Good Eats: Mashed Potatoes, Gravy, Shark, and Dog
A Saturday Story
{Welcome to Saturday Stories. I’m borrowing the “Good Eats” title from my friend Donnie Jackson’s Facebook posts with that title. This is a further installment with that theme}
I’m not sure we ever get past our rearing. Rules and expectations handed down generationally are written with an iron pen on the stone tablets of our hearts, and are as much a part of our DNA as our long noses, curly hair, or bowed legs. I won’t sit down to eat without a shirt on. I can’t. I also won’t lick a butter knife or share a drink. And please, in the name of all that is good and holy, don’t eat with your mouth open or make smacking sounds while you do.
Dad taught me these things. I think he might have had stone tablets somewhere with these rules on them; slabs of granite handed down from some distant patriarchal relative on which these involatile laws were engraved. Or so it seemed to me.
Not all of our rules were laws of forbidden things. For example, we were taught the proper way to eat mashed potatoes and gravy. In case your parents neglected this area of instruction, I will fill you in. In proper mashed potato eating, you mound the potatoes like you would imagine a volcanic mountain to be. Then, using a large spoon (not the gravy spoon because no one wants your potatoes in their gravy) you smash the top of your potato mountain down, making a crater-like bowl on top. You then spoon the gravy into the crater until it starts to spill over and run down the sides of the potato mountain and onto the plains of the plate below.
This is how my father explained it to me. It was only later in life he confessed to the rest of the story. We were poor back then. I didn’t know it. When you don’t have much and live around people who don’t have much, your frame of reference is limited. Nevertheless, because of where our family was at that time in life, we ate mashed potatoes and gravy a lot and this was Dad’s way of making it interesting and exciting.
So, while we had certain table rules we dared not violate, we also learned to eat what was put in front of us. I can only think of a few times I rebelled against eating what I was provided. I can’t and won’t eat liver and onions. It’s the smell. I never cared for Mom’s mint jelly. In a previous Saturday Story I explained my boycott of balut and durian. And once Grandma Roberts tried to force milk over rice for breakfast on me. I refused myself into a standoff with Grandma from which only my mother could and did kindly deliver me.
For the most part, though, I will eat what someone gives me. I ate a baby shark once in Indonesia. I have to tell you, it was really good. It was also on an Indonesian island that I ordered dog on accident. It was at a small café. I couldn’t read the menu. The guy running the place couldn’t speak English. I gave up trying to get past the impasse and pointed at something on the menu. I didn’t care for it.
Once while in a remote area of China, while teaching a pastor’s conference, a small car pulled up in the parking area. A couple got out, opened the trunk, pulled out a slab of beef, threw it on a plank of plywood, and began hacking on it with machetes, turning it into chunks of meat, gristle, and bone while the flies were doing touch and go’s until the various chunks were thrown into a boiling pot of water. Lunch! I paid for that meal with frequent visits to the facilities for several nights.
Several times, my Indian pastor friend John led me on mountain hikes to minister in remote villages. He always packed us a lunch of lemon rice, boiled eggs, and a chicken leg. He wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a backpack. We would stop somewhere along the mountain trail, pour a bit of our bottled water over our hands for a washing, sit on a rock, and eat eggs, chicken, and rice that had been in a hot backpack for several hours. I survived.
Dad didn’t know it, but when he taught me to eat what was put in front of me without complaining; when he showed me how to not be a picky eater, he trained me for the mission field. I bet he wasn’t expecting that.
