Hot dogs are not nutritious, I'm told
A writer in his forties, short of money,
got a job as a cook to a wealthy WASP family who had a place in the Hamptons
on Long Island in New York. Not being social, they wanted only "plain
cooking" for two months for the extended family, including children,
grandchildren and a few family friends. The grandmother, who hired him,
explained that her demands were simple. As long as he could grill fish or
chops, roast a chicken and prepare salads, no more would be required of him.
The cook-writer was rather proud of his
repertoire and knew he could do more than that. So he gave the family boiled
lobster and steamed clams as well. In his two months of cooking for the
undemanding group, he discovered that no child under eight would eat
anything except hot dogs and french fries. Anything else, the children left
on their plates.
My three children, whose earliest years
were spent in Geneva, were more discriminating in their tastes. I had a
Spanish nanny who fed them steamed mussels and paella. She'd never heard of
hot dogs. They liked the mussels and Spanish dishes and, of course, like all
children, they loved frites.
When my children returned with us to
Canada and lost their nanny, their tastes narrowed. Still, they were not
difficult to feed, except for smelts. A nutritionist writing in a newspaper
recommended fried fresh smelts for children, "a cheap and nourishing
dish." I was particularly enthusiastic when I read that the smelts came
directly from Lake Ontario. A healthy local product, I thought. It was the
only time I attempted to force my children to sit at the table until they
had eaten everything on their plate; i.e., the smelts. They ate around the
smelts and above the smelts and my son actually put a flake on his tongue.
He gagged. My daughters wept. To this day, in my family the word smelt means
nasty witch-mother.
I don't have to worry about what my
children eat now, as they are all in their late thirties worrying about
their weight. But I'm a lucky grandmother. All five of my grandchildren live
within a mile of my house. Their ages range from nine years to one week.
Thankfully, I don't have to worry about what the youngest one eats. The mean
witch-mother tries to be a kinder grandmother by inviting all her
grandchildren over for dinner with their parents and giving them what they
actually like to eat.
The writer who cooked for the family in
the Hamptons was right. I know I'll never go wrong if I give my
grandchildren hot dogs and french fries. But I don't. Their mothers tell me
that hot dogs are not nutritious -- although they liked them well enough
when they were young. Rachel, my youngest, ate whole bratwurst in Geneva
when she was nine months old. That's because she had to copy her siblings.
Now I have to cut one thin hot dog in two for a three-year-old, in case of
choking.
Nobody choked on bratwurst in Geneva in
1963. Now it seems that every child chokes on non-split-apart hot dogs in
2002. All my kids have the same pediatrician who warned them about their
little ones choking on skinny hot dogs. As for french fries, I don't
deep-fry, although I am not averse to using the McCain's frozen variety.
The problem is that the grandchildren
come with their parents, who want adult food. I will only go so far in
making something for the grandchildren that is different from what I serve
their parents, all of them now gourmets, having reverted to their Genevan
roots.
I have discovered that my grandchildren
will eat frozen fish sticks (so deep-fried you can't taste the fish),
chicken nuggets (deep-fried, of course) and crunchy sweet Chinese spareribs.
If the meat, fish, or potato is crispy crunchy, my grandchildren will eat
it. But my children, like me, are wary of deep-fried foods -- too fattening.
I asked my grandchildren what else they would like to eat. They all said in
unison "pasta" (a term I never heard of when I was young -- we
called it spaghetti then).
They don't mean pasta, of course -- they
mean Kraft Dinner. But I hate making Kraft Dinner and my children, who loved
it once, now loathe it, but of course love pasta, in the Italian sense.
Given the mixed-up meanings of the word pasta, I rarely serve it when the
family comes over.
One grandson, Joe, is unusual in that he
likes vegetables -- i.e., little tomatoes or a carrot or two. My older
grandson David will not, however, eat anything with a fleck of green in it.
God help me if he spies a parsley stem in the mashed potatoes. One
granddaughter, Fanny, the one who barely eats at all, loves roast beef, but
only if it is very rare, and then she might eat two forkfuls. Sweets are not
a problem. If they don't like the pie they'll eat the chocolate ice cream.
So is there anything I can serve that
will please every single person in the family, regardless of age? Indeed
there is. And it is very expensive. As grandson Joe said when he was told
that he was going to Grandma's for dinner, "Oh good, the smoked salmon
house." It's a strange thing indeed that all my grandchildren adore
smoked salmon -- and in quantity. Not any smoked salmon, however. Once, I
tried to pass off frozen supermarket smoked salmon and they said,
"Grandma, we like the other kind better." They mean the $29.95 a
pound variety.
Aside from the cost, there is nothing,
nutritionally speaking, against smoked salmon. The granddaughter who eats
only rare roast beef satisfies her anxious mother by getting even more
protein from smoked salmon. When I recently set out a plate of a dozen
smoked-salmon hors d'oeuvres served on English water biscuits, my
then-youngest granddaughter, Sally, swiped all the smoked salmon slices off
the plate, gobbled them up and left the water biscuits for her cousins. So
whatever I cook, I know my grandchildren will never grow hungry in my house,
as long as I am willing to indulge their taste for high-quality smoked
salmon.
I have this nightmare. Some kind
Rockefeller-type person gives my husband or me two pounds of fresh Beluga
Malossol caviar worth $100 an ounce. My husband loves caviar, I love caviar,
my children love caviar and their spouses love caviar. In the dream, I'm
feeling generous. I set out the caviar in its original can with a couple of
spoons. My grandchildren get there first. They discover a new food they all
adore, even more than smoked salmon. In my dream I see Rose, my youngest
grandchild, miraculously standing up, scooping the dregs out of the tin with
her finger. None left for anyone else. -
By Sandra Gotieb National
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