My Life in the Little Brown House, part 6: Meals

The main meal of the day was at noon and was always called “dinner.” I didn’t encounter use of “dinner” for the evening meal until I had gone to work for Shell in California. While the family lived in the little brown house during my early years, my father always walked home for the noontime meal. Generally it was a meat and potatoes meal. Now I can’t really recall what the cuts or type of meat were, but I’m sure they were not the expensive ones. Meatloaf, wieners, meatballs and such. Occasionally my mother would make vegetable soup, and accompanying this would be the meat from the “soup bone.” Potatoes, carrots, perhaps some cabbage, maybe a little rice were the main components. She would also make navy bean coup and cabbage soup. Fish, except for canned salmon and, rarely, sardines, was not on the menu. My mother would make a salmon loaf, which I still recall I liked. Vegetables if cooked were usually “creamed” — corn, peas, string beans. Tomatoes were often stewed — my mother usually canned tomatoes for use in the winter months. In the summertime there would be corn on the cob and such fresh produce as lettuce and radishes.

I think there was usually a dessert of some kind, if nothing else, canned fruit. But there would also be various puddings — tapioca, chocolate, rhubarb, apple puddings, occasional pies. The most frequent pies were pumpkin (sometimes without a pie shell) and raisin. In season there might be apple or cherry.

The evening meal was called supper and was often a lighter edition of the noon meal, sometimes using leftovers in the form of a potato/meat hash, corn cut off of excess ears and corn and heated in the fry pan, etc. And often there would be an afternoon coffee time with rolls that my mother made, or rusks [a rectangular, hard, dry biscuit or a twice-baked bread] for those of the adults who were having coffee (coffee generally was not for children); this would be along about 4 o’clock or so.
















Rusks