Author and real-food activist Michael Pollan isn’t known for comedy. His work is generally very serious. But his frequently quoted mantra always gets the corners of my mouth twitching: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
He intends for people to avoid processed and engineered food products, but you see, by the time I was old enough to pay attention to my great-grandmother’s eating habits, she had fully retired from cooking. Her small oven was used primarily for storage and most of the contents of her tidy kitchen collected dust in the cabinets. She had the only freezer I knew of that required defrosting and in its ever thickening nest of ice she tucked boxes of Stouffer’s single-serving macaroni and cheese dinner.
For dessert she kept tins of strawberries frozen in thick crimson syrup. I wasn’t a fan of the macaroni and cheese, but those strawberries were incredible. I loved using a can opener to pry the metal cap away from the cardboard packaging. My sister and I would dip our spoons into the semi-frozen fruit and get giggly from all the sugar we weren’t allowed to have at home.
My great-grandma Mildred, or Mill, was born in 1906, one of the eldest children in a large dairy farming family with midwestern roots in Arlington. In such a large and hardworking family, Mill would have been expected to help with the cooking and washing from a young age. Daily meals on the farm were basic affairs made completely from scratch to fortify a flock of children and farmhands. The hot meal of the day might have included boiled chickens, sticky jam and milk straight from the cows. This is the food Mr. Pollan is talking about, but as I said this is not the food I associate with my great-grandmother.
As soon as she was able, my great-grandmother left the farm life and moved to Seattle, where she married. The young couple settled in Ballard and had a son, my grandfather. It should have been tra-la-la happily ever after but when their son was just 6 years old her husband died from stomach cancer. With his passing Mill was left a single mother in the midst of America’s Great Depression.
After her early years on the farm it was probably no coincidence that she often supported her small family by working around food. She ran a small store with a apartment above so she didn’t have to leave her young son to go to work. The store supplied ice and dry goods to residents in their Ballard neighborhood.
Mill also spent years working as a lunch lady in the Seattle School District at a time when far more of the food was prepared in the individual school kitchens. Cooking a hot lunch for a school full of rowdy children must have been light work for a former farm girl.
Mill must have enjoyed baking. My own mother smiled as she recalled sleeping over and waking Saturday morning to freshly baked cinnamon rolls. I don’t recall any cinnamon rolls but I do remember brownies. Mill often arrived at family celebrations with a 8-by-8 pan of frosted brownies. She made the kind that are slightly underbaked — half the brownie sticks to the knife and you can’t eat a square without a frosty milk chaser. Her not-so-secret recipe was to open a box of whichever brand was on sale, add the prescribed ingredients, then slather the top with half a can of similarly priced chocolate frosting. Oh man, I loved those brownies.
As happy as I am to remember the brownies and frozen treats, the food I will always associate with my great-grandma came from the Chinese restaurant two blocks from her house. It was everything you might expect from a neighborhood restaurant in the mid-1980s. The smell of fryer oil permeated your clothes and hair. The menus were protected by plastic sleeves sticky from drips of overly sweet and not very sour sauce. Sitting in those booths and watching the bubbles pop in my Coca-Cola was as fine a dining experience as one could want.
The restaurant has changed names but it is still there serving Americanized Chinese food. I have thought about stopping to order fried chicken smothered in a gloppy almond sauce with a side of egg fried rice and barbecued pork. The notion is romantic but the reality is I no longer care to eat that kind of food.
At this point in my life I agree with the sentiment of Mr. Pollan’s mantra. We should aspire to eat foods we can recognize in nature. These days I prefer my strawberries unsweetened and my macaroni homemade. My cooking style has more in common with the meals on the farm but the flavors and ingredients I use are heavily influenced by cuisines from all over the world. Without those trips to the neighborhood Chinese restaurant, I might not have embraced the foods of other cultures as enthusiastically.
Every few weeks I see Michael Pollan’s “real food” mantra wagging its finger from my Facebook newsfeed and I stop and smile. I think about my soft-skinned, kind-eyed great-grandma Mill. She must have been tough as nails, but I never saw her grit. I just saw the simple way she lived after she retired from cooking.
Chocolate indulgence brownie bites
1 box Betty Crocker Fudge Brownie Mix
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, unsifted
3/4 cup plain strained Greek yogurt
1/2 cup water
46 grams of finely chopped dark chocolate or 1/4 cup mini chocolate Chips
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tablespoon low fat milk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
small pinch of salt
This recipe uses a mini muffin tin to make individually portioned brownies. You can dress them up for a special occasion with a bit of chocolate glaze (see below).
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare mini muffin tins by wiping the inside of each cup with paper towel coated with non-stick spray.
In a large mixing bowl: use a fork to mix together the contents of the brownie mix packet, cocoa powder. Add the yogurt and water. Stir with a spatula just until the bater becomes uniform in color and texture. Now fold in the chocolate.
Fill each prepared mini muffin cup 2/3 to 3/4 of the way, this is just about 1 measured tablespoon of batter per brownie.
Bake at 350 for 15-17 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.
The glaze: In a small bowl stir together the ingredients using a fork. It may initially appear to need more liquid but keep stirring until it all comes together. Once the glaze looks like frosting you may add a drop or two more milk to thin it a little more, be conservative with your additional liquid.
Drizzle the glaze over the brownies and allow the glaze to set before serving. The glaze will dry firm and smooth but will not harden completely.
Prep time: 15 minutes. Yield: 40 brownies.
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