Senior Social

Six days ago, the over-70 crowd at Center had an evening social. Hiromi and I and the Joe Yoder family planned the event and worked together to make it happen. My sister Linda, Joel and Hilda, and LeRoy H. were others outside our immediate households who helped that evening. Three Center students from my composition class, Stephen, Christy, and Anja also helped with the entertainment.

Based partly on what we had learned during the Rural Roots project about the fond food memories the elderly among us have, and partly on the cornmeal mush cooking skills and experience Joe and Twila have, I suggested, and Joe and Twila agreed, to serve a fried mush supper, with tomato gravy, sausage gravy, and syrup as topping options. We also served applesauce and some fresh fruit.

Last year, in preparation for the Mennonite Manor fundraiser, Joe and LeRoy had worked together to make several mush fryers. The mush slices are placed on a grate with a long handle rising out of the middle. After the grate is lowered into a fairly shallow steel pan containing hot oil, the burners underneath kick in to keep it at 400 degrees, powered by propane from a portable bottle. After precisely six minutes at 400 degrees, the mush is lifted out and served promptly or kept warm for later serving.

Twila had helped cook the mush last year for the fundraiser, so she had recipes and procedures down pat. She also had a handle on the sausage gravy. We used Shane's sausage and the same delicious and simple cream gravy mix that restaurants use--purchased from the bulk food section at Wal-Mart. I experimented and formulated a recipe for the tomato gravy and cooked it.

The mush frying didn't quite happen as soon as expected because there did not seem to be any matches or lighters at church which could be used to light the burners for the fryers. So, to keep the people from having to wait interminably for their meal, I began the entertainment I had planned to do after supper.

I read excerpts from several books that my neighbor Chris Terrill had had a hand in getting printed--stories told 15 or more years ago by people in the Partridge area, about their life experiences. Not a single person at the social owned the books, so it was even newer to them than I thought it would be. Many of the story authors have died, but they were well-known to the elderly people from our church, and the life experiences they shared contained familiar themes as well. They really seemed to enjoy the stories. A big thanks to Joel for suggesting it, and Chris, for selling me the books the evening before when I couldn't find ours. (I was looking for the wrong kind of binding, based on my faulty memory.)

After supper, my students, with a bit of help from Jonny and Euni, did a dramatic presentation of some children's stories they had written in dialog form: The Garden by Arnold Lobel, Best Friends for Frances by Russel Hoban and Lillian Hoban, and Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. I had a few second thoughts before I decided to go ahead and use the children's stories, but none after they were presented. Those oldsters liked them as well as any crowd of youngsters would have. I wouldn't be surprised if they're saying to themselves things like "Growing a garden is hard work," or when they're trying to do the right thing, I want to be "faithful, 100 percent," or perhaps "nothing much" when anyone asks them about what is hidden away inside a container (as first Albert and then Frances described the huge lunch each had packed).

We finished off with a few more Partridge stories and then dismissed everyone around 9:00.

My friend Lizzie, who lives alone, and has no parents or siblings alive, and no children, thanked me heartily for the good evening. "This was a short evening," she said. For people like her, this kind of event would be welcome more often.

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My family likes tomato gravy, but I am in the habit of making it without a recipe. For this event, and in this amount, I didn't dare "wing it" quite like I do for my family, so I set about finding or creating a recipe. Joe and Twila, and Wesley S., at school, rhapsodized about the wonderful tomato gravy Rose Nissley had made for the Manor fundraiser, so I called her after I had created a recipe I thought would work. She didn't have it written down--just goes by the color and flavor to get it right.

I also had searched the internet for "tomato gravy." All I found there was a very tomato-y sauce thickened with a bit of water and cornstarch. It's used in Cajun cooking. "Creamed tomatoes" produced something closer to what I was looking for, but it was still too tomato-y and too thin. I did pick up the idea of adding some butter to the juice while I was heating it, which I've never done before. I had learned that Rose added cream to hers, and reasoned that adding butter would likely give the gravy a similar mouth feel and flavor.

The recipe I came up with was this:

Tomato Gravy (Midwestern Style)

2 cups home canned tomato juice or peeled, diced tomatoes

1 T. butter

1 1/2 cups cold whole milk

1/2 cup flour

1/4 t. salt (or to taste--will vary, depending on how much salt the canned tomatoes have)

Bring tomato juice and butter to a boil. Meanwhile, blend the cold milk and flour into a smooth paste. When the juice is boiling, add the milk and flour mixture, stirring constantly. Continue stirring till the gravy comes to a boil again. Cook briefly and then add salt as desired.

Notes: For the seniors, I did add 2 cups cream at the last minute--to a batch ten times the size of the recipe above. It tasted good and creamy, but I would have liked it without too. For the recipe above, that would be equivalent to less than 1/4 cup cream per batch. I understand that some people add sugar to tomato gravy--a good way to ruin it, in my opinion.

For this recipe, when I stirred and then spooned the flour into the measuring cup, it was a little too thin, and when I scooped my measuring cup into the flour canister without stirring it first, it was a little too thick. Go figure. It was acceptable both ways though.

By the way, I won't ever use commercially canned tomato juice to make gravy. It ends up looking chalky pink, and does not have the right flavor. It think it's because commercially canned tomato juice is made by pureeing whole tomatoes--peelings, seeds, cores, and all. Since last summer we had such a paltry tomato crop, I used commercially canned peeled, diced tomatoes and blended them a bit, then pressed them through my cone/strainer--whatever you call it. It worked fine, but I did add one quart of home canned juice because there were only four quarts of juice left from ten Aldi cans of commercial tomatoes.