gatherings of cousins, aunts and uncles, and great aunts and
uncles before the big kitchen was redone as another bedroom and one of
the small rooms was turned into a modern kitchen. The new kitchen was
very long and narrow, and even when it was brand new I remember it as
dingy and rickety, an old woman's kitchen--though my grandmother
wasn't old when it was added--without the solidity and significance of
the old kitchen. Nevertheless, it had hot and cold water with a real
sink, a refrigerator, a gas stove, a washing machine, and a chrome and
formica dinette set with the table still covered by a worn-out table
cloth. I remember very well the family dinners that came out of the
new kitchen when we visited in the summers as I grew older.
          These dinners were complex affairs. Orchestrated by my aunts and my
mother, they took place on Sunday after church. The assembled family
included not only Panny and Papa Charles, my grandparents, my aunts
and uncles, and my first cousins. They usually also included at least

a great aunt or two and occasionally some second cousins as well.
          These gatherings occurred in three movements. The first movement,
of moderately quick tempo, was in three parts. Providing one part, the
men-folk sat on the wide front porch staring toward the road and
talking about the crops and other uninteresting subjects. The next was
played by the children, who were almost all male. In the back yard,
the side yard and the front yard the little ones ran around and
whined, while the older ones teased each other, scuffled, and
tussled. The third and central part came out of my grandmother's
kitchen, and the players were my mother, my aunts and my grandmother
with an occasional female first cousin to set the table, pour the iced
tea, and so forth.
          The second movement was much slower and was in two parts. All the
men and the younger children performed first, coming in off the porch
to eat by themselves without the women. Men at one end, children at
the other, they would assemble in the darkened dining room at the long
white dining room table, while the overhead fan would stir the hot
summer air.
          Sometimes the meal would be pot-roast, new potatoes, and beans
boiled forever with a piece of salt pork. Sometimes it would be ham or
the infamous fried chicken and fried corn. Never were we without
tomatoes from the garden, slaw, and little onions, and usually a white
cake with caramel icing. falling apart in the middle with the icing
running into the crack, and a fruit pie or two. Even the children
drank gallons of the sweetened iced-tea, which was served in big
round, stemmed glasses with little dents in the sides. But most of
all, there were wonderful rolls or biscuits which would be provided by
hovering aunts who kept them coming steadily, always hot, always crisp
on the outside and soft on the inside. Only after the men and children
had eaten, and the table was cleared did the women gather together
their own meal and go to the dining room for the "second sitting."
          For the women, the major portion of the much more rapid third
movement was again the kitchen and clean-up. Unlike the time before
dinner, when conversation was fairly well restricted to discussion of
food and gossip about the present, during clean-up time my
good-natured, joking aunts, great-aunts and grandmother would tell
stories of their own aunts, great-aunts, grandmothers, cousins, and
great-grandmothers. All the while, the men smoked smelly cigars on the
porch, continued to talk about crops, deals, and the weather, and the
children played and napped around the house and yard.
          How to understand these dinners from this distance, One key is in
the breads. I'm not sure how old I was when I began to realize the
special importance hot homemade breads held for me as a female family
member, and how it was that I came to know that everything a woman is
or is not is wrapped up in her rolls and biscuits. I know I learned
late about chicken. I remember as a fourteen-year-old being mortified
at my own gaping lack of womanly abilities when I heard my aunt Suzie
exile a neighbor from the entire race of women by saying of her,
"she's a good woman, but she can't pluck a chicken!" But there never
seems to have been a time when I didn't know that, whatever else my
grandmother, my mother, my aunts, and my great-aunts were able to do,
their power, their honor, and their mysterious authority lay in their
ability to make those perfect biscuits like the women in the family
before them, and bring them to the table throughout the meal, forever
golden, full of buttermilk, and always hot.
          I may not know how old I was when I began to understand about the
significance of biscuits for a real woman, but I do know that it is
only recently that I have come to begin to understand the real power
structure of my family which was revealed in those Sunday dinners.
          Although I lived in New_York City as a child, and although I was
the daughter of Kentucky on my mother's side, the law of my father's
Yankee family prevailed in our household. A dazzlingly intelligent and
entertaining so-

