A Matter Of Taste It’s funny how one’s taste changes through the years. I use to view cooked cabbage as a challenge, if you could get past the aroma and awful taste and choke it down, you could probably survive on a deserted island, eating bugs and weeds. Now, I love it, like eatin’ candy. Same deal with beets, peas and a few other once dreaded foods that I can’t get enough of now. Matter of fact, I couldn’t name any food I don’t like, with the exception of pickles, a horrible thing to do to a cucumber in my opinion. I guess everyone’s taste changes, but I wonder if there isn’t a generational gap in things tasted, some tastes the younger folks have missed altogether. Like chicken and dumplings. Not the kind made with biscuit dough and food coloring, but the real deal, dumplings made from scratch using lard ,swimming in a rich yellow broth rendered from cooking a fat old hen. As fat old hens are few and far between these days, some may never experience this delight. If someone could come up with a microwaveable, low calorie, cholesterol free version of the real thing, they’d make a fortune. Or rhubarb cobbler. Sad to say, but I’d bet there’s young’uns out there that have never tried it. They used to be a common treat , sure to turn up at church dinners and special occasions , now they’re so rare they seem exotic. The tartness of the rhubarb and the sweetness of the sugary crust made for a winning combination. I don’t know what left over rhubarb cobbler tastes like, I’ve never seen one last that long. Not all tastes came from the kitchen. I wonder if kids still try honeysuckle dew, pulling the flower gently from the stem , revealing two strings that drew a tiny drop of nectar along with them that you could lap with your tongue. It’d take a lifetime to gather a gallon of the sweet stuff, we usually tired of doing it after a dozen or so blooms. If summer has a taste, it’s honeysuckle. How about the wild stuff? Has everyone ate tangle gut, creasy greens and dry land fish? Hickory nuts? Paw paws? That ole standby ,polk sallet? I daresay there’s quite a few who haven’t and wouldn’t know where to get their hands on them if they wanted to. Wal-Mart ain’t the only place to get meat either. You owe it to yourself to try squirrel fixed with gravy at least once, groundhog ain’t bad either. Some tastes you never forget, like gasoline. It’s been a long time since I had a mouthful of gas come out of a siphonin’ hose. I’d bet there ain’t a handful of people under 50 that knows what gasoline tastes like. In my day ,everybody kept a short length of rubber hose to siphon gas from a car’s tank to fill a pop bottle to prime the carburetor with or to get a little bit to burn a pile of green brush with. Nowadays, all the cars have screens in the gas tank , you can’t siphon any out, thank goodness, that’s one taste I can do without. Yes , a lot of my tastes have changed , but thankfully not all. I still have a taste for short brunettes named Teresa. Wayne Bartley
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 17:05:30 +0000
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