By Lady Gray, March 28, 2017 — If you are anywhere near my age, there were foods you had to eat as a child but you swore as an adult, you would never eat them again. For me, one of those was navy bean with soup. Most people know it now as bean with bacon soup but we didn’t eat ours with bacon even though there was a part of the pig in it.
One of my father’s brothers had eight children and every time he brought the family for a weekend visit from Pittsburgh, he brought this huge, I mean huge pot, and made navy bean soup with ham hocks (pig ankles, in case you didn’t know). I will admit the soup was good and my uncle always made these really big rolls to go with it. It was filling but after three days (the entire weekend), we got tired of that soup quickly. The problem came after my uncle took his family home. There was always soup left over. My father would make me and my brothers eat that soup until it was gone. That usually took another three days. Ugh!
On the flip side, my maternal grandmother, traditional woman that she was, cooked certain foods every Tuesday and every Friday but she really could not cook. She was a devout Catholic so when we were at her house we ate fish: cod, salmon, whiting, porgies, even tuna sometimes. She was not a good cook and we all knew it, but as my grandfather would say, “She never seemed to hurt the fish.” Friday night fish fry at Grandmom’s was memorable. However, the Tuesday tradition was another matter. My cousin and I dreaded when our sleepovers extended to Tuesday. Tuesday night was liver night! My grandmother mastered the technique of ruining a good piece of baby beef liver … My cousin and I dubbed it, “rubberized meat.” My great aunt (her sister) would encourage us to chew our food more than 20 times. No problem there, but the effort was fruitless because we chewed but the food stayed the same. In the end, we got real creative at hiding it or throwing it away.
When I became a mom, I said I would not force certain foods on my boys. However, when times got hard I had to rethink some things. Sometimes, I had to stretch foods to last so we did have navy bean soup sometimes. I just didn’t make so much that it lasted forever. As for the liver, I learned how to make it so tender you could cut it with a fork. I also smothered it with gravy and onions and served it with mashed potatoes and green beans. I also learned not to let my guys see the liver until after it was cooked. Any time they went shopping with me and saw it in the package, or on T-V, they would vow “Never to eat that slimy looking meat.” That’s why I didn’t tell them what it was until they grew up.
