I’m delighted to present a guest post from Barbra Austin who is a freelance writer and co-editor of Paris by Mouth; she blogs at barbraaustin.com.
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The Salmon Loaf Standoff of 1983 was the most heated food-related battle ever to take place on Mars avenue, rivaled only by the Mint Brownie Massacre of the same era, which pitted my father’s appetite for sweets against my mother’s inability to understand that one person could be both willing and able to eat that much green icing. She won the moral victory, but he took the spoils.
Ours was more a war of attrition.
The dish in question had several strikes against it. For one thing, it contained fish, a food I preferred in the form of sticks, deeply breaded, taken from a box in the freezer, heated in the toaster oven, and dipped in ketchup. I liked fish so long as it contained no evidence that it was actually fish or, put another way, so long as it was the tuna in tuna noodle casserole. The fish on the table this night was smelly, pink, and being used to desecrate a food I held dear: Meatloaf.
Had she not insisted I eat it, or if I had just gone ahead and taken a bite, there would have been no fight. But she did insist, and I didn’t bite, and so the power struggle began, every capitulation she made — from five bites to three to two — emboldening me to resist even more.
“It would have been better if you’d tried it when it was hot,” she said. I seriously doubted this.
She excused my brother from the table and I watched her clean up. She knocked it down to one bite, and then we haggled over its size. Finally, milk chaser at the ready, I ate a single morsel and went to my room.
I suppose my mother was trying to instill in me the value of trying new things, though I’m not sure this lesson is the important one, and I say that as someone who now derives great pleasure (and occasionally makes a living) from trying a wide range of foods. Last year I ate a live, squirming shrimp; an ambered, sulpherous preserved egg; and pasta with pajata, which is the intestines of an unweaned calf. The partially digested mother’s milk turns to soft cheese in the tract. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t let any of those things come near their mouths. So what?
The more important lesson is about receiving. It’s the lesson my father forgot that day he ate all the brownies, and a lesson I was still too young to learn that night I refused to touch my dinner. Like most children — but tragically not all — I could take for granted that there would be food on the table the way I took for granted that my mother loved me. It was only when I got older that I realized that these two things were one and the same, and that that one thing was also a gift.
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