Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll traces the trajectory of ENTERTAINING – THEN AND NOW! She writes:

Ah, gone are the days when a kid’s birthday party consisted of a homemade cake with candles, a gallon of the cheapest vanilla ice cream, some Kool-Aid, as many balloons as Dad would blow up, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and a few presents. Gone are the days when a kid was excited to own a balloon and cried when it popped or floated away.

When I was barely in double digits, I remember reading a Life magazine story about a Hollywood birthday party where there were pony rides, visits from celebrities (friends of the celebrity parent in the story), and a bakery cake plus an actual theme to the whole party!

We were friends with a farm family with a horse, but Mama said, “Absolutely not” when I suggested a horse could possibly ride around in our small backyard. Heck, she wouldn’t even pop for a ride on the grocery store horsie which would go back and forth for a very short time with the insertion of a quarter. In her defense, a quarter in those days would buy a pound of hamburger and still have enough left over for a couple of baked potatoes, and Mama was a very thrifty lady, not one to squander a perfectly good quarter on frivolity.

She put up most of her own vegetables and fruits – cherries, peaches, pears, all manner of pickles, tomatoes – and was a beloved customer at the Dented Can Store. She firmly believed that an expiration date was only a suggestion. For her famous Fried Chicken she bought a whole chicken and cut it into parts herself. It saved 3 cents a pound! You can take the girl out of the Depression, but you can’t take the Depress…well, you know the rest.

When Joe/Max and I were first married (1967), entertaining was usually a home-cooked meal like Chili or Spaghetti with one or two other couples. Nobody in our social set at the time could afford much in the way of liquor, but we had attained a level of sophistication that included a punch bowl filled with Gallo Spanada Red Wine and – wait for it! – sliced lemons, limes, and oranges! Quelle elegance!!

I am of the belief that eight people around a dining table is the absolute maximum for guests carrying on ONE conversation without breaking down into separate conversations. Six is better yet. Because once separate conversations began, in the Way Back Era of Very Divergent Sex Roles, a random person could not help noticing that the fellas were discussing fun, interesting things like sports, guns, off-color jokes, and politics and the women were going on about bridesmaids’ dresses and shoes.

Later, when we were all married and reproducing, I was not averse to discussing babies and recipes. I enjoyed cooking and my own baby was – not to put too fine a point on it – the cutest, smartest baby ever born, with the possible exception of one of your grandchildren. But to this day I have limited interest in shoes and none in the details of weddings.

Time marched on, as it will do, and people developed various fanatic food theories and practices which made entertaining infinitely more challenging, not even counting allergies or health issues. When we lived in San Francisco, quite a few people were not only vegetarians, but claimed to get physically sick if the water that their brown rice and wheatberries were cooked in contained one small chicken bouillon cube for a little flavor.

I remember once we had a couple over where the woman announced she was a vegan (without mentioning this upfront), and I had served a nice piece of costly Halibut and she wouldn’t eat it because “I don’t eat anything with a face.” Do you know how much I had to restrain myself from making a whipped cream smiley face on the Lemon Pie I served for dessert?

Food fanaticism – whether with a health or religious veneer – developed in the best of families. Poor Mama eventually had one adult kid that wouldn’t eat red meat, one who wouldn’t eat pork or meat with milk, and one who was a vegetarian. She used to say when we were all coming home: “I’ll bake a pie and rye bread – you each bring what YOU eat now! May I assume you all still drink WATER?”

In sheer frustration, Mama pointed out, “You notice this NEVER goes both ways, right? We can’t go to the kosher or vegetarian house and demand they cook us Porkchops or a Rib Eye!” Point taken, Mama.

Nowadays, of course, the whole food paradigm thing is taken to a new level. I know one delightful couple in which the wife is a vegetarian (who WILL eat fish!) and the fella has lost over 100 lbs. on KETO. I would happily feed them at least once a week because they are such wonderful guests, but most of my more famous “specialties” one or the other cannot eat, which limits my ability to show off.

We learned recently that Jordan Peterson is strictly carnivore, meaning nothing BUT meat, not even nuts or cheese. Another guy who I keep reading about insists that vegetables are plotting to KILL YOU and he won’t even let his own children eat them. A famous model on Leno once was not only a vegan, but would eat nothing COOKED. I don’t remember her name or know if she eventually starved to death. With most models, it’s hard to tell.

Eggs fall in and out of favor every few years, as does butter. It is far too late for me to extend my life by doing without either one of them and not worth what miserable few extra years it might afford me.

We are not exactly ideal dinner guests ourselves, what with observing imperfectly the dietary laws of kashrut. Obviously, if we were strict, we could not even eat off our hosts’ dishes. But, except for Passover, when we are super-strict for 8 days and must eat every meal at home, our best friends who invite us over keep the pork and bacon out of everything and try to separate the meat and the dairy. It is much appreciated.

We no longer favor Gallo Spanada, nor Boone’s Farm wines for that matter, but own a massive selection of liquor that makes us look like alcoholics when we rarely drink at all. It’s just that I will find a martini recipe that calls for something like “Birthday Cake Flavored Vodka” or Coconut Rum. Sometimes up to 4 ounces are used before it joins the other oddballs on the Liquor Shelf.

I have been thinking of putting out several large Amazon boxes of those liquors with a FREE sign on them, but I’m pretty sure it is not allowed in the HOA. What if a passing teenager stopped and thought he had died and gone to Heaven without even going to the trouble of making a fake I.D.?