Seniors - Baking for Daddy

He would come home from work, eat his supper and then act surprised when his dessert was my handmade tidbit. “This is the best apple pie I ever ate,” he always said, and I always believed him.

Times have certainly changed. Today, families are being urged to eat together at least once a week. What a concept! One survey reports that when families eat together five times a week, the children are less likely to smoke, drink and take drugs.

My family ate together every day of the week for the evening meal, and breakfast and lunch on weekends. Often our Sunday treat was buttermilk biscuits with maple syrup, whipped up by my Southern father. He never talked about business at the table and my mother never discussed housework. We talked about other members of the tribe, neighbors, problems in our city, county or country. (We didn’t get interested in international affairs until WW II when an atlas and a small globe of the world sat on a sideboard in the dining room.)

Manners were corrected and homework was discussed at that table, along with lessons in moral conduct. The highest compliment my father could pay a man was to say, “He’s a good citizen.”

So we got lectures on cheating at school, sloppy homework and being polite to our next door neighbors (which was hard during the war as they were German émigrés).

I think most of my moral education took place at the dinner table. Holidays were especially rich since the adults drank my grandfather’s homemade wine and sometimes talked about subjects they would otherwise have kept from us. So we also learned about childbirth and divorce and money troubles and sibling rivalry, even among adult brothers and sisters. Citizens got divided up into the good, the bad and the ugly, not always fairly, but I had to grow up to realize that.

We recently asked some friends about their experiences around the dining table and found that people who are today labeled “seniors” had almost a common experience of eating and sharing and learning together at the family dinner table. One of us has a mother who gives each generation classes at her “sauce and meatball” school. She’s even taught her son-in law how to make his favorite lemon cookies. Now that’s “bonding.”

Even bad meals can have good memories if they were shared with companionship. A friend told us that although her mother wasn’t much of a cook, she always had room for another person at the table, thinning the soup with water if she had to. She also made lumpy Cream of Wheat which became the favorite of her children as adults, “because we didn’t know the difference” one of them recently said.

Today we say bravo to a daughter with three small boys who still uses the dinner table as a way to instill manners. They pass a paper pig to the one who is chewing with his mouth open or grabbing the last cookie off the plate. The boy with the pig at the end of the meal has to clear the table. Once a week they cook a meal with one of the boys serving as sous-chef and the other two setting the table and cleaning up. Their father takes them out to lunch on weekends to learn how to behave in a restaurant. What confident bachelors and good husbands they will be.

I guess this nostalgia for the family clan sitting around the table sharing a meal and memories and lessons is probably just that, nostalgia. In an era of fast food, drive-by meals and quick microwave fixings it’s not realistic to expect families to cook and eat together in a leisurely fashion. But maybe we should also take heart from the statistics showing that more families are watching cooking shows on TV. And there’s even a new trend toward “cooking dates,” where one family goes to the home of another and they all cook and share a meal together. Bon appetit!