Forever, Erma

by Erma Bombeck

  By 5, the asparagus looked naked without a sauce, so I opted for hollandaise.

  By 5:30, I was furious. How dare my husband be late and force me to obesity? I added whipped potatoes to the meal.

  By 5:45, as I stood watching the driveway, I got a horrifying feeling. How could you possibly serve dry whipped potatoes? I added a pan of gravy.

  By 6, the fish looked terminal. I decided to get my husband’s mind off the small main course by giving him a robust appetizer. I rolled out those little butter, cheese and flour things stuffed with olives and popped them in the oven.

  By 6:15, I sliced the apples and covered them with a pie.

  At 6:30, my husband walked into the kitchen. “I’m home!” he shouted brightly.

  “You animal! You don’t care about other people at all. How they look. How they feel about themselves. If I go to my grave with pantyhose around my hips, let it be on your conscience!”

  He pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  Seven Days to Make Garbage—May 3, 1981

  It’s a myth in this country that anyone can make garbage. I’m not talking about the frozen/quick-serve/packaged/just-add-water/ three-minutes-in-the-microwave garbage. I’m talking about the made-from-scratch-leftover garbage for which American women are famous.

  Garbage, if it’s made right, takes a full week. Most men don’t understand the process. They think you can take a leftover straight from the table, scrape it right from the plate and dump it into the can. That is not the way American garbage is made.

  Let us walk through a week in the life of two tablespoons of leftover peas and a coaster-size piece of leftover pot roast:

  Day 1: The leftovers go from the table to the refrigerator in an elaborate ritual of joy. In her eagerness to display her frugality, the woman transfers the peas and beef to a smaller dish with the haunting chant, “Don’t touch this. I’m saving it for vegetable soup.” Everyone believes her...or pretends to.

  Day 2: The leftovers enjoy a place of prominence in the refrigerator and are seen every time the door opens. A few times the container is reexamined, but from a distance comes the familiar chant, “Don’t touch it. I’m saving it for vegetable soup.”

  Day 3: The leftovers are moved to a less prominent shelf and occasionally patted and reassured they will be the makings of vegetable soup.

  Day 4: A traumatic time in the life of future garbage. It either is tossed prematurely or shoved to the rear of the refrigerator on a shelf next to a bowl containing three tablespoons of peach juice and a pit.

  Day 5: Traditionally on the fifth day, a leftover is opened, exposed to air and passed around to see if anyone can identify it. If it is recognizable, it is shoved in a dark corner and allowed to ripen for another day.

  Day 6: This is the crucial day in which the peas and beef curdle, turn green, harden and grow fuzz.

  Day 7: Excited cries resound through the kitchen as the children dance around the refrigerator chanting, “Is it garbage yet?” Mother removes the leftovers, folds back the foil and pronounces the peas and beef dead.

  In no other country do women prepare their garbage for burial the way they do here. First, they wrap it in newspaper, next put it in a brown paper bag, then a plastic one, and finally put it to rest in the garbage can in the garage. It’s a time-honored tradition of American women, who for years have vowed, “I will bury no garbage before its time.”

  Thawing Hamburger—March 9, 1982

  There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do, and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.

  I suppose there are some people who roll out of bed and can hardly wait for the day to go by to get at those cabbage rolls, but I’m not one of them.

  I am always surprised when it is time to eat and there is nothing on my plate.

  When my children were younger, I figured out there were two kinds of mothers: those who dragged out of a warm bed and put nutritious chili in a wide-mouth thermos, and those who stuck a stick of gum and a holy picture in a sack with instructions to “Trade up!”

  When 43 percent of the women in this country went out into the marketplace to work, planning ahead for meals became a real challenge and hamburger became our national bird.

  There’s something about hamburger that’s so...ground. It’s like an old friend. I am never defeated by frozen hamburger like I am by a package of chops that are welded together or spareribs that wrap around a piece of frozen fat that is held captive until spring.

  I never met a frozen turkey that was not capable of sinking the Titanic.

  But hamburger is conquerable even at 6:30 when the big game starts at 7:30 and it’s frozen like a rock. I know all of you have tried traditional ways to defrost hamburger, but have you considered some of the following new ones?

  1. Tuck frozen hamburger under your armpit while setting the table.

  2. Balance meat under your shower cap as you run through the hot water.

  3. Put it in your dishwasher and run it through the dry cycle.

  4. Have the children put it on top of the television when they first arrive home and begin playing video games.

  5. Put it under the rear tire of your car and back up.

  There are some people who put hamburger out on the counter-top or sink before they go to work in the mornings. I don’t know any of them personally.

  Fruitcake—December 11, 1986

  I never like to make generalities about people, but let’s face it: People who love fruitcakes are “different.”

  In evangelism, they are to the right of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if fruitcake lovers founded the next major religion of the twentieth century.

  I have never met a fruitcake baker in my life who didn’t want to convert me to all that baked fruit. I can be standing in the baker’s kitchen and announce without a trace of humor, “I do not like fruitcake. I have never liked fruitcake. I have sampled more than 10,000 species of fruitcake in my time, and it is my dream that I never have to sample it again,” only to have someone put a slice in front of me and say, “Try it. This one is different.”

