Hash patties
Don Coldsmith, Syndicated Columnist
Monday, September 22, 2008
A while back, in the car on the way home from church, we had the radio on and caught a part of the Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor was describing a Sunday dinner when he was a boy, back at Lake Wobegon, “Where the women are strong, the men are good looking and all the kids are above average.”
We found that we could relate to his description of a Sunday dinner with the family. Until after World War II, the average family size was four and a half children. Families are smaller now, since the discovery of what was causing it, I guess. There was, in many cases, probably some discussion of which kid constituted the “half.”
What really got my attention was Keillor’s story about his playing tricks on his sister. In a big family, there’s always a lot of give and take among siblings. You fight with ‘em or for ‘em, as circumstances require. Keillor’s story involved the necessity for revenge against his sister. At dinner, she had distracted the family and while they weren’t looking had flipped a gob of butter to hit him in the face. He bided his time, then innocently asked if anyone heard a car door slam. He slipped a hunk of raw liver into a slit in the side of his sister’s dinner roll, while everyone else was looking out the window.
Somehow this reminded me of my own childhood. I was number three in sequence with a sister four years older and a brother three years younger. We had another brother, ten years older than I, who was pretty much an adult compared to the rest of us. At least it seemed so to me. My sister Dorothy aspired to become a teacher, so from the time I could remember, I was lined up with her dolls to represent a classroom. “Playing school” wasn’t much fun, and I’d often run away after I was big enough, when the teacher turned to write on the blackboard.
My younger brother James came along to become yet another pupil in our sister’s private classroom. About the most odious thing she did was to continually refer to us as “the little boys,” even after we started to real school. (School wasn’t, of course, as bad as I’d anticipated when exposed to “playing school”).
Jim was called “The Varmint.” I guess that was caused by the comic strip L’il Abner, in which Mammy Yokum called Pappy “lil” varmint” when he irritated her. I admit, I called my brother that around come other kids and it stuck. He was “The Varmint” until after we were both out of college and on our own. We argued and fought, of course, but mostly got along. We had to hang together against the constant threat of learning something in our sister’s ersatz school. She in in turn, was continually embarrassed by our existence in her otherwise well-regulated life. The Varmint was always a little better than I at how to get her goat. A little more brazen, too.
One of our favorite foods was called “hash patties.” These consisted of leftover roast beef or other meat, ground with other leftovers; mashed potatoes and vegetables, maybe some chopped onion. This mixture was molded into patties and fried.
One noon as we sat down to bless our dinner, with a hash patty on each plate and plenty of bread and milk on hand, The Varmint began to recite the familiar childhood rhyme: “Sugar and spice and everything nice — that’s what little girls are made of.” Our sister, who was about 14 at the time, wore a self-satisfied smirk. She knew what little boys are made of, of course. The Varmint continued — “Slugs and snails and puppy dog tails —” he paused and turned directly to our sister — “that’s what HASH PATTIES are made of!”
Dorothy never had a very strong stomach. She didn’t actually barf on the table, but knocked her chair over as she bolted and ran for the bathroom, gagging all the way.
The Varmint shrugged, calmly bisected the abandoned hash patty and placed half on my plate and half on his own. He was a pretty good brother, though I never understood how he got by with that one.
See you down the road.