WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY

It’s National Grandparents Day 2023, a Hallmark-type holiday to collectively celebrate and honor our grandparents. I never met my paternal grandparents as they both passed away when my father was in his teens, but I’ve written at least a half-dozen posts reflecting on my maternal grandmother, Minnie Goddard. I suppose I’ll eventually run out of anecdotes about “Nanny” as I fondly called her, but I still have a few more up my sleeve.

I actually planned this post for Grandparents Day 2022, but due to Queen Elizabeth’s passing a few days earlier, instead I focused on the topic of tea, a beverage Queen Lizzy and Nanny both enjoyed.

As most of you know, I have no siblings and no family members. Through the years, Mom used to tell me about visiting HER grandparents, 60 miles away, always on holidays and every Summer. Mom said she was close to her grandmother. Here she is with her grandparents. I assume the first picture was taken at some type of celebration judging from the corsage and dress clothes (her cousin Ted is to the right).

This photo was taken at her grandparents’ farm.

Mom was devastated when her grandmother passed away in 1953. Her opinion of her grandfather was that he was a cantankerous old man, an opinion I shared about my own grandfather, including in this forum.

Mom would recount how on hot Summer nights, the entire family would cool off by sitting on the wraparound porch. Here is a photo of Mom on that porch.

When the Ariss homestead was to be sold after her grandfather’s passing, Mom asked for two items from her grandmother’s kitchen, a blue cake plate and a teapot. These vintage items have been part of my country kitchen’s décor for decades.

Nature’s bounty.

Each Summer when friends/fellow bloggers Diane and Ruth are posting pictures of the bounty of fruits and veggies from their respective gardens, it pulls at my heartstrings a little. The tasty rewards from their efforts remind me of my mom’s tales about her family’s annual August trip to her grandparents’ farm to help bring in the crops, harvest the fruits and veggies and “put up” the abundance of nature’s goodness for the long Winter ahead.

Likewise, when I got lost on a country road enroute to the sunflower festival a few years ago, I passed many driveways with makeshift produce stands. They reminded me of Mom’s stories about farm life circa 1930s – 1950s, plus triggered nice memories of my own family’s Sunday drives to country farm stands to buy tomatoes, new potatoes, green beans and ripe, juicy peaches for cobbler. Once home, we didn’t bother with the “B” or the “L” as we’d just have the “T” … sliced tomatoes on buttered toast. If I close my eyes I can picture Mom enjoying a juicy beefsteak tomato over the kitchen sink to catch the drips, the tomato in one hand, salt shaker in the other.

So many nice memories revolve around food and family don’t they?

You say “to-may-to” and I say “to-mah-to” … some just say “yum”.

MY grandparents were NOT a match made in Heaven. I’m surprised he cracked a smile in this photo. Nanny was without a smile however.

I truly believe the only thing my grandparents ever collaborated on was the annual ritual of making chow chow, a tasty tomato relish which I’d describe as a thick salsa. (Okay … well maybe they collaborated as to my mom, Pauline and her younger brother Ronny too.)

As to anything else, my grandparents fought like cats and dogs.

I never heard my grandfather call Nanny an endearment, let alone by her given name, Wilhemina, nor her nickname “Minnie” and instead he muttered and mumbled constantly, or grunted in response to anything she said to him, often cursing back at her. But then, she never called him “Omer” – instead she referred to him as “the Old Man” (he was 14 years older than her). They were a perfect example of how opposites attract – she was kind and gentle …

… while he was a miserable old coot.

But together they made quite the team as they turned out enough jars of green and red tomato chow chow to fill the shelves of their fruit cellar until the following Summer.

Those bushel baskets of green and red tomatoes, plus a lot of onions, came from Ariss, the “souvenirs” from their annual sojourn to the farm. They didn’t “put up” anything else to my knowledge and likely there was no recipe as Nanny learned the art of making chow chow from years of helping her mom.

Nanny was not a good cook, (just like me), except for her Sunday pot roast. If you were a visitor to the house, she’d fix you a ham sandwich and a cup of tea the minute you walked in the door (without asking you first), whereas my grandfather immediately went into the living room to watch wrestling or the hockey game, or he’d go and sit outside depending on the season. My grandfather made dinner every day but Sunday. Mom said she never knew if this was because Nanny’s cooking was so bad, or he got home from work earlier.

My grandparents were not fickle about this pickly treat.

