I glanced at the sign alongside the highway: “A Taste of Home.” It was an advertisement for a restaurant.
“Hmm,” I thought, “really? A taste of home?”
At 516, Navajoe Road, Altus, Oklahoma, where I grew up, it was a pot roast on Sundays, like only Mom could do it, cooked to perfection. If it happened to be too dry, it was because the preacher went too long.
A week wasn’t a complete unless we had chicken fried steak, with fried okra, and mashed potatoes. And I was enjoying the crispies from momma’s fried chicken long before I had ever heard of Col. Sanders.
I could almost taste buttered, corn on the cob, fresh, cooked green beans, and homemade apple pie, as I drove along.
“A Taste of Home,” is not only the name for a restaurant. It’s a magazine that’s been around for a while, compete with recipes, dinner ideas, and recommendations for holidays and special occasions.
And several colleges and universities have incorporated the “taste of home,” concept into their campus dining, where faculty and students can submit their favorite family recipe that might be featured in the school’s dining commons for a special meal.
A taste of home is obviously for those who are away from home, a reminiscence of home, wherever “home” might be.
A local woman in Seattle has a food service, “Turmeric and More,” targeting Indian and South Asian immigrants. And Punjabi truck drivers in California can enjoy a taste of home near Bakersfield, California.
It’s only those who never leave home that think momma is the only cook. Exploring others’ cuisine is fascinating, but most of us have a culinary homing device that draws us back, if not to home itself, at least to the memory of home-cooked meals.
But it’s more than food on a plate for which we weary-worn wanderers long.
It’s my brothers and my Dad, sitting at the dining room table, talking about the Sooners’ last game, while Mom samples the pot roast before serving it to us.
It’s ducking to miss the grease flying as my older brother, Mark, tore into his fried chicken like a lion who’s caught his prey.
It’s the family, all of us, lounging around on a Sunday afternoon after the kitchen has been cleaned, reading the Sunday Oklahoman, waiting for Dad to cast his eyes in the direction of the kitchen and ask, “Time for desert yet?”
It’s seeing Mom smile at our satisfaction.
There we sat at the dinner table, like the Reagan’s on Blue Bloods, not sampling food as if we were food connoisseurs, but talking, laughing, relaxing.
“We’re going to eat together, all six of us,” Lori announced when we blended our family, years ago.
I knew what she wanted; it was more than a chance to try out some new recipes she had kept but never used; it was more than an opportunity to let the kids learn how to cook and clean up the kitchen; indeed, it was more than a way to more efficiently conserve our food resources.
It was much more than all that: it was an invitation to be family, something like the ones we knew, and still do, if only with a fading recollection.
Our gang is all up and gone now.
I’m grateful that they want to fly back now and again, settle in if only for a while, and enjoy a taste of home, here where we are, still: family.