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by C. Jeanette Tyson
Everyone’s
got one; some hidebound family tradition at once exasperating and
commanding. They differ only by cuisine and degrees of psychic pain. Here in
the early days of the season, let’s ride the swells of nostalgia and hope
and good will towards even the craziest members of mankind -- our families
-- and just talk about the food.
Since I’m the one who left home, I’m the one
who’s always flown back, not to imply that I didn’t enjoy all those
flight attendants with their own cute versions of Jingle Bells. Or the
screaming babies (lately my own) and the stuffed overhead bins. You figure
there must be something special that compels me, year after year, to head
home for the holidays. There is.
Waffles.
At six
o’clock in the evening on Christmas Eve, after frantic, last-minute
shopping and wrapping, my aunt and her family gather with my family at my
brother’s house. These days we number fourteen, give or take the surprise
guest or new boyfriend. My aunt unscrews the top on her zinfindel, the rest
of us indulge in store-bought eggnog (some of us "with the nog")
and after a bit of back-slapping and more nog, the children and anyone else
on the first shift sit down to plates of steaming waffles and sausage.
Obviously these aren’t just any waffles. We
proudly serve Aunt Jemimah and her syrup, too, in the low-fat version for
those on diets or with butter flavoring for those who make sure everyone
knows they intend to diet later.
The sausage, in the old days, was not store-bought
but from our own farm. Some time in the fall my father selected a pig to go
to slaughter, coming back to us as a box of small packages wrapped in plain
white paper. I can attest there was nothing stressful in that pig’s life
up until that point and the sausage was wonderful. Although the family’s
been out of the hog business for a long time, my brother has his connections
and still manages to get the good stuff for us.
My brother and I are unclear on how this waffle
business got started. There’s the whole day-for-night,
breakfast-for-dinner issue, of course, which might be okay if we were French
or maybe even Belgian, but was unheard of in my family unless someone was
ill enough to be indulged such a bizarre whim. One of our aunts was known
for her frugality, but I don’t wish to speak ill of the dearly departed,
especially those whose reach surely still extends to Texas. I think this
tradition, like most, had practical roots. During all my childhood the
larger clan gathered at my great-grandmother’s house on Christmas Day. (Oh
the conversations that must’ve happened every year: "you know honey,
she’s not going to be around forever", but then she was, and she was
and she was until there were great-great-grandchildren.) There were nearly a
hundred of us by the end. The tables groaned with turkey and ham and salads
and things in jello, cakes and pies and my cousin Carol’s famous fudge,
the recipe for which she will carry to her grave. The decision to have
something simple and light the night before seems sensible enough but why
waffles instead of, say, grilled cheese?
To her credit, my mother did try to change things.
One year she got it into her head that the occasion demanded more dignity
and served oyster stew.
To this day oyster stew is my family’s lingo for
total screw-up and my mother still gets red in the face trying to defend her
high-mindedness, which she had to do that night and has nearly every year
since because we are merciless.
I have gone from the child who ate from the first
batch of waffles and waited the eternity it took for the adults to finish to
the adult who hurries through coffee and conversation so the kids can open
their presents. I went from the child who carried the gifts to their
intended recipient to the teenager who read the names on the tags only to
have that job snatched away from me by my cousin who later lost it to my
niece. I moved firmly into the realm of adult tastes when I started having a
fried egg on top of my waffle.
For a time there was a step-grandmother and her
grown children, which required six waffle irons and inexplicably brought
fruitcake into the mix. These days we get by with two waffle irons but I bet
we could keep three busy. There was the first Christmas after my father
died, when I thought I was holding together pretty well, until that first
bit of batter sizzled on the iron and suddenly I wasn’t holding at all.
Other people do their thing at Thanksgiving. For me
Thanksgiving is the time for friends and circumstance; every one is
different. There’ve been turkeys cooked up from San Francisco to London,
and eaten with some people I’ve loved and others whose names I can’t
even remember. The stuffing is always different; we don’t make potatoes if
no one wants to eat them and good wine flows. These times are fun and they
mark time, too, but in a different way.
Yes, it’s time we start our own Christmas
tradition, just for us. But that’s it, it would be just for us and I think
it requires a full tribe of blood-bound, slightly deranged people to
establish a tradition. Otherwise it’d be easy to look at each other and
say, you know, probably that duck l’orange wasn’t such a great idea and
let’s do something different next year. But see, then you’d be right
back at Thanksgiving.
Right now it just seems easy to jump into the
stream that’s already flowing. But I’ll keep trying to think of
something wacky enough to keep the kids coming back for more.
The bar, after all, has been set.
Happy holidays.
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C. Jeanette Tyson is AustinMama's beloved foodie-in-the-field. Got a tip, suggestion, idea or feedback for A Little More on Your Plate?
Send it to Jeanette at: foodie@austinmama.com
