Fall 2009, Volume 102 Number 2

EVERYONE WAS LIKE ME WHEN I WAS YOUNG, OR SO I THOUGHT. OH, NOT IN THE OBVIOUS THINGS LIKE THE COLOUR OF THEIR HAIR, OR WHETHER THEY WERE TALL OR LITTLE, OR THEIR RELIGION OR WHERE THEY WENT TO SCHOOL. I LEARNED PRETTY QUICKLY THAT SOME PEOPLE COULD RUN FASTER THAN ME NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRIED, OR THAT I WAS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING THE BEST AT PLAYING “ALLEYS” ON MY STREET, AND THAT I WAS THE YOUNGEST AND SMALLEST IN THE GANG AND THERE WAS NO WAY TO CHANGE THAT. BUT I THOUGHT THAT EVERYONE WENT TO SCHOOL AND CHURCH AND EVERYONE HAD A MOM AND DAD AND SISTERS OR BROTHERS, AND ATE THE SAME FOOD. IT WAS ALL PRETTY MUCH THE SAME. AT LEAST IT WAS LIKE THAT FOR ME UNTIL I WENT TO UNIVERSITY IN THE 1960s.

That first year I took classes in general arts and sciences: maths, English and French, philosophy, anthropology and sociology. And that is where I found out that in Newfoundland and Labrador we had something called culture. We were different from everyone else. I remember it hit me like a thunderbolt in Sociology of the Family class. Our prof was probably from the Caribbean or South America and probably doing his PhD. He had to teach us on Monday evening at 7:00. We were almost all students from the province and had not travelled much. Maybe to Halifax or to London, England or Montreal or Toronto. For most of us, St. John’s was the big time.

He told us that he had never come across people before who ate the same dishes on a certain day of the week. He said in all his reading and studying people around the world, he had never encountered it. It was something foreign to him and he wanted to understand why we did it. I remember we students looked at each other shyly, strangely, out of the corner of our eyes when he said it. We did not know what he was talking about but we did not want to embarrass him or ourselves. What did he mean?

Well, you know. On Sunday at the noon meal— dinner—what did we have? Roast beef or roast chicken, of course, but at Christmas, turkey, we replied. Right after we came home from church. And we had mashed potatoes, with boiled carrots and turnip with gravy, right? And bread stuffing made with Mount Scio savory if it was chicken or turkey. And then cold-cuts for supper from the leftovers with salads and Jello with fruit cocktail and Nestle’s thick cream.

Yes. Why was that?

We explained.

On Mondays when your Mom had clothes to wash and hang outside on the line (winter or not) and no time to be fooling around cooking fussy stuff, you had leftovers again. If she was starting to run out, you might have to load up on homemade bread and butter with sweet mustard pickles or homemade rhubarb pickles. In my house it was always served in Grandmother’s little blue dish. Every Monday, right after school and Brownies or Guides you had leftovers. That’s right.

Yes. And on Tuesdays, what about Tuesdays?

That was followed on Tuesdays, by “boiled dinner” for supper. Mom did the ironing on Tuesdays, and everthing was all cotton in the early days: bedsheets, pillow cases, Dad’s shirts, our school uniform blouses, aprons, her dresses…the works…all pure cotton. So ironing was a major chore, and she had little time for niceties. Especially if it had been raining on Monday and she was still trying to get the clothes dry on the clothes line in the kitchen. Boiled dinner. Some people called it Jiggs’ dinner or corned beef and cabbage. She just threw everything in one pot: corned beef, cabbage. Right. With pease pudding (just like in the nursery rhyme). Hot in a cotton cloth pudding bag. And boiled potatoes and here we go again: boiled carrots and turnip. When it got to the table, we kids would fight for the sweet mustard pickles. We did not know what ketchup was.

And what about the rest of the week?

So ironing day was followed by grocery day. Wednesdays Mom walked uptown for groceries: Lawlors’ Meat Market, and Bowrings for the rest until the supermarkets came along. Then she could get everything there in one shop, and get it delivered. But she had to get home in time for them to deliver, so we had fish and brewis with scruncheons. She must have put the hard tack in soak the night before to have it soft enough to cook on Wednesday evenings.

On Thursdays she must have put clothes away, or did darning, and concentrated on cooking. That was perhaps an optional day when we could have anything: bottled moose with potatoes, or rabbit stew, or partridge, or in the spring seal flipper pie. Or sometimes in later years you got modern, foreign kind of food for supper like pork chops.

On Fridays we started getting ready for Sundays so she scrubbed the floors…on her knees…and waxed and polished them by hand. Wooden floors in the living room and dining room but canvas and later linoleum tile in the rest of the house. Until Dad got the polisher for her. Most of my friends had fish on Fridays. Which meant cod. Trout was popular too anytime of year but usually not in the winter. Fish on Fridays. That was not culture. That was religion.

Saturdays were big cleaning days and preparation for Sundays. Baking: cookies, squares and fresh bread were always on the go. You could not get near the kitchen…or dared not in case you ended up helping. And it meant pea soup for lunch with carrots diced into it with dumplings. I loved the dumplings: light and fluffy. My Grandmother Guy’s recipe. My mother always complained that she could never make dumplings like Mrs. Guy. And the soup had bits of salt meat or riblets. Saturday evening was saltfish with potatoes and scruncheons. No question.

Sometimes Mom would make tea buns too with raisins but she was never happy with them, and Father used to tease her that they were heavy and hard enough that he could use them as sinkers…that’s the lead weights you put on a fishing line to sink it. Not like Gammy Guy’s tea buns but wonderful all the same, hot with a bit of Good Luck margarine melting on them, not real butter. We used to tease the young kids when we were small if we did not want to play with them. “Go home! Your mother got buns!” That meant that their mothers had been baking and there was fresh bread or biscuits at home, so they had better go quickly or they would miss out. Everyone knew that. That was culture. Go into any house on my street, Forest Road, and it was pretty much the same.

Then on Sundays, Mom started from the top again and we had a so-called day of rest: no movies, no playing cards, no knitting. Nothing. Go to church and Sunday school and eat roast beef. Life was simple. It had structure and predictability. We had culture and we did not know it. We had haute cuisine de terre neuve. A professor at the university had told me.

Jeannie Guy is a professional librarian, formerly of St. John’s, living in Ottawa.