Adventures In Cooking
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I’m old and we geezers are allowed to reminisce a little bit. I have no idea why I thought of this, but when I was a kid about 7, right around the end of the war, (that’s World War 2, not the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the latest Iran War, or any other war) we lived on a little street in Toronto, Billings Avenue. It was just two blocks long. But at the south end of the street was a forest. Not a big forest, a couple of trees and a bush. When you are 7 that’s a forest, the whole thing would probably fit in your basement today, or on the veranda.
What I want to tell you was there was an abandoned jacket heater on the lot. A jacket heater is a little stove. I think it had something to do with heating the water for the radiators. I could be wrong I usually am. I guess you put the coal in . . . wait a minute most of you people are too young to know what coal is. It was sort of a black rocky-type stuff and we bought it by the ton in the 40s. Some guy came by in a truck and poured the coal through the basement window until the dust filled the house.
Where was I? Oh yeah, three or four of us kids would jam sticks in the jacket heater and light them up – it’s a wonder we didn’t burn down the whole block. We grabbed the potatoes, eyes and all, and baked them in the fire ― burned the crap out of them is what we did. Sometimes we would swipe a wiener or two out of the family ice box, skewer them on a pointed stick and stick it in the fire too. The wieners always broke in half and fell into the fire but that didn’t matter we just scraped the ashes off and ate them anyway. The potatoes were cooked according to some age-old recipe passed down from the first cave-woman. We left them in the flames until they were burnt black, dragged them out and ate them ashes, charcoal, burning bugs and all.
Now this is where it gets interesting and why the parents of today should look into this. Are you ready for this? We did not die! Kids back then were immune to everything not like today. If we weren’t sure about something, we fed it to a younger kid and kept an eye on him for a few minutes.
Now let’s just say today you are babysitting your grand-kids for a few hours and your own kid comes home and says,
“Did you have fun with Grammy and Gramps?”
“Yes we
did, Mommy, and guess what, Grampa lit a fire up against the neighbour’s fence
and burnt the crap out of some potatoes and were they ever good. Not only that
he dropped them in the dirt, wiped them on his pants and we ate them anyway.
He’s a good babysitter.
“Really? Well don’t get too fond of him; we are putting the crazy old fart in a
home.”
Things have changed since we were kids and not always for the better. Do you know what I read in the Toronto Star, some researcher, probably some kid in his 50s, claims the five-second rule for dropping food on the floor is false? You and I know it is perfectly safe to pick it up and pop it in your mouth if you do it fast enough. If it’s a peanut butter sandwich, you might want to have a good look at it.
Actually you can leave it there much longer as long as you wipe it on your pants ― even your jeans as long as you haven’t been wearing them forever, a couple of weeks would be okay. Once jeans can stand up in the corner all by themselves it is usually a sign they need to get tossed in the dirty clothes hamper – or burned.
Do you know what we ate when I was a kid? Bread and drippin’. After she cooked up a pound of bacon, Mom would throw in a slice or two of bread and fry it. It’s a wonder our aortas didn’t congeal like hockey pucks but they didn’t and we are still alive to prove it.
I was going to say bread and drippin’ didn’t do us any harm, but Doctors Devon Bhatt and the late John Jefferies might have argued the point after shepherding me through two bypass surgeries.
I never made bread and drippin’. I made a fish stew from a crock-pot recipe once. It tasted terrible. I guess you were supposed to gut the fish and scrape the scales off first.
(Image Supplied)
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