By David Rose
I once got invited to a pot-luck dinner with a theme – bring a dish from your ethnic heritage. All my friends were whipping up lasagna, quiche, and potato knishes, but I was at a complete loss.
My childhood recollections were useless. I fondly remember weekly encounters with Chef Boyardee, but I was quite certain we weren’t Italian. It seemed like every third meal included soup or beans of some other delicacy that came out of a can labeled Campbell’s. Scottish was a possibility.
It was a bit of a shock to realize I was in my thirties and had never really considered my ethnic heritage. I made some calls to older family members. What they revealed was English Separatists, Palatines from Germany, French Huguenots, and Dutch peons.
My family had been run out of just about every country in northern Europe by the beginning of the 1700s. Most came with only the shirts on their backs. No recipes. They settled in the Catskill Mountains as subsistence farmers and stayed that way for the next 250 years. My people showed no interest in advancing their social status or, for that matter, their culinary skills.
Time was running out for me on this pot-luck thing. In a panic I ran to the grocery and bought half-a-dozen, frozen, chicken pot pies. I stuck them in the oven, browned them to perfection, and took them to the pot-luck.
There was a lot of laughter when I walked in, but the pies were quickly devoured amid fond childhood recollections. It seems frozen pot pies are part of most everybody’s culture.
As an artