Friday, February 17, 2012

That Humblest Of Condiments



Spent the whole day catching up--reading due-tomorrow library magazines and bouncing around to all the wonderful blogs I've been forced to neglect during the work week. All the catching up led my brain to ketchup, because that's the way my brain works.

At our house growing up, we sometimes put ketchup on our bologna sandwiches--or at least I did. I must not have been the only one because I never once thought it was weird until the summer I turned 11.

A group of my mother's extended family was over at my Aunt Mae's house for haying. The adults and the older kids helped out in the field; I was consigned to the house to keep an eye on the younger kids and to make sandwiches for the hungry workers to eat when they came in for lunch.

Mae showed me a stack of lunch meat and cheese and when I asked what else to put on the sandwiches, meaning condiments, she said just do an equal number of all "three things."  So ten or fifteen sandwiches with mayonnaise.* Ten with mustard. Ten with ketchup. No problem, right?

Big problem. The look on Mae's face when she saw a stack of sandwiches smeared with ketchup is pretty much the look I would have today if faced with a stack of sandwiches smeared with ketchup, having long since outgrown my taste for ketchup-covered processed meat (hot dogs being the obvious exception). At the time, though, I was devastated and completely confused. What was I supposed to use, if not ketchup?

Mae said something pretty nasty, the specific content of which I can't remember, and my mother stepped in and led me safely away. A few of the adults gamely selected ketchup sandwiches, probably out of sympathy as much as anything.

My mother then went back and told Mae she should've been more specific and asked what the third condiment was supposed to be, if not ketchup. And the answer was butter. Butter? Really?

That was not the first time I felt like an alien in the bosom of my mother's family. And it would not be the last. Eventually, though, much like I outgrew my taste for ketchup-covered bologna, I outgrew my desire to fit in with that particular group of folks.


*We did not use mayonnaise in our house. My mother bought knock-off Miracle Whip, but she was really the only one who used it--and she used it on peanut butter sandwiches.

23 comments:

  1. Brilliant post! I love the ending.
    Butter and bologna is just wrong. Bologna is pretty much wrong in general, but butter?
    I used to eat ketchup and bologna sandwiches and loved them. However, when we ran out of bologna and my mom thought she would sneak cut-up cold hot dogs onto my sandwich instead, ick! Why? I don't know. Isn't bologna essentially a huge hot dog, sliced?

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    1. That it is--though there is some subtle textural difference there. I confess to eating an occasional cold hot dog, but can't imagine cold on bread.

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  2. Ketchup is great with most everything. My brother, however, puts ketchup on everything! Even rice.

    I'm wondering if he'll ever grow out of that. My grandpa did the same thing for a while..so I'm not so sure..

    (Obviously my family is quite weird. But that just means we all fit in together. Some way or another. Thank Heavens for it.)

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    1. My 12 year-old loves ketchup on everything. I'm not sure if he's tried it on rice, but he would probably like it. I saw a shirt I wanted to buy him that said, "I like ketchup on my ketchup."

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    2. None of my kids ever got all that into the ketchup thing. My third son though, puts potato chips on his sandwiches with some regularlity.

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  3. Butter? Ew. Shoulda put some with butter, some with ketsup and some with... I dunno... relish, out and seen which was most popular!

    And I agree with your mother. I hate it when people are non-specific and then complain about the results kids or novices give them. I'm sure your other two stacks of sandwiches were perfect, so YOU did well!

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    1. Thanks! It was just one of those weird family moments that stuck with me for some reason--amid lots and lots of weird family moments, to be sure.

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  4. I have issues with ketchup- there are very few things upon which it belongs, in my opinion. It drives me crazy when we eat places and people offer my kids ketchup for everything, even stuff we wouldn't normally have it on...then they come home and ask for it, and I explain that it's actually just sugar, so no, they can't have it with everything. I like canned flaked ham and braunschweiger (liverwurst) though, so I'm really not one to comment on lunch meats;) As for the humiliation, well...I've been there too. That's whats so good about growing up- we have choice about the people we associate with.

