Thoughts on Things: Eyebrows

When I was fourteen, I began trying to learn to raise one eyebrow. I'd stand for half an hour at a time in front of the mirror, one hand holding the right brow down while the other hand pushed the left brow up. Hold, relax, then reverse the procedure. My plan was to free up the tight forehead skin between the two brows, so that I could lift either brow at will. This never happened, despite years of practice.

 

Later, to compensate for my inability to cock a disbelieving eyebrow at pontificators, I married a man who could do it. (That isn't really why I married him. I married Rolly because he and his best friend could whistle the "American Patrol" march in harmony. Whistling was another skill I had failed to perfect.)

 

As good as Rolly was with the eyebrow, however, he was a piker compared to his mother. Thelma (though I never dared call her that; I just called her "Mrs. Harwell" until the children came and I could relax and call her "grandmother")—Thelma was the best eyebrow-raiser I've ever known. She was a tall, big-boned Tennessee country-woman who had little formal education but who knew how to work hard. She taught me how much I didn't know about keeping house.

 

A true country cook, Thelma turned out daily breakfasts of biscuit, sausage, eggs, bacon, and toast. And her Sunday dinners (for which all the family converged after church) consisted of fried chicken, pot roast, country ham with red-eye gravy, collards or turnip greens, southern-style green beans (grey from long cooking but salty and soft, infused with bacon or ham fat), cornbread, summer squash and onions, mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, mashed potatoes, fried corn, and three kinds of gravy (the red-eye that went with the country ham, milk gravy for the chicken, and pot-roast gravy). Desserts came after.

 

The first time I visited Thelma's home, before Rolly and I were married, I woke up on Sunday morning hearing voices. It was 7 a.m., according to my watch, and I thought there must be a family emergency. Why else would the family be up and talking in the kitchen at 7 on a Sunday morning? I knew that the church service started at l0. In my family, if Mass was at l0, you slept in until 9:30.

 

But I hadn't reckoned on the southern Sunday dinner. Thelma was just putting the pot roast on at 7, in order to have dinner ready at noon for the hungry hordes.

 

But back to the eyebrows. Thelma, though she had no formal education beyond high school, was not at all intimidated by anyone else's education. Her book-loving, academic, perpetual-student son, Rolly, didn't impress her at all. Her true source of knowledge was the Reader's Digest. If she hadn't read a piece of information there, it couldn't be true. When Rolly tried to present her with the latest thinking on any topic whatsoever, including even the subjects that were his academic specialty, she would tilt her head to one side, raise that left eyebrow in a gesture totally natural to her (she'd never had to practice in front of a mirror), and say, in her Tennessee drawl, "Why, Rol-l-ly!"

 

And it was a waste of time to try to change her mind with the facts.

 

Thelma made fried corn all summer long, and we loved to eat it. To make fried corn you take a lot more ears of corn than you want to deal with--say, three dozen or more ears for the family. And you take them out to the back fence to shuck them. You throw the husks over the fence for the neighbor's cows.

 

Then you take your shucked ears to the kitchen, and with a sharp knife you cut off the tips of the kernels, into a big bowl. Then you take the back of the knife and run it hard down the cob, so that all the milky corn juice also falls into the bowl. Then you go back outside to the fence and throw the spent cobs into the pasture, where the neighbor's cows will be thrilled to eat them.

 

 

So, all your corn stripped, the cobs disposed of, you come back inside and put a large skillet on to heat, melting a goodly chunk of butter or bacon fat, depending on your taste, into the hot skillet. When the fat is melted and bubbling, dump in the big bowl of corn, liquid and tips, and add salt and pepper and a little water or milk.  Let it cook. Some southern cooks leave it on low heat for a long time so that a crust forms on the bottom of the pan. That's deliciously decadent, but it isn't the way Thelma made it. She just cooked it till it was done. I don't remember ever hearing any complaints

 

Copyright 2008 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com