  Fruitcakes are not different. They all tend to be the same, each having an assortment of incompatible fruits and the distinction of weighing more than the stove they were cooked in. They defy all the culinary rules in the book. No one ever says, “This fruitcake is so light you don’t know you’re eating it.” That is because the heavier the fruitcake, the better.

  Another thing I hate about fruitcake lovers is they smile when their cake is rejected. I don’t like people who do that. It’s unnatural. I’d be more comfortable if they would just say, “Who asked you to eat this cake? It cost me forty-five bucks to make, and if it were up to me, I’d drop it on your ungrateful foot!” You can have respect for a person like that. But no, fruitcake lovers will stand by and watch you spit out the sample in your hand and say, “But isn’t it moist?”

  My mother is a fruitcake disciple. Every year since I’ve been old enough to hold a fork in my hand, she has tried to make a holiday conversion. Last Sunday, she opened her cake cover and there it was: 97 pounds of cooked fruit. “Doesn’t that smell good?” she asked.

  I said, “It smells like fruitcake.”

  She said, “I don’t understand you. Your grandfather loved fruitcake.”

  “What has that got to do with me?”

  “He loved you so. You were his favorite.”

  I watched her get out a small plate and knew what was coming. “The pineapple alone cost six dollars,” she said.

  “I hate pineapple, Mother.”

  “It’s Julia Child’s recipe, and you like Julia Child.”

  I was tired of fighting. I opened my mouth, and she put in a slice of fruitcake.

  Put your hand on the fruitcake and say, “Hallelujah!”

  Doggie Bags—August 25, 1987

  I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant the other night, and when the waiter came to clea
r away the dishes I said, “Could you please put the rest of the almond chicken and the egg rolls in a doggie bag?”

  He registered surprise.

  “A doggie bag? What’s a doggie bag?”

  I explained to him a doggie bag was an American tradition where, when people ordered too much food, they took it home in boxes or bags to be put in the refrigerator, and when it was no longer recognizable or became restless, they threw it in the garbage.

  Boxes he knew about, but he had never heard them called doggie bags before.

  I told him that years ago people used to ask for the bones left on their plates so they could take them home to their dogs, but the dogs never saw them. The people either gnawed on them before going to bed or made soup out of them.

  He was genuinely confused by this time. “This is an old American tradition?”

  “The oldest,” I said. “Bags stuffed with food were started by my family maybe a hundred years ago. If you’d go to one of my relatives for dinner, you never left empty-handed. My grandmother always baked extra yeast bread so everyone would have something to take home.”

  “So you enjoyed the bread in your own home?”

  “Not really. Do you know how long it takes yeast bread to reach brick consistency? About three hours after baking. There were no preservatives then.”

  “So you threw it out?”

  “Usually.”

  “And you carry on the tradition of doggie bags with your family?”

  “I do indeed. I have three grown children who are not permitted to leave unless I send something home with them. They don’t eat human, if you know what I mean. I send little leftover boxes with cold asparagus and lima beans in them. I pack macaroni and cheese and cabbage rolls in little foil containers where all they have to do is slide them in the oven. Sometimes I put leftover fruit salad in Dixie cups and cover them with aluminum foil, or I place leftover veal and chili in little storage containers. Oh, and jellies I have made with a cute little label that reads, From Erma’s kitchen. Made with love. Believe me when I tell you an army of Tupperware marches out of my kitchen each week into my children’s apartments.”

  “And what do they do with the doggie bags?”

  “They put them on their refrigerator shelves, and when the food is no longer recognizable or gets restless, they throw it in the garbage.”

  “Maybe you should feed it to your dogs,” he said.

  What a weird suggestion.

  Spices—July 26, 1988

  Doris from Rochester, New York, writes:

  “I’ve got my thirtieth wedding anniversary coming up in September, and I just used up my first box of bay leaves. The box has a price tag on it that says 15 cents. Am I alone?”

  Pull up a couch, Doris. Of course you are not alone. You are a member of the largest cult of home makers in the world, who hang onto everything in their kitchens—except their sanity.

  If spices qualified as antiques, Sotheby’s would be camping at my kitchen door.

  I have a spice from Ceylon to sprinkle over my chilled melon, one from Jamaica for pickling, one from Sierra Leone for rhubarb, one from Spain for sweetbreads and one from Madagascar for winter squash. I have no idea what I’m doing with these spices, because I don’t like any of the things you use them for.

  But I know this is true: Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices.

  There are several reasons for this. First, they smell so rotten to begin with that most of us have no idea when they go bad. Second, they don’t take up much space, so we say, “What the heck.” Home-makers also figure that one rainy day when they are trying out a new recipe and it calls for a quarter teaspoon of cardamom, they’ll have it.

  You couldn’t get me to throw away my container of fennel. This probably seems like a shallow reason, but my husband alphabetizes my spices, and it’s the only F I have.

  Men do not understand this attachment to spices.

