A Cullenary Memoir

Food forms some of our earliest memories. Mother’s milk followed by mushy food in unappetizing colors in small, fat, glass containers whose lids went “pop” when opened. 

Crackers. Our first fun food.

Feeding my infant children, I felt neglectful offering them meals in colors the U.S. Navy painted battleships or browns I associated with the color of hills in cowboy movies or yellows that suggested lethal gases used against soldiers in World War I. 

My children, lolling about in high chairs, lapped up the strange food, though the food, even to them, must have smelled funny.

Small wonder people develop prejudices against squash and carrots.

Later childhood food memories are better. I remember first oatmeal on cold mornings in a drafty, wood frame house. My mother served an uneven oatmeal, bland except for little patches of sugar. Bland broken by sweetness, oatmeal prepares us for life.

It snowed my second winter. We were snug in a house bought on the GI Bill. My father had spent World War II floating in the South Pacific aboard an ammunition ship that might have exploded at any time.

We lived in half a duplex, safe and warm, and rented the other half of the house. My father must have remarked on the difference between the life of a sailor sitting on a powder keg and that of a landlord. For me, our new life was celebrated with oatmeal.

With that first snow, my parents had the idea of putting scoops of snow in bowls and pouring chocolate syrup over the icy, alien, white mounds. Maybe, they’d read in a magazine to do that or maybe—confronted by snow in the deep South—they just invented it. 

The months passed and breakfasts got better. There were the smells of eggs frying, ham and bacon sizzling, bread toasting in an iron skillet on the stovetop. There was the smell of the first drug I’d come to know: coffee.

My appreciation of food began with my French grandmother’s dark roux for stewed chicken and okra gumbo. My grandmother served everything over rice. Each grain was cooked to perfection, separate and distinct from the other grains. Gummy rice was tossed, and a new pot begun. Not much rice got tossed from Mo Mo’s kitchen.

She made “dirty rice” using eggplant and ground meat. The dish’s more genteel and appetizing name is eggplant dressing.

My mother was a good cook, but she deferred to my grandmother who lived with us for a time.

Banana pudding was my mother’s specialty. Joy was coming home from school on a fall afternoon to a house of open screened windows and doors, the smell of newly waxed floors and the rising aroma of banana pudding in the kitchen. Clouds of meringue with oven-browned peaks were a heavenly Himalayas covering bananas baked in a custard.

Food in high school was served in a super-heated, enormous room that could have passed for a prison dining hall. Ditto the food.

College dining hall food wasn’t much better. We ate to the music chosen by the students who served the food and bussed the tables. The music ran heavily to Roy Orbison and someone’s collection of someone else’s favorite waltzes.

College meals were summed up by a student who stood suddenly at dinner one night to exclaim: “Everybody, skate!”

In the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin, we dined on mess decks where missiles were prepped and tagged for next day’s delivery. Our lives were in the hands of teenage technicians who had dropped out of college.

After the navy and college, I married a woman who taught herself to cook nutritious, delectable dinners. At that point, I abandoned attempts at learning serious cooking. 

College meals were summed up by a student who stood suddenly at dinner one night to exclaim: “Everybody, skate!”

On Sunday nights, however, I took over the kitchen to make breakfast suppers. With the radio tuned to KMOX in St. Louis, I cooked as Jack Buck called Cardinals’ baseball games. Buck’s growling voice rode the clear-channel frequency down to our kitchen in Baton Rouge.  

Cooking for my family, I felt what my father must have felt after coming home from his war.

God, this feels good. War is a hell of a way to finance a house.  

Ed Cullen’s wry observations on life in South Louisiana will be familiar to readers of The Advocate, where he worked for forty years. Letter in a Woodpile, a collection of his newspaper and radio essays, was published in 2006.