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    1. Lunch meats in general are kind of strange if you pause to think about them much.

      And yeah, I've definitely outgrown the ketchup thing for the most part and absolutely outgrown hanging out with people who seem to delight in making other people feel bad.

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  5. Funny the moments from childhood that stick in our heads. I still love ketchup. I love mayo and all mustards. Please do not judge.

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    1. Hubby brought me over to the mayo side when we got married. Don't know how I ever lived without it. I am a mustard fan to some extent, but very particular about what mustard goes where.

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  6. Ketchup and eggs were my mainstay breakfast for most of my life. And if I seemed to eat it a lot more after someone remarked, "How can she eat those bloody eggs?"....well, I was!

    I also love mayo, but that is less socially acceptable!

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    1. I used to do ketchup on my scrambled eggs sometimes too. ;)

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  7. What? No discussion of ketchup on cottage cheese, as made famous by Nixon?
    If it tastes good [to the eater] then do it.

    Off the track, but barreling at you anyway, cdnkaro's comment prompts this memory. My oldest was still a toddler, and comfortably ensconced on my back, as I unloaded the groceries from the cart to the check-stand belt. The cashier derived great amusement from Casey's position, and conversed with him while ringing up the items. He got to the braunschweiger, held it up to Casey and asked, "Can you say liverwurst?" Nonplussed, Casey responded, "Braunschweiger." Big smiles all around.

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    1. Never tried ketchup on cottage cheese--just imagining what it would like (and the fact that Nixon ate it) is a little scary.

      Love the "Braunschweiger" story and it reminds me of an even more off track story from when Son-Two was two or three. We were looking at TIME magazine together (I know, weird, right?). We came to a picture of a rhinocerous and he pointed and said, "Dog." I said, "No, rhinocerous." He said, "Dog." I tried rhinocerous again. He said, "Dog!" more emphatically and then turned the page.

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    2. LOVED the reference to Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon.

      Linguistic jousting has its merits, but simply turning the page has a lot to be said for it, lending a triumphant note of finality to the discussion.

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  8. My aunt used to eat ketchup sandwiches, just bread and ketchup. Of course, after visiting her house, we had to go home and try it.
    My youngest kept asking me for peanut butter and lunch meat. I kept refusing, then finally gave in to 'teach him'. Yeah, he liked it.

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    1. There is definitely no accounting for taste. My mother and peanut butter and salad dressing sandwiches being a prime example. :)

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  9. Your last sentence makes me happy. :O)

    As a kid, I liked yellow mustard and pickle relish on soft white bread. If there's a nastier sandwich out there, I can't imagine what it would be.

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    1. I have a love-hate relationship with relish as it is--once every couple of years, I get a powerful craving for it, but the rest of the time I find it mostly icky. Yellow mustard and relish on soft bread is a pretty disturbing concept.

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  10. I would have used ketchup as the 3rd condiment too. I've never heard of a butter and bologna sandwich!

    And my mom used to make me peanut butter and miracle whip sandwiches all the time. Now the idea of it disgusts me but I occasionally find her sneaking them for herself.

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  11. The only thing my mother ate that disturbed me more than peanut butter/Miracle Whip was the half-eaten strawberry jam and Worcestershire sauce sandwich I found on the kitchen counter one morning. My mother had horrible insomnia and would wander the house half-asleep in the middle of the night and make--and eat, or try to eat--things in that state. Once she tried to make herself a glass of chocolate milk and poured the milk into the Quick canister and spent several long minutes stirring it, unable to figure out why the powder hadn't dissolved before she gave up and went back to bed. She discovered the mess in the morning.

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    1. I knew someone like that! But in her case it wasn't the insomnia, exactly. It was the meds she took for insomnia. She'd fight against the effects (even thought SHE took them!) and would continue walking around trying to do things while she was practically sleepwalking, rather than staying in bed while the meds kicked in. Oh the things I'd find...

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