Twice over the past several years I’ve read Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, his self-deprecating yet glorifying autobiographical account of public school teaching. One of my favorite parts of the book is when in one of his desperate moments of inspiration he required students to bring in recipes to read as poetry, an assignment that evolved into a potluck of ethnically diverse cuisine.
So, inspired, I assigned a “food essay” in which students were to include a favorite recipe, a description of the food, a memory about that food, and a paragraph about the food’s symbolism. In my demo for my students, I told about the gingerbread my family always made for supper on applesauce-making days.
I would bring in the gingerbread, I told my students, on the day when everyone could–for extra credit–bring in their special food to share with the rest of the class.
Over the next week as I supervised essay revisions and graded final copies, I again and again complained to the students: “I should not be reading this right before lunch. I’m hungry.” And the foods really did sound delicious, albeit not nearly as varied as those brought by McCourt’s classes, which is totally understandable since most of my students live in the country and don’t flinch in conversations about killing deer; the most popular strains of t-shirts in the school are of the self-proclaimed redneck stripe.
Unfortunately, not all of the foods written about–most notably homemade ice cream–made it to the food share day, even though students promised as late as the day before to bring them in. But I ended up with a day of local flavor feasting anyway:
…cabbage and white bean soup in a crock pot brought in by the mother of the boy who the previous week had objected to my censorship of certain parts in Mel Gibson’s Hamlet (which we watched after reading and acting out a version of the play) by saying, “I’ll just go buy the movie,” yet said, after seeing the play’s family relations kissing each other on the lips when saying goodbye, “Now I know why you don’t want us to watch this movie; it’s full of inbreeds”;
…coconut cake, which reminds the student of an annual get-together his family attends. Once his dad even came to the party instead of staying at the hospital with the student’s mom and prematurely born little brother;
…coffee cake, American flag cake;
…salty cakes (fry bread) with homemade apple butter, a granddad’s favorite that mysteriously rather quickly disappeared from the table the first time they ate it after his funeral;
…corn fritters, accompanied by two jugs of the student’s special iced tea for the class;
…butterscotch dessert, multiple batches of chocolate chip cookies, lasagna;
…”Scotcheroos” first eaten by the student when she was two, when an aunt gave her one along with some Mountain Dew;
…lemon lush containing ingredients the student’s mom was upset that she had to go buy at 10:30 the night before;
…chocolate and vanilla pudding pie, pumpkin roll, two batches of macaroni and cheese (one re-warmed, one unheated);
…cherry cobbler that in the traditional recipe contained the fruit of a wild cherry tree that was later struck by lightening;
…and so much more that by the third class I gave up trying to sample everything.
Twice throughout the day the class sobered and listened almost reverently as students mentioned that their foods reminded them of grandparents no longer living; in every class the mere fact that I played music for the students–and both “butt-dancing” and country, at that–and the spirit of plenteous food made school almost, well, fun.
As I told one student, “Man, this is good. If it weren’t for having students here, I’d think I was in heaven.”