I said earlier that I'd brought phyllo triangles to my quilt group's
holiday potluck. They were a big success. Here's what other people
brought:


An artichoke dip with crackers, very creamy with cream cheese and
bottled artichoke hearts.


Garlic chicken wings and drumsticks from a Chinese take-out.


Eggplant in tomato sauce.


Broccoli with lemon essence and lemon zest.


Angel food cake.


A sort of pastry from a Brazilian bakery filled with a sort of
butterscotch sauce.


Good quality chocolate.


Red jello fruit salad.


It's that last one that got me curious about cooking styles and what
people think of as festive and special.


I grew up in the 60s. My mother wasn't considered a cook, but meals in
our house were pretty good: broiled meat, frozen vegetables (which I
didn't eat), fresh salads with bottled dressing, fruit, bread and
dessert from a good bakery, milk, and a certain amount of junk like
sugary breakfast cereals and soda. We didn't normally concoct dishes
like putting canned cream of mushroom soup on green beans or adding
packets of spice mix to salad dressing.


When I learned to cook on my own, I started with health food and
vegetarian foods and didn't realize it at the time, but that meant
learning about foods in the natural state. Canned broccoli, frozen
broccoli and a head of broccoli from the produce department are equally
vegetarian, and I was drawn to the head of raw broccoli.


In later years, I noticed that the health food/vegetarian movement went
in 2 directions. One was towards processed vegetarian: frozen t.v.
dinners with brown rice and tofu instead of sliced turkey in gravy,
veggie burgers mixes, and bottled miso-sesame salad dressing. The other
direction was towards a sort of nouvel yuppie food: free range chicken
salad, chipotle black beans with lime, corn and red peppers, kiwi tarts,
emphasis on real whipped cream, no additives. My tastes developed
towards the yuppie.


Which is why I was interested in the jello fruit salad. The one at the
pot luck was just jello and canned fruit, but I saw a demo of a jello
salad on television the other night that included lime jello,
marshmallow fluff, cream cheese, canned pineapple, whipped cream,
marischino cherries, and canned mandarin oranges. I watched with a sort
of morbid fascination, then admited that if someone brought it to a
potluck, I'd probably try it and might like it.


That led to a discussion with Jim about how, for some people, opening
packages of convenience foods and combining them is cooking. They might
have grown up in cooking traditions that involved not very plentiful
farm food, times when there wasn't much variety, when food in winter
meant a lot of bacon and cabbage. For them, it wasn't a choice between
fresh pineapple and canned in syrup, it was a choice between canned and
never having tasted pineapple before. Jell-o, which strikes me as
humorous, might have been the most excellent convenience food, a way of
serving something elegant for friends. Making it today for a holiday
potluck might be nostalgia and a best offering.


--Lia