Food Memories @LucyBurdette

Lucy's mom, ready for the party

LUCY BURDETTE: With Thanksgiving in the rear view mirror and Christmas coming fast, it’s not hard to drift back to memories of earlier days. Especially memories of food and family. 

We grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. My father had a long commute into New York City to his job, leaving my mother as the chief cook after her days teaching elementary school, and taking care of four kids. She didn’t love to cook, but like the rest of us, she loved to eat. She also loved the holidays, when we got together with her sisters and their families. That food was never fancy, but it was good and plentiful, usually anchored by a ham or a turkey. If it was a ham, my aunt Barbara made a mean baked beans dish, and always two kinds of potato salad, one with onions and hard-boiled eggs for most people, and one without for the fussy kids. With turkey, we'd have mashed potatoes and gravy and all the trimmings.

A summer party with Mom, Aunt Carol, and my sisters Susan and Martha

My mother also loved a party. The times Mom most welcomed assistants in the kitchen was while baking cookies for the holidays and preparing finger food for a party--we often hosted a holiday open house for neighbors and friends. She spent days making tiny triple-decker finger sandwiches, choux puffs stuffed with tuna or shrimp salad, fruit salad piled into a watermelon shell carved like a basket, and spritz butter cookies in various shapes and colors. I’m borrowing some of those to use for a funeral reception in A DISH TO DIE FOR. Here's Hayley helping her mother prepare:

“Does old-time recipes mean head cheese, and Spam, and vegetables out of a can mixed with Miracle Whip?” asked Sam. He seemed to love serving as my mother’s first assistant, but he loved teasing her most of all.

“Let’s hope not,” my mother said cheerfully. “We’ll focus on finger foods, since most people won’t be sitting.” She clipped the list of recipes to a stand on the counter. “I asked Cole’s Peace Bakery to slice some loaves of bread lengthwise.” She pulled four loaves of sliced bread out of the brown paper bags on the counter. “My mother used to make little three-decker sandwiches when her friends were coming to lunch,” she explained to Sam. “The fillings were always different, like egg salad in one layer and tuna fish or cream cheese with olives in another.

“At Christmas time she had her bakery dye some of the bread loaves red and some green, so the layers of the sandwiches were multicolored. Do you remember, Hayley?” Her face looked a little melancholy, and her voice was wistful. We’d both deeply mourned the loss of my sweet grandmother.  

How about you Red family? Are you full of holiday food and family memories this time of year?