Grandma Remembers

by Esta Jane Fowle Service, written in 1988 for her teenaged grandaughter

When I was growing up, our extended family really celebrated just three holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. On one holiday we went to Uncle George and Aunt Bess’s in Alameda; on the next, to Aunt Nan and Uncle Roy’s in Alameda; and for the last, to our house in Oakland or Berkeley. The next year, the sequence was changed. Only George had an automobile, so the rest of us rode the street cars. Always there were guests, and many a time at Uncle George’s the table was set for 25 or 30 people, with a giant turkey at each end of the board.

Our menfolk were all adept at carving, and waited with assumed nonchalance to hear who would be master of the bird. Carving was an artistic production. It was begun only after the fruit cocktail had been eaten, and carried out with technical skill and lively banter. Each year Dad or George maintained that Grandma Johnson wanted and deserved “the part that went over the fence last”, and each year Grandma protested that she didn’t want it at all. We would have felt cheated if the exchange had been omitted.

By custom, the hostess prepared the turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy. Others brought cranberry sauce and steamed carrot pudding, complete with both hard and soft sauce, the latter with a discreet lacing of brandy. One year Uncle George produced two bottles of wine (this was during Prohibition), and Aunt Bess let each of us young ones have a spoonful apiece in her delicate wine glasses. This led to delicious speculation: was Uncle George perhaps a bootlegger?

We were eaters of turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, and made only token acknowledgement of nature’s bounty by providing one vegetable and rather grudgingly accepting gelatin salad. In those days turkey appeared on our menus only during this season, and they were not the elegantly dressed, prebasted, thermometer-equipped birds the markets supply today. Always the hostess followed the carving with anxiety, facing the possibility that a bird the size we had would be tough or stringy or tasteless. We shared the stressful moment, experts at evaluating the first morsels, breathing sighs of relief and pleasure when the judgment was favorable.

The main course finished, the children and some of the men undertook the obligatory run around the block while the women cleared the table and prepared the dessert -- and awaited another moment of truth -- was the carrot pudding properly steamed, or had the piece of cloth that tightened the seal of the Hills Brothers coffee can and its lid drawn water into the batter? It was always perfect. Then onto the table with it and the salted almonds and sugared walnuts and penoche and divinity and fondant-filled dates.

Our dinners lasted for hours. Though no slouches at eating, we were even better at talking. Uncle George was a superb raconteur, and there was much reminiscing and laughing. We did not eat at these affairs, we dined.

Finally replete, and with their share of the work completed, the women retired to the living room and the piano while the men and the children took over the kitchen and the dish-washing. Our men were far ahead of their time in this. When we were all together again, we sang, with Mother or Nan or Bess at the piano. We sang for hours: light opera, jazz, World War I songs, popular tunes. You’ll find them all in the music cabinet, for I have all of Nan’s music as well as my mother’s.

And at last, cold and tired, we waited passively under the street lamp for the street car that would start us on our long journey home.

To go back to Esta’s biography, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here.