2016-464-E Arts - Eno Publishers - Spring 2016 Arts Grant Agreement

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DocuSign Envelope ID:A7B705FD-OEDD-4AC5-8764-8905D8B8991 F carrot slivers quivering in translucent cubes of jello,which led us to call the column LET'S COOK SOME SALAD WITHOUT ANY LETTUCE IN IT! My mother's cooking column was the subject of much scrutiny because my mother, as she would herself admit,was not really all that into cooking. She was too busy. She worked as Dean of Students for a community college and she ran the evening program and traveled around our huge county—bigger in square mileage than the state of Rhode Island— recruiting recent high school grads. Often her workday began at eight a.m. and ended past nine p.m. There wasn't much time to spend planning elaborate meals for her brood,none of whom were terribly discriminating. As long as there was a gallon of milk on the table to wash down the casserole and canned LeSeur peas,we were happy. We ate a lot of baked spaghetti(my favorite part of which remains the crusty edges, scraped from the perimeter of Pyrex) and we ate a lot of Hamburger Helper. I grew up loving Hamburger Helper. I especially loved the title—the notion that the scalloped potatoes were just there to lend a helping hand to the hamburger led my brothers and sisters and me to break into an impromptu chorus of"You've Got a Friend" every time the dish appeared on the dinner table,which was every other night. Because my parents came of age in the Depression in large families—my mother is the last of seven,my father the last of eight—food was not something they were inclined to be ironic about. On the rare occasions when my father cooked,his two specialties were something he called Scrambled Hamburger,which was ground beef browned and plated and presented to us as if it were foie gran (apparently his hamburger did not need any help) and Welsh Rarebit,which I can only assume that my father, a working-class boy from Tarboro,North Carolina,picked up while overseas during World War II. Even though we tried to attack the latter dish with our characteristic irony, calling it English Rabbit, its simplicity—as I remember, a puddle of melted cheese over toast put it in the same category as Flaubert's limited heroine Felicite, in"A Simple Heart,"about whom the literary critic Jonathon Culler, in answer to those who read the author's treatment of her as cruelly ironic, argued that there was nothing there for irony to deflate. My mother agreed to write her cooking column not because she was interested in cooking but because my father's newspaper did not have a cooking column. Nor did the rival paper,the Republican one, across town. A cooking column was needed, my mother was a woman,women wrote cooking columns. Brick Cheese,Boiled Cabbage, and Buttermilk Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt 7