phisticated Manhattanite, my father ruled our home with the same grace 
and power as any other absolute monarch. Obedience without argument or questioning was demanded and received from wife and children equally, 
and speeches detailing the moral, psychological, and physical weakness 
of women provided the justification for the law.
          Naturally, therefore, on my grandmother's farm, all I could see 
were the men on the porch rocking while the women worked, sitting to 
cat while the women stood up to wait on them. I was afraid of my big 
uncles. I knew they believed women should work while men played. Even 
on Sunday in their good clothes their hands were huge and rough and 
cracked, and the smell and feel of large animals as well as of intricate 
and spiked farm equipment enveloped them.
          When I would come onto the porch Uncle Bob Wesley and Uncle Bo 
especially would tease me. "You talk like an Eye-talian! " "Say 'Pie 
in the sky when I die!'" And most humiliating of all, "Well, well, 
little lady, you ain't nothing but a horse's titty!" I thought they 
despised me and wanted to make me cry. Uncle A. D., my aunt Kas's 
husband, was kinder and sweeter, and Uncle Bob, married to my Aunt 
Susie, was the quietest of all. I don't remember much from then of 
Quentin, my then college-aged uncle who is now a lawyer. I did not 
know how grindingly hard my farming uncles worked. I could not see 
much of their relationships with my aunts, though I know now as an 
adult that the marriages in my family were remarkably happy, and were 
based on a kind of equality and respect that was invisible to me.
          The truth is, as I have been able to work it out over the intervening 
years, the position of the men in the family is somewhat ambiguous. 
I know now, as I did not then, that my family is an intricately 
structured matriarchy. Living as I had with only a mother, an 
authoritarian father, and younger brothers in New_York, the patterns 
of the larger family had escaped me, and so I could not see the 
smaller ones within the larger family, either.
          Yet even then, if I had been asked to diagram the Wynns and the 
Wesleys, I would have known that my greatgrandmother Grammar, a Withers 
before she was married to Bob Wynn, was the center and source of power 
in the family. Only incidentally, it seemed to me as a child, was Papa 
married to my great-grandmother. When I thought about it, I knew that 
all Grammar's children lived on farms close by, that when her daughters 
married, her sons-in-law came to live with her daughters close to their 
mother, and that her son John Bundy didn't marry at all but continued 
to live with his mother. I knew that among my grandmother Roberta's 
children, the same was true. They all settled around their mother. Only 
the oldest, my own mother, had broken that pattern.
          I knew even as a child that within the hierarchy of the family, 
one's status depended upon whether one was male or female first, and 
only after, whether one was born into the family or married into it. 
In the Wesley family, the aunts ranked first, followed by their husbands, 
then came the aunts-in-law, trailed by their husbands, the natural-born 
uncles. Among the cousins, the children of daughters were closer to the 
sources of power than the children of sons, and the daughters of 
daughters both were most favored and had the most expected of them.
          Once when I was about ten, when it was the turn of the front room 
to be the dining room, I watched my mother ironing. I saw a little 
white pique skirt on the ironing, board. "Whose little tiny skirt is 
that?" I asked. Immediately, I received a shock. For the moment I 
asked the question I knew the answer. "Why, it's yours, silly! Whose 
did you think it was?" "I knew that," I said, pitifully. I had thought 
I was almost grown up.
          When I see those childhood dinners, now, I find the players in them 
have changed size and shape as radically as I changed myself when I 
saw the real nature of that white skirt on my grandmother's ironing 
board. From this distance the men in the family appear dull, living 
in a clumsy world of language made entirely of plodding ideas badly 
expressed. Although I was afraid of them I saw even as a child that to 
them, being a man depended on showing no softness, accepting no ambiguity, rejecting men who enjoyed the company of women. They ate first with 
the children because they were like the children. They were too simple for 
the company of women, and their memories were too short. They did not 
carry in their bodies and their minds the skills, jokes, and history of 
the family.
          Now I remember the plates of fried chicken with some of the best 
pieces saved back for the women. Though my mother was my father's weak 
woman at home, I recognize now how articulate, self-confident and strong 
even my mother as well as my aunts were in that place. Their skills at 
sewing, quilting, gardening, laughing, and story-telling were enormous. 
Now I know how little and confused I felt

