Ruth Bass

Column for January 26, 2009

Stirring up
grandkids
catches on
RICHMOND
Lots of people say they can’t cook, which either means they won’t, they don’t want to, they are afraid to, or they can’t follow directions. Reading is the basic talent needed for cooking, and if a translator is present, even those too young to read can cook.

For children, it can be not only fun but one of those things that fills up the part of the day when everyone is a little tired and a lot hungry. The most inventive cook among our offspring is the one who was rolling meatballs at the age of three, basically because of a need to fill the time before lunch and a nap.

Making meatballs isn’t all that far from making mud pies – nicely messy and absorbing – and far more productive. Her next major foray into cooking was making Christmas cookies with a babysitter, who probably had a similar need to use up a quantity of time and also achieve something.

To this day, the increasingly inventive cookies are turned out every December –from traditional gingerbread boys and girls to wreaths, dreidels and stars, each painted or frosted or decorated with the hard silver balls that she favors and that we all remove so we won’t break our teeth.

The grandchildren have stirred a thousand batches of pancakes here and during the annual Cape Cod vacation. They graduated from standing on a chair to needing only a stool, to being tall enough to reach. After a number of admonitions, they learned to hold the bowl with one hand and the whisk with the other. They moved from mere stirring to measuring to – sometimes with parental disapproval – to cracking the eggs (and immediately washing their hands).

Some have made whipped cream. Some have made brownies or the time-consuming meatballs. One made strawberry jam, then labeled Sam’s Jam, almost as good a marketing name as being a Smucker. With all this, it was no surprise in November when one of them accepted an invitation to help prepare chicken at our son’s house. Minutes later, Emily joined Summer, and we formed an assembly line.

After the chicken was pounded into submission, the girls coated the pieces with flour, dipped them in beaten egg, then into bread crumbs. Fingers thick with eggy crumbs, they transferred the cutlets to the pan.

Back home, Summer announced that she could make Chicken Milanese now, and when could they get the ingredients. From memory, she took her mother through the process and produced the dish. Time-consuming, not difficult, messy, delicious.

Then Emily became chief assistant for the same dish on New Year’s Eve at her house. And Summer wanted another round at the other end of Connecticut, which is when Max, previously a mere pancake maker, wanted to help. His sister, known to be a little imperious at times, said, “Max, you have to learn from Grandma first.” She shut him out totally, moving his mother to ask when he might serve his apprenticeship.

The dish is a tradition at my husband’s birthday, something that goes back to the memorable day when he and Don Miller, late publisher of The Berkshire Eagle, were introduced to it at Alfredo’s in Rome.

They were served by Alfredo himself, the very man who made Fettuccine Alfredo a household word and who tossed the Americans’ introduction to cheesy noodles with golden utensils given him by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

We just toss ours in the pan they were cooked in and heap all the chicken and fettuccine on a big platter so everyone can get at it. But everyone knows the story of when Chicken Milanese was introduced to the patriarch.

So in mid-January, there was Max, dipping chicken in flour and egg, periodically running off to get the goo off his hands and start over again. There was Summer, managing to get out of doing the sticky part but tall enough to turn the pieces in the skillet.

At one time, it took longer to make anything if the grandchildren insisted on helping. Now they make things more efficient.

But little Hannah is coming – she’s not yet two, but she’s observant. Whenever the kitchen counter is uninhabited, she pushes the step stool over and climbs up to look around.

She’ll be wanting her fingers on the whisk soon. As for me, I’m thinking of introducing the big kids to knives, now that their parents have stopped fussing about the cracking of eggs.

Cooking with grandchildren

Column on patriotism, November 3, 2008



Of flags,
patriots and
politics

We fly the flag. It’s not a conservative flag. It’s not a liberal flag. It commemorates forever the courage of thirteen colonies who chose freedom over a king’s rule, and it has 50 identical stars to represent 50 non-identical states. The flag is American. It’s patriotic.

We’re patriotic. Liberals are patriotic. Conservatives are patriotic. Women are patriotic, feminist or traditional. Evangelicals are patriotic, along with American atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Congregationalists, Hindus and Zoroastrians.

Patriotic Americans come in all sizes and colors, from many countries and cultures, from poverty and from wealth. Trying to define them politically is nonsense. Being a patriot means believing in the nation, and that belief will engender a variety of visions for the country.

While still known for generosity to those in need, at home and far from home, we have somehow lost our sense of generosity toward each other.

Differences of opinion do not define patriotism. It is OK to be against a war. It is OK to be pro-choice or anti-abortion. It is all right to be for or against gun ownership, stem cell research, the death penalty, gay marriage or regulation of corporations.
These are matters for debate, not pillars of patriotism.

Under the banner of unpatriotic are things like bigotry, hatred, misogyny, greed or outright treason, as in the Benedict Arnold tradition. It’s worth remembering that in Canada, statues honor Arnold, making clear that one country’s traitor is another’s hero.

“We patriotic Americans,” our Texas nephew started to say, a number of years ago, after he had delivered a long diatribe that pretty much indicted everyone in the northeastern United States. We had listened politely, New Englanders taught not to raise prickly subjects at the Sunday dinner table, but that phrase tore it.

My usually mind-mannered husband, a World War II veteran who pushed through Holland, Belgium and Germany at an ugly and dangerous time, abandoned Emily Post and made it very clear that all patriots do not live in Texas. When he was finished, it was a few silent seconds before we could comfortably get back to the superb potato salad.

The man who married one of my aunts was a World War II conscientious objector. That didn’t mean he wasn’t patriotic, although some members of the family seemed dismayed. He was morally against killing people for any reason. So he took on whatever the government wanted him to do and was never forced to carry a gun.

Sometime during the Vietnam War, a visiting friend was stunned that an American flag was attached to our split rail fence. She had been taken in by the idea that the flag belonged to the hawks, and she was worried we had turned into warrior birds.

“It’s our flag, too,” my husband reminded her. “I won’t let anyone take it away from me.”

The hawks tried to brand those who objected to the Vietnam War as anti-American and themselves as patriots, defenders of the flag. But whenever the nation absorbs itself in the “I’m a patriot, you are anti-American” thing, it gets nasty, with those claiming exclusive rights to the term creating a situation not far above the level of a playground fight or a game of King of the Hill. Whoever shouts the loudest or who has the most strength at the moment prevails, only to be toppled another day.

If the discussion were more elevated, people could think about what it means to love one’s country and recognize that it’s not the same thing to everyone, any more than it was for my uncle who chose a hard road during what many choose to call “the good war.”

Despite swift boats, nephews and present-day naysayers, there’s nothing in the word patriot that puts it in the conservative or liberal column. A patriot can be either. It is shameful in a country that boasts of free speech that we have patriotic souls who have no space for anyone who doesn’t agree with their political agenda.

Like my parents and grandparents, we fly the flag. With the help of our incomparable neighbor Roy Rawson, we eventually installed a real flag pole and held a special ceremony when it was ready, complete with a somewhat astonished girl who was here for a sleepover, a daughter playing the clarinet and a Shetland sheep dog sitting at attention as the flag rose for the first time. It was a very American scene, both solemn and funny.

To keep that banner waving, America’s patriots – a motley crew – must vote tomorrow. Patriots vote – and pay their taxes.