  One day, I asked my husband to put a small jar of mint in his vise and take the lid off with his pliers.

  “When did you last use this?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I’ve never used it,” I said.

  “How old is it?”

  “What year did we move from Ohio?”

  “You paid to have this transported from Ohio sixteen years ago? Why did you buy it in the first place?”

  “It was on sale.”

  “But you hate mint.”

  “Maybe it will absorb some of the odor of the sauerkraut in the disposer. Get the lid off!”

  If it makes you feel any better, Doris, I bought a small packet of saffron last week. Cost me an arm and a leg. Did you know it takes approximately 55,000 flowers to yield one pound of it? A pinch will flavor a whole pound of rice.

  The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

  Older People Only Talk about Food—May 24, 1990

  A thirtysomething reader posed an interesting question: “Why is it when speaking with older people about a trip or a vacation they’ve been on, I get an answer like this?

  “Me: ‘You were at Yellowstone last summer. How was it?’

  “Them: ‘Oh, it was wonderful! We had the best spaghetti I’ve ever tasted, just outside of Jackson Hole at a little restaurant.’ ”

  The young woman observed that about 75 percent of the conversation with older people is about food: where it is, how much it cost, how it tasted. She wondered if it was because they grew up in the Great Depression, when food was scarce and they had to eat the same thing all the time.

  I think that’s part of it. When I was attending college, my mother’s letters read like a menu. She began with breakfast and outlined everything she had to eat for the entire week. Our phone conversations were always about the same thing: food. “What are you having for dinner? I’m heating up the leftover ham and frying some potatoes and having a little corn on the cob.”

  A few years ago, she and my dad took a cruise to Alaska. They took 125 slides. Only six had people in them. (Two of them were pastry chefs.) The other pictures were carved bits of ice, cheese displays, baskets of bread and flaming desserts.

  I blamed the Depression years for having to clean up everything on my plate and eat up the black bananas before I could start on the yellow ones. We were told the heels of bread made your hair curly, and starving Armenians were waiting in line for those stinking brussels sprouts. Mom would spend a fortune on glass jars and lids to can a bag of free apples.

  My theory is that, after a certain age, food is one of the few vices left that you can enjoy. The kids are gone and have their own lives. Your job is a memory. Physical activities are a real effort. A new car no longer gives you the kick it once did. Food is one of the few fantasies you can lust after and turn into reality. Food even replaces sex.

  Our young friend said the weird part of her findings was that a couple of weeks ago a contemporary of hers went to a rock concert.

  When asked how she liked it, the friend said, “Oh, it was great. You should have seen all the food we had before the concert—honey-baked ham, roast turkey, munchies....”

  I told my reader that her friend is older than she thinks.

  Leftovers That Refuse to Die—December 17, 1991

  My secretary and I are compiling a list of leftovers that not only refuse to die, they reproduce. Heading the list is her pasta salad. Out of a pound of macaroni, she fed a family of six for two meals, ate it for lunch every day for three weeks, and at that point still had more pasta salad than she originally made. She eventually buried it in the backyard.

  Split-pea soup has a reproduction cycle. So does beef stew.

  And I defy you to scoop out the last spoonful of fruit cocktail from a bowl. Every refrigerator in America has two tablespoons of fruit cocktail on a shelf somewhere, and the peach slices and brown bananas keep giving birth to more peach slices and more brown bananas.

  Well, I’ve got a new immortal to add t
o the list. It’s rice soup. It was a package deal, complete with spices and slivered almonds to give it a “nutty” taste.

  All I had to do was sauté onions in butter and add them to the rice, along with 2½ cups of water. That was a Tuesday night, November 5, of this year.

  Well, the water disappeared at the end of an hour and the rice seemed thick, so I added another couple of cups and continued cooking it.

  Just before dinner, when I dipped in to serve it, it still seemed thick, so I added some more water.

  We had a lot left over.

  At lunch the next day, I added some more water to a bowl of it and nuked it in the microwave. Two nights later, I put some of it in the wok with some leftover pork.

  When the weekend rolled around, I asked my husband if he wanted a rice sandwich. He said no.

  I sent some of it home with the kids and put some in the bird feeders.

  Every time I took the lid off the pot, there was still enough left to celebrate a Chinese New Year in Shanghai.

  I patched plaster with it, mixed it with mulch and fertilized my roses, and gave myself a facial with it.

  I was ready to freeze it last week and perhaps retard this senseless breeding, when it hit me.

  I had stumbled upon the answer to one of the greatest dilemmas facing the planet today. I could feed the world on a pound of rice, an onion, a packet of spices and slivered almonds.

  People have gotten the Nobel Prize for less.

  Think about it. Rice exists in many climates, needs no refrigeration and has no natural enemies. All you do is add water—and water—and—water—and water....

  Leftover Halloween Candy—December 1, 1994

  I polished off the last piece of Halloween candy today. Don’t ask me why I have the need to tell you this, but there it is. For trick-or-treaters, my husband and I stocked 50 Hershey bars, 50 Nestle snacks, and 50 Baby Ruths.