Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

December 26 2006

Yet Another Blast From The Past

My red, white and forest green Jell-O creation was quite the hit. Women my age and older swooned over it and told stories of much loved Jell-O salads from their past.

It was the Jell-O that delivered the knock out punch as I claimed the "awesome" cook award for 2006. I don't use the word awesome myself, unless I am experiencing actual awe, but it was a very popular word amongst those at dinner yesterday. The shrimp salad I made was awesome. The seven layer salad I made was awesome, and the pumpkin cranberry loaf was, like, totally awesome.

I have no Christmas traditions of my own. I'm the lone Jew in a family of United Church Protestants and Catholics. My general sense was that Christmas dinner should feel comforting and familiar rather than exciting and au currant.

Like many of the people at the table, I was born in the 50s and passed through my teenage years in the 60s. And although I spent these years in upstate New York, while the people I was with yesterday lived in rural Saskatchewan, holiday food all over North America came from the pages of the women's magazines of the day.

My mother discovered the ubiquitous, and now mostly reviled, green bean casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and canned onion rings, when she was just beginning to forge her own identity as a wife, as a mother, and as a cook. The women at the table yesterday remember that dish. The green bean casserole, like the Jell-O salad, is somehow all mixed in with our past, and even though we, at some point, made more or less conscious decisions not to serve these foods ourselves, tasting them again has somehow become nostalgic in the best of ways.

There was something wonderful, and a bit bittersweet, about watching the children, for the most part our grandchildren and great nieces and nephews, as they played with their toys, and about watching their moms and dads as they went about the business of parenting.

Somehow, as the taste of foods from our shared past brought back memories of our own lives as young women, it was, well, awesome.