In Bates City, Missouri,
where I lived as a child, Sunday dinner was the most important and elaborate
meal of the week. Sunday dinner occurred about 1:00 in the afternoon.
On Saturday, after five
days of teaching history and geography at Odessa high school. Mother not only cleaned
the entire house and did the week’s laundry, but also made a Jello salad,
sometimes with fruit and sometimes with grated carrots and pineapple, and baked
a pie or made an angel food cake.
On Sunday morning she rose
early to peel potatoes, open a jar of home-canned green beans, and start a beef
roast cooking before she got gussied up and went to teach a Sunday school class
and attend church services.
Occasionally she was also
responsible for preparing the communion wafers and “wine” for the church
service. The communion wafers were home-made pie crust cut into tiny pieces
before baking and the wine a bottle of Welch’s grape juice poured into the tiny
communion glasses that sat in trays especially designed to hold them.
After we returned from
church, Mother covered the dining room table with a perfectly-ironed damask
tablecloth and napkins and set the table with inherited Haviland china and sterling sliver tableware, along with her beloved Fostoria teardrop crystal goblets.
She boiled the green beans and potatoes. She removed the beef roast from the
oven and replaced it with homemade rolls to warm before dinnertime. She also
made an iceberg lettuce salad and opened a jar of home-canned jelly or
preserves, putting both into teardrop serving bowls.
After dinner she
hand-washed all the crystal, china, silverware, and pots and pans, and put
them away after I dried them. Dish-drying was my only contribution.
I don’t know how Mother
summoned the energy to do all this, and I don’t really understand why she was
motivated to do it. Even so, I appreciate the memories and today, Sunday, I
decided to commemorate her Herculean effort by making a pot roast with mashed
potatoes. This was a pale comparison to the Sunday dinners Mother served, but
every bite was delicious.
Thank you, Mother, for
these wonderful memories. I’m not the woman you were, but I appreciate all you
did to make Sunday dinner a special occasion.
Copyright
2013 by Shirley Domer
2 comments:
Your roast "beast" looks delicious!
I remember Sunday dinners too! I adored the "everyday" dishes we used in the kitchen. I think they were Currier and Ives, blue and white with country scenes!
Thanks for sharing the memories and the photo!
After I posted the photo, I realized that it looks like what Dennis calls "a pile-up" when the restaurant chef places one thing atop another. Mine was an accident. The beef looked tough even though it had cooked for hours. It wasn't.
I, too, remember the everyday dishes. They were blue and white with country scenes. She acquired them piece by piece at the grocery store, where they were a promotion for months on end. Eventually she had the whole set.
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