When the pair collaborated on making green and red tomato chow chow, my grandfather would sit in the basement peeling and chopping onions, a matchstick with the sulfur part in the corner of his mouth to thwart the strong fumes and keep his eyes from watering. (At least that matchstick kept him from his usual foul mouth and outbursts that accompanied his ever-present sullen demeanor.)

After filling a big bowl with diced onions, he dutifully took them upstairs to join the tomatoes and spices which would then simmer in a huge pot on the kitchen stove. After endless hours, maybe even days, of this collaborative effort, the wooden shelves in the fruit cellar were lined with green and red tomato chow chow, which the family slathered on eggs, meat, ham sandwiches, or simply spread on toast. This ritual lasted for decades until my grandfather’s death in 1969.

When I was young and we visited my grandparents, Nanny would send me down the creaky wooden basement stairs to the fruit cellar to retrieve a few bottles to eat then and/or take home. Not only did I fear falling through the steps, I was afraid of spiders and the light from a solitary light bulb did not calm my fears in the least.

Stirring up the memory pot (in more ways than one).

So how did this become an annual ritual? My great-grandparents, Andrew and Catherine Klein, had a farm in rural Ariss, a community near Guelph, Ontario. Nanny had eight siblings – there were three girls and six boys. One by one the boys grew up and married, settled in the area and farmed, like their father. The boys remained close to one another and led similar lives, but Nanny and one of her sisters moved to the big city, a/k/a Toronto, to escape the farm wife/farm life existence. Toronto was the hubbub of manufacturing, jobs were plentiful and the sisters got factory jobs right away and each eventually married, but always returned to Ariss for every holiday gathering.

Through the years Mom would be wistful about those long-ago, huge family gatherings at the Ariss homestead, even though the Summer get-together involved hard work and could hardly be defined as a vacation. For example, my grandfather had two weeks off from Gutta Percha & Rubber Manufacturing Company, a plant which made tires, hoses and rubber boots. My grandmother had an equal amount of time off from Planter’s Peanuts or Rowntree’s Chocolates, two factory jobs she held when my mom was growing up. During those two weeks spent in Ariss, they were immersed in a round-robin helping venture, from the elders to the rest of the extended family. My grandfather helped harvest the crops and bale the hay, while my grandmother joined her mother in the hot farmhouse kitchen.

I understand my grandmother had berry bushes everywhere, so there were lots of berries to pick for preserves, pies and cakes. Sometimes a cousin or two would run over from another farm to visit and they were relegated to berry-picking chores. The kids were dispatched with big buckets and told not to come back to the house until their bucket was filled to the brim. Being out in the hot sun and toting that heavy bucket might have made it tough being a farm kid back then in the early 1930s, but the cousins made it into a game and challenged each other to see who could pick the most berries. Mom’s favorite pie was red currant and for years, every Summer Mom and I would scour the local farm markets for a couple of pints of red currants so she could relive her youth and enjoy this tart and tasty pie once again. Mom would tell me the farmhouse screen door didn’t do a stellar job of keeping the flies outside and her grandmother would be swatting at flies sitting on a coffeecake in the back kitchen while asking her granddaughter “is that a fly or a currant Pauline – my eyes are bad?”

With the berry picking done, the cousins moved on to collecting tomatoes, still warm from the sun …

… then similarly toting them into the house so those tomatoes would eventually be turned into chow chow.

My mom never did any of the annual canning rituals like her grandmother and mother, but she always loved this tomato-y treat. Whenever we went to a fruit and veggie stand while out on a Sunday drive in the country, she’d always be scanning their offerings for a similar product.

One time I went to pick up some holiday goodies for Christmas at a local Honey Baked Ham store and saw they had red tomato relish. I brought home a couple of bottles which were gone almost immediately as Mom declared they tasted just like what she remembered, so I bought her a case for her Valentine’s Day birthday and tomato chow chow became a regular staple in this house until the store stopped carrying it.

If you’re wondering why you never heard of tomato chow chow, Google confirms it is a Canadian treat, (though not as famous as poutine). 🙂

Here is a recipe for it (click here).

Ceramic decorative tomatoes are more my style as you see in this kitchen countertop picture.

Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future. ~ Gail Lumet Buckley

Happy Grandparents Day if it applies to you.

[Photos are my own except for the chow chow pics and tomato meme obtained from Pinterest.]