On the first day of 2013, I was in New Jersey with my Grandchild Delivery Device and her progeny when I noticed that Imani was engrossed in something on her mother’s phone. I inquired as to whom or what it might be, and was told that it was a YouTube video of a cooking show. That seemed to me to be an unlikely candidate for the rapt attention my four year-old granddaughter, but her mother likes to cook and spends more than a little bit of time watching things like the “Food Network” on TV.
There is a joke between the two women of my first marriage that Bride One cannot cook. I remember Lisa saying that her mother and I had handled the dissolution of our marriage in a fashion that presented few problems for the child, with the exception of one thing: “The quality of the meals fell way off,” said Lisa.
By the time the three of us had migrated from California to Southern Indiana, the First Bride and I had worked out an agreement similar to that of many working couples: the first one home starts the dinner. I was a small loan office manager and she was a human resource manager for a chemical company. My hours were regular and hers were not, so I was almost always the first one home. I would pick up our daughter from after-school care, and while she did homework, I did dinner.
On this New Year’s Day I sat in the kitchen with Lisa as she prepared the traditional black-eyed peas. She had soaked the lentils (black-eyes are neither peas nor beans) overnight and now swept chopped onion into a small crock-pot with crushed garlic and smoked turkey wings. She covered the contents with chicken stock and turned the crock-pot on high, then measured one cup of rice and two cups of water into a large saucepan, over medium-high heat. On a rear burner of the stove, red liquid bubbled in a small pot. In the sink, chicken wings sat in water. At the kitchen table, she moved aside the volcano she had made with the kids and measured flour into one small container and poured a seasoned egg mixture into another.
Black-eyed peas, according to a Texas A&M Web site, were “cowpeas,” primarily feed for cattle until 1863 and the siege of Vicksburg during the War Of Northern Aggression. The town was starving and began to eat the cattle feed, “thus starting a Southern tradition.”
On this New Day, Lisa slid buttered chicken wings coated with flour into hot oil. The oil hissed and the wings bobbed to the surface like hungry dolphins. The pot of beans had been combined with the crock-pot contents and white rice waited to be covered. No chef nattered in the background as my daughter, her work done but her body still weak from the colds and flu that had ricocheted around her family, went to her bed.
On the Newest Day of 2013, Imani and I watched “Paula Dayne” (she pronounces the name as does the southern chef) as I shoveled white rice and those black-eyed “symbols of hope and humility” into my mouth and sopped up the juices with jalapeno-cheddar cornbread muffins. On another plate, some fried chicken wings glistened in a coat of special buffalo sauce, while others, naked, died between my grandson’s hungry teeth. The children’s parents, recovering from the previous night’s shenanigans, slept with the knowledge that on the floor below them there were lentils, luck and love.