Home Coopkin'

HOME HOME COOKIN’ AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE – maybe it never was.

Among our most cherished myths, right up there with motherhood and apple pie is “there’s nothin’ like good ole home cookin’,” Take the corn bread I bought last week. It was “home made.” I got it at a farmer’s market. Between those two verities – home made, and rural, you can’t go wrong. There is thankfully – nothing like it. That corn bread was drier than the desert sands and as tasteless as week old porridge. I get better results at home with corn bread mix from the supermarket.

Which illustrates another myth: “Country-good.” Somehow, if it comes from some bucolic board-and-batten farmhouse with Victorian gingerbread along the roof line, it has to be good. Not only is the food good, but it comes from “honest law-abiding folks. They are always usually God-fearing but it would be nasty to castigate them for that “virtue.”

Short story virtuoso Flannery O’Connor wrote wickedly about her Georgia redneck neighbours. In “Good Country People,” the very smug Mrs. Hopewell declared to an itinerant Bible salesman who presented himself as “just plain country folk,” “Country people are the salt of the earth,” declared Mrs. Hopewell. The salesman turned out to be an unprincipled con man. In all her writing O’Connor’s country folks are more decent than city folk. They are honest and true. They are uncorrupted. But somehow they always get into trouble.

(Flannery is worth a read. She was a devout Roman Catholic living in Georgia and her targets were the “God-fearin” Southern Baptists whom she saw as corrupted by their own religiosity and misplaced pride in themselves and other country folks.)

In major cities (and a few minor ones because little towns like to cuddle up to the notion that small towns are nicer places) there is always a Farmer’s Market. Thousands of urban sophisticates, hoping perhaps that some of the old home verities about country life will rub off on our Gucci clad Rolex wearing bodies – flock to buy stuff that is good for us. “Good” because it is organic, has no pesticide or fungicides, no chemical interventions and was grown with nothing but good old “natural” horse dung. That some of us end up with E coli infections from the natural fertilizer doesn’t seem to matter. (But that is another story.)

The Farmer’s Market and Country Folk mythology goes to the heart of our reality. In popular culture we esteem good-ole-country folk. John Denver’s hymn to hay is “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” He got rich from it and I don’t think he spent a lot of time down on the farm just a-pickin' away. It is a sad irony that he died not in some tractor rollover while plowing the back forty but in his own high priced, high flying expensive airplane. I mean no disrespect to Denver.

The “Farmer’s” Market may actually have some real farmers in it, people who arrive in their mud-spattered pickup trucks some time before dawn. But, like Flea Markets – where the vendors are romantically conceived to be people who have emptied their attics (it is important that they be farmhouse attics) and found that there was a Stradivarius beneath the dust – which some wise-ass city guy picks up for eighteen dollars and rushes off to the Antiques Road show where he discovers that: the violin is actually worth eighteen dollars. At most Flea Markets the sellers are merchants or jobbers. At most Farmer’s Market many of the people are also merchants.

The myth is also concocted from one part of a longing for what we lovingly remember as “the good ole days,” and another part folklore we were supposed to have heard from our pioneer grandparents. Images there of people crossing the prairies in Conestoga wagons led by John Wayne. Another Hollywood concoction because those Hollywood moguls came from little “shtetls” villages in the Pale of Settlement and their contribution to North American culture, was to invent values they thought were real and down-to-earth.

Our gustatory myths are right up there with white picket fences, which were really a construction made by Hollywood for Andy Hardy movies, and Norman Rockwell magazine covers, which purport to be the genuine thing – real life at home with real folks.

It’s not all mythology though. People in small towns perpetuate the myth that: small towns are more friendly and open and welcoming than the big city." (Which is true unless you are a newcomer in which case you may has well have arrived from Mars for the suspicious looks you get, and the exclusion from the inner circle of small town life.)

All of us have eaten homemade food. We are obliged to be polite, even to gush a little about how good it is as we choke down under-seasoned, overcooked, bland-tasting vittles, declining second helpings by pretending we are stuffed. In less decorous times, a hearty belch announced total satisfaction.. The truth is: it is all part of a grand conspiracy, a homespun Saturday Evening Post cover with good old Mom in her gingham apron spinning out kitchen miracles. Her little boy is always red-headed with freckles.

Perhaps then it goes without further examination to say that ”country cookin” is honest and good and decent, not to mention God-fearin' and Presbyterian. (Insert your own choice from Evangelical Lutheran, Total Immersion Baptist, or some other good old-time religion.) Not to insult any one belief, but it has been my experience that very few atheists or Episcopalians sell homemade pies at the roadside. I know certainly of no Chassidim who do either.

We are all dupes in the country-is-better culture. Driving through the rural countryside on the way to or from the cottage you pass by a roadside farm stand and there is a crude hand-lettered sign (they always have to be crude and hand-lettered so there is no suggestion of city-slickery.) The sign proclaims: “Home made pie.” Must be good.

A close companion to “homemade” is “fresh from the farm kitchen.” Perhaps we are seduced by the charm of the green grass, bird-chirping, smell of fresh hay, sunnydale-acres look of the countryside as we drive the back roads. “Look, there is a quaint, hand-lettered sign announcing “farm fresh baked goods. Apple pies like mother used to make.” (Some mothers couldn’t cook but that’s another myth.).I’ve stopped by and let myself be greeted by someone who pretends to be :”just plain folks” while actually hiding a Phd in advanced agronomy from MIT.

How can I resist? I buy a pie. Still hot. By the time the pie gets home it has morphed into a sticky thing with a crust like wet cardboard and slices of apple that are reminiscent more of road kill than tree ripened. O.K. – I exaggerate.

I suppose we have to have myths to make life bearable. I suppose we have to believe that there must be more to life that the urban zoo with its noise and pollution and ceaseless striving and gridlocked traffic and crime and high rent and unbearable chic.

It is perhaps simply because all of us who are urban-corrupted, exhaust-fume-inhaling,
chic and cool and totally with it – sometimes want to pretend, to play make-believe, to be restored by the notion that all is not commerce and acquisitions. Like kids from the high rise jungle becoming folk singers protesting about how commercial everything has become.

The successful ones have a Maseratti parked out back.