On any given holiday down South, you’ll find people gathered together for a meal. It might be neighbors at wooden picnic tables on the Fourth of July just before dusk, with plastic forks and patriotic-themed paper napkins. Someone will bring watermelon, and chances are there will be at least two variations of potato salad. There will be fireworks and friendship and freedom.
Or it’s Easter and the extended family is coming over for lunch after church, when grandmother’s deviled-egg plate is rescued from the china cabinet and the wrinkles are steamed out of the linen tablecloth. Someone will bring ham— sugar and country, because Uncle Bud will be there—and certainly yeast rolls. There will be lilies and laughter and love.
Casual or high falutin’, inside or out of doors, Southerners know that food matters during the holidays. We also know that the memories matter more. Call it our secret ingredient.
One Thanksgiving when my parents were out of the country, my oldest sister, Venona, who was recently married, said she’d make sure my middle sister, Lizzie, and I had a traditional meal. Lizzie, who was eighteen or so at the time, volunteered to make the dressing. Why Venona thought this might be a good idea remains a mystery some twenty years after the fact, but Lord knows that’s not the only thing we don’t understand about her.
Granted, Lizzie looked like she knew what she was doing as she toiled in our parents’ kitchen, chopping this and measuring that. For a little extra flourish—Lizzie always was the dramatic one—she donned an apron, the kind that ties at the neck and the waist. It had pictures of Elvis Presley all over it. Lizzie tossed around words like simmer and sauté, all the while mumbling about how hard it was to read Mother’s handwritten notes on the recipe card. If memory serves, she made a very big deal indeed about how mature it was of her to help Venona.
The dressing smelled fine while it was baking— edible, even—but when we took it out to get ready to drive the half hour to Venona’s house, we immediately realized it didn’t look like the dressing Mother always made for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And the difference was this: Lizzie’s dressing was a disturbing shade of green.
In all honesty, I can’t think of a shade of green dressing that wouldn’t be disturbing, but this particular hue seemed especially alarming. No words were exchanged as Lizzie slapped a few pats of butter on top, covered the dish with aluminum foil, and grabbed two of the multicolored potholders I had woven at Camp DeSoto the summer before. Maybe she was hoping a little extra butter might soften the tone or fade the color a bit, but, alas, it did not.
“I’m sure it will be delicious,” said Venona when we arrived at her house and she got a look at what we’d brought. She always was the diplomatic one.
It was not delicious, even if you invoked the lowest possible standard for the word. The best any of us could do was to choke down one bite apiece. Even Sloopy the dog turned up his wet nose, and he had a neighborhood-wide reputation for eating out of garbage cans.
Thankfully—and, after all, it was Thanksgiving—other guests had provided a veritable smorgasbord of casseroles: sweet potato, squash, green bean, and something Mrs. Willis from across the street described as “kitchen sink surprise.” Don’t ask me what was in it, because we were sworn to silence. I will say, however, that it was delicious. So there was plenty to take the place of the dressing—did I mention the cheese grits?—and no one seemed to mind. At least no one said so out loud, it being Alabama and us being so polite and all.
Since then Lizzie has been encouraged to provide sweet tea for our family holiday meals. Sometimes at Christmas, if we’re feeling lucky, we let her bring seven-layer salad, because Venona— bless her heart—steadfastly believes just about anyone can be trusted to put peas on top of lettuce.
At the end of the day, the green dressing didn’t really matter. We walked away with more than full stomachs. We created a memory that still makes us laugh after two decades of retelling and keeps our hearts full of gratitude for one another.