My favorite meal really comes from love

Asking me what is one of my favorite meals is a little like asking me what is my favorite book. I have lots of favorite meals, and I have lots of favorite books. More about the latter at another time. But my favorite meal would have to be my Grandma Mary’s fried chicken, mashed potatoes (from the garden), chicken gravy, and green beans (from the garden) cooked with bacon pieces, chopped onion, and well-seasoned. A biscuit or a slice of her homemade bread with her home-churned butter made it complete.

I watched a couple of times when Grandma Mary would take a chicken out to the chopping block, which was a piece of a log 15-20 inches high, put the fryer’s head on the block with one hand, holding tight at the back of the neck, and chopping the head off with a hatchet in the other hand. Then she’d let the fryer loose, and it would frantically scat around the chicken yard while it bled out. That’s where I learned what “runnin’ ’round like a chicken with its head off” really meant.

After that, she’d dip the carcass in boiling water and pluck the feathers off before gutting the chicken, keeping the heart, liver and gizzard, and cutting the pieces for frying — legs, wings, thighs, ribs and back. And she always cut up the chicken so there’d be a “pulley bone,” as she called it — the V-shaped bone located between the neck and the breast that I rarely see cut that way now — and then fry the chicken in a cast-iron skillet on a wood-burning cook stove.

The odd-shaped bone was also called a wishbone because, after you ate the meat off, you took hold of one part of the wishbone, and somebody took ahold of the other side and pulled. The one who got the bigger part of the pulley bone or wishbone got to make the wish and it was supposed to come true. I also heard that both would make a wish and the winner’s wish would come true. Regardless, I always liked to get it.

I remember one Sunday dinner when I was 8 or 9 years old getting to sit at the big table and looking hard at the pile of fried chicken on a plate in front of me. Grandma was across the table from me, looked over at me, and pointed at the wishbone.

“There’s the pulley bone, son,” she said quietly. “That’s what you’re looking for?”

I nodded and stuck my fork in and pulled it out. I ate the tasty breast meat and asked if she’d pull the other side. She nodded and reached across the table, and we pulled. I pulled away with the largest piece, thinking that she let me win somehow.

She smiled and said, “Make a wish.”

I did, but don’t remember what I wished.

Of course, Grandma wasn’t the only good cook in the family. My mother and the rest of my aunts made great fried chicken, too, but I probably thought Grandma’s was better because I’d seen her take the fryers from the chicken yard to the table. As bloody and distasteful as the slaughtering was, it made me appreciate the chicken for what it provided. The others had dressed chicken the same way, I know. My mother wasn’t impressed with my reasoning.

At Sunday dinner at Grandma’s family home, everybody brought tasty dishes that made it an even greater feast and complemented Grandma’s meal. Mother sometimes brought beef ’n’ noodles. Cut thick and doughy and with tender pieces of beef, it was the tastiest I’ve ever eaten.

All the aunts, five or six usually, brought pies or cobblers, such as apple, blackberry, raspberry, peach, rhubarb, banana and coconut cream, custard, lemon meringue and even a mincemeat pie. I never could understand how the latter could be considered a pie because it had small pieces of ground meat and suet among the ingredients. But Aunt Elsie brought pecan pie, the king of all the pies for me. Aunt Florence brought pieces of banana with a light coat of mayonnaise and rolled in crushed nuts. They all had dishes they were known for making.

But Grandma’s basic meal was my favorite. Maybe that’s because she was my grandmother. I don’t know. I know as long as she was still able, she often prepared the same meal for my father, my grandfather (my mother’s father), and me when we were there working in the field, and I always looked forward to it. And I know that meals like fried chicken are not necessarily the healthiest, but Grandma lived well into her 80s. So I still happily enjoy it once in a blue moon, if only to remember. ...