Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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When you were a kid, I bet your mother was a good cook, wasn’t she? That’s what just about everyone tells me. I have never heard anyone say, “My mother was a lousy cook.”
But consider this: There are millions of mothers in this country. Surely they can’t all be good cooks. There must be thousands of those mothers, who are really rotten cooks, but their kids don’t know it. So why is that?
I think it is because, when youngsters are growing up, they are constantly eating their mother’s cooking. In fact, during their first 18 years or so, that’s pretty much the lion’s share of what they eat, and they just get used to it. So if their mother is a bad cook, they don’t know it. They think that’s the way food is supposed to taste.
But it’s not just kids. Adults can also be creatures of habit, and it can affect their taste buds. Let me tell you how I came to this conclusion. It was during World War II, when rationing became a part of our lives. There were so many things rationed, you wouldn’t believe it … gasoline, sugar, meat, butter, canned goods, even shoes.
I think the rationing that affected our family most was the rationing of meat and butter. They both used the same rationing stamps, so sometimes my mother had to make a decision. Should she buy meat, or should she buy butter? It would be hard to give up meet, but maybe we could switch from butter to margarine.
We tried margarine, but it was a lot different than real butter. First of all, it didn’t even look like butter. It was pure white and looked like a one-pound block of lard. Unfortunately, that’s also what it tasted like.
The manufacturers were not allowed to color it to look like butter. I think that was probably the result of pretty strong lobbying by the dairy industry. But a bit later, they started putting a little packet of yellow dye in each package of margarine. So my sister and I would help our mother by working that yellow dye into the white cake. The best way was to use our bare hands and squeeze the dye into the white mass.
That made it look more like butter. But it still tasted like lard. So we had to try something else. My dad had a farmer friend who milked several cows, and he made his own butter. He also sold some to his friends, for there was no rationing of homemade butter.
We gave it a try, and it was certainly better than that margarine stuff. But it was really strong. In fact, it was so strong that it was sometimes hard to eat. I didn’t know if that farmer was doing something wrong when he made it, or maybe it was the fault of his cows.
So my mother began to experiment. She took a pound or so of the homemade butter and mixed it with a pound of margarine. This required a lot of squeezing, of course. First my sister and I had to squeeze the yellow dye into the margarine. Then we combined that with the homemade butter and we squeezed them together.
After all the squeezing was done, we formed the whole thing into a single mass that resembled a yellow meatloaf. When we first tasted it, we all thought it wasn’t great, but we could eat it. It certainly wasn’t as good as that wonderful sweet butter we bought at the grocery store, but it was a lot better than the oleomargarine by itself.
But then, within maybe six or eight months, we all thought it was good. I’m not kidding; our whole family felt that way, even my dad. We were all just like those millions of kids who thought their mother was a good cook, because they just got used to eating her cooking. And they thought that’s the way it was supposed to taste. So kids and adults are pretty much alike as far as their taste buds are concerned.
Now, I hope you don’t get the wrong idea from all this. I am in no way suggesting that your mother may not have been a good cook. In fact, I bet your mother was a great cook. I know mine was.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com