YOU WILL EAT YOUR TRIPE AND LIKE IT!

Growing up in a large, poor Italian family didn’t have too many perks. If you were lucky, you got new clothes once a year, when your birthday rolled around, or your godparents came into a few extra bucks from betting on the ponies. I can remember getting a new pair of blue dungarees from my Uncle Mario, when Seabiscuit made a surprise leap forward just a foot from the finish line at Freehold Raceway in the summer of 1960. That’s also when they broke out the “good” whiskey and passed around those god-awful stogie cigars.

For a lot of Italian families, many happy memories came with holidays. At Easter, for some reason, we boys always managed to get new suits, and the girls got fancy new frilly Sunday dresses. Of course, these were meant to only be worn to church or to a funeral, that’s it! We could also count on getting clothing for Christmas. Sometimes it was a pair of really ugly socks, or a really hideous chartreuse-colored Mohair sweater that was probably marked down at least three times in Bamberger’s bargain basement.

We boys learned how to get a few more miles out of a pair of torn boxer shorts, by using homemade mending tools. After all, none of your classmates would ever know that under your street clothes, you are being held together with Elmer’s Glue and Scotch Tape. I can’t recall even a month going by, that I didn’t have to squish up a couple of Kleenex tissues to stick in the toe hole of my favorite pair of gym socks, but that’s what you did. We also always kept a good supply of knee patches in the sewing kit.

Let’s talk sugar. When I was growing up, our food budget was pretty small. With our large brood of hungry mouths to feed, snacks like cookies and cakes were never on the shopping list. I remember my dad making friends with a landscaping client who worked for the Burry Biscuit Company in Linden, New Jersey. He would often exchange some lawn maintenance work for a huge 50-pound plastic bag of broken cookies, that came off the assembly line unable to be sold. This didn’t happen often, but when it did, we kids were in sugar heaven. We didn’t buy sugary cereals either. Our breakfast choices were either the cheap store brand of Corn Flakes or Toasty – O’s. No one ever thought about fiber either. That’s what prunes were for! We always did have a sugar bowl on the kitchen table, and we were able to add a couple of tablespoonfuls to our morning cereal before any adult would notice. We also knew about rotting teeth, but how else could a kid get through a boring class lecture on the fall of the Roman Empire without even a slight sugar high?

I think I learned more about more foreign countries at the dinner table than I ever did sitting in my World History class. For example, many nights at dinner, Dad would cook up a batch of tripe and sauce. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s basically the inside lining of a cow’s stomach. It was also very cheap to buy, because most butchers would just throw it out. In some parts of the world, it’s a delicacy. At our house, serving this at dinner was the equivalent of inducing gastrointestinal distress. Eating tripe required really strong jaws, as this “membrane” was as tough as shoe leather, and smothering it with tomato sauce didn’t help. You could easily gag, but if you made even the slightest remark to dad, he would remind you that “There are hundreds of starving kids in Bangladesh who would kill for this food!”

Liver was another one. I personally like the stuff, but I don’t think anyone else in the family held the same regard for the meat. Some evenings, when you would come home from school or practice and enter the kitchen, the strong odor of fried liver and onions would cause you to hold your nose and rush off to the bathroom. For me, knowing the origin of the meat wasn’t as off-putting as it was to others. That perception of liver as part of the “waste filtration system” is unappetizing to some, and the smell could be the deciding factor of whether or not to consume it. Just so you know, overcooking liver is what gives it that “earthy mineral” smell. If it’s cooked right, the smell is generally quite tolerable.

Of course, in my house, there weren’t many cooks who knew this, and so what was served on the plate was simply undesirable. The gagging would begin, and once again we kids were schooled about that small country of Biafra in western Africa, where the children have so little food that their rib cage bones showed through their thin, fragile chests. Of course, we would then hold our collective noses, scarf down the liver, and call it a night.

Some of the other hated foods I can vaguely remember as a kid were Brussels sprouts, squid (calamari), powdered milk, spam, canned spinach, lima beans and ham hocks. I have since learned to forgive the lima bean and occasionally a garlic-sautéed Brussels sprout, but the only way I can force a piece of calamari down my gullet is if it is breaded and deep-fried.

There is still one very disgusting dish that I refuse to eat to this day. That is chipped beef. It is commonly known as “s#%t on a shingle”. The “shingle” in this case would be a slice of toasted white bread. This dish, to me, conjures up so many bad memories that just one look at it bubbling away on the stove causes me to start gagging.

Way back when, you could buy a pound of ground beef for about a quarter. It was cheap, and if you were at least slightly inventive in the kitchen, you could create a lot of great appetizing meals with a pound of ground beef. How someone snuck this awful dish in the lineup of dinnertime meals is still a mystery. I’m guessing that at one time, an army galley chef decided to serve his troops this gruel. I’m also guessing that most G.I.s didn’t care, they just wanted to fill their bellies and get back to the war. They also wouldn’t dare confront their commanders-in-chief to complain, even if they were to just get a lecture on the hundreds of starving kids living in the war-torn streets of central England. Chipped beef got our guys through a lot of conflicts, and even if it didn’t taste like Chateau Briand, it still served a purpose. It kept our guys from going hungry. Charles Dickens’ classic “Oliver Twist” surely recalls the protagonist uttering this plaintive line about gruel: “Please, sir, I want some more.” One can assume this is the juncture where being orphaned, poor and homeless became associated with the term “gruel”. 

At my age, I can cook the things I like, buy new clothes when I need them, indulge in half a package of Oreo cookies and milk if I have that craving, and never have to answer to anyone but myself. And, if I need to know where the starving kids are in the world today, I have Wikipedia and Google to help me out. I’ll send a small donation if I can, but I promise you, I will never ship anyone a container of chipped beef, even if they begged for it.

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CIAO!

Lenny