One of the main reasons I watch Blue Bloods is not because it stars Tom Selleck -- although he is a pretty slick piece of merchandise. No, I dote on those Sunday dinners after church services where the whole family sits down to a sumptuous repast that always includes a hefty roast, real mashed potatoes, lots of bread and butter, a great big green salad tossed and served in a pressed wood bowl, and something fatally chocolate for dessert. Never mind all the wine they guzzle during the meal -- that’s just Hollywood flummery. Any real family that tried to drink that much vino during dinner would wind up on skid row in a matter of months.
My own mother endured long sessions over her Kenmore every Sunday after morning Mass at Saint Lawrence Church in S.E. Minneapolis, whipping up fried chicken or succulent pork chops with a huge casserole of potatoes au gratin in the oven and creamed peas percolating in her one good copper pot. There was always a homemade pie -- either lemon meringue or apple.
I immediately missed those Sunday feasts when I went to work for Ringling as a First of May on the Blue Unit some 45 years ago. The Ringling pie car featured nothing out of the ordinary to celebrate the Sabbath Day -- same old burgers and fries or wilted iceberg lettuce salad with canned olives and sclerotic tomato slices. If you wanted something decent to warm the cockles of your heart on a Sunday you had to eat out -- and many towns still had blue laws those long years ago that shuttered the best restaurants on Sunday because they sold liquor.
Tim Holst and I, the only two Mormons on the Blue Unit, were always invited to a member’s home after morning church services on Sunday. Back then Mormon families were larger than they are now -- there was always a spare daughter or two that mom and dad thought ready for a Temple wedding. Back in the day Holst was considered a Good Catch by the discerning pater familias -- a returned missionary, hard-working, and with a clear tenor that could give the Mormon Tabernacle Choir a run for its money. I was viewed, on the other hand, as his slightly half-witted sidekick -- hadn’t served a mission yet and was too young and dopey-looking for anything but a few laughs; so I was usually fobbed off on the young children after dinner to keep them occupied with balloons.
A half century ago in most of the United States the typical centerpiece of a Mormon Sunday dinner was several loaves of baked Spam with some kind of ketchup glaze drizzled over it. My mother never allowed Spam to cross the threshold of my childhood home, so I had no idea what it was. The first time I saw one of these concoctions I innocently asked Holst if it was a meatloaf. There was always a big ceramic bowl of instant mashed potatoes. Another big ceramic bowl of canned corn (sometimes gussied up with a jar of pimentos.) Bottled peaches as a relish to go with the Spam. And really really good homemade bread with all the butter and honey I could handle. And I could handle a lot. Dessert was inevitably Jello -- with a Dream Whip topping.
Or, if our luck was out, we got to eat a Food Storage meal with the family. Mormons have been counseled since the days of Brigham Young to keep an emergency supply of essential foodstuffs on hand for a Rainy Day.. Back when Holst and I roamed the countryside as Ringling gypsies it was a common practice for LDS bishops to cavalierly choose several families in the ward and challenge them to live off of their food storage for a week. And if the two of us were invited to a Food Storage meal we had to be satisfied with rehydrated soup ,freeze-dried vegetables, and a leathery dried beef jerky that chewed like a Firestone tire -- and tasted like one, too.
Since most Sundays with Ringling were moveout nights, the matinee and evening shows were moved up a few hours, so Holst and I usually had to eat and run -- with Holst dutifully taking down the address and phone number of the daughter(s) while I made one last wiener dog for the clamoring kiddies. Then dad would drive us back to the arena, where Holst and I would scramble like mad to get into makeup and costume before Performance Director Charlie Baumann could balefully announce “You’re late for come in -- I fine you five dollars each!”
It is a tribute to both the good cooking of LDS women back then and our own cast iron stomachs that I never knew either Holst or myself to suffer from indigestion after snarfing down one of those LDS Sunday meals.
Today I don’t think an LDS family would be likely to offer such a Sunday meal as I have described to a visiting circus guest -- but I haven’t had the chance to find out in a long time. I myself keep a couple of cans of low sodium Spam in the pantry and will often pop one open on Sunday to fry up a few slices with some eggs for breakfast. If only I knew how to bake bread like those LDS ladies of long ago . . .
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