about what I needed to be myself in the face of their competence. I
had been raised to be obedient, but my aunts were not obedient, and
neither was my mother in this place. They were in charge. My aunts and
my great-aunts summoned me to take my place of authority as the eldest
granddaughter in matriarchy that went back as far as I could see, but
how could I even let myself know it? If I took a place of competence,
I would betray my father. If I did not take it, I turned my back on my
own strength. As it happened, I wanted my father too much. I chose the
second option long ago, and only many years later did I begin
seriously to undo that choice.
          It is true that on me fall the expectations and responsibilities of
the oldest daughter from all those generations of women whose memories
I inherit. I suppose this is why sometimes I feel myself to be a
failure in the family in some important respects. Though the biscuits
I bake are as good as they come, and I can bake rolls from my
great-grandmother's roll recipe any woman in the family would be proud
of, I don't live in Union County. I am not a matriarch. I feel myself
to be a branch still green but fallen off the family tree-the feeling
Eve had, perhaps, as she made a life for herself and her family
outside of Eden. Though I hang on to the memories of my great-aunt's
and grandmother's generation, I don't keep track of my cousins as I
should. I'm a city woman. I can't can. I don't quilt. I certainly
don't know how to work like my aunts and my mother.
          Even in that far off time, however, when I was twelve I began to
cast in my lot with Kentucky women. I had a second cousin my own age
named Sam. Sam was my great aunt Blacky's son. He was mean and didn't
like my Yankee mouth and cringing shyness. One day, out in the yard
behind his house on the hill he grabbed my two pinkie fingers and he
starting bending, outward. "I'm gonna bend your fingers till you yell
'uncle,'" he taunted. I didn't say a word. "Say uncle!" he said. While
I felt a fire in my joints, I gritted my teeth and said nothing. "Say
uncle, say uncle!" he yelled, and he kept on bending. By the time he
was finished my fingers were bent so out of shape they never
recovered. They hurt all through high_school, and they are still
misshapen.
          After my aunts and mama and I finished our morning packing to get
her out of the big house and into the little condo, we had a lunch
unthinkable from my childhood-fancy chicken salad, a green salad with
an intricate dressing, and croissants. While we scraped the plates
into the garbage disposal and put them into the new dish-washer, I
mentioned my memories of Aunt Suzie's biscuits. "Oh, no," she
laughed. "I never make biscuits any more. They're not so good for you,
you know. They have too much cholesterol, and we're all too fat,
anyway."
          Astounded, I mull over the meaning of what Aunt Suzie
said. Earlier, and inexplicably, she has told me how proud of me my
aunts are because of the work I do. For years within my own family, I
have felt embarrassed by my university work. I have avoided talking
about it, as though it were a not very good substitute for the
practice of the real skills of the women of the family. What does it
mean that she doesn't make biscuits because they're not good for you?
Has she just taken away from me the power of my womanhood or has she
set me free? Feeling a bit betrayed by the aunts I thought I had
myself betrayed, I wonder over the mystery of time passing, and of
cooked food. 
          
            Roberta Bondi is professor of church history at the
Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She is the author of
To Love as God Loved: Conversations with the Early
Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). Illustrations
with this article are from John Egerton's Southern
Food (New_York: Knopf; 1987), photographed Al
Clayton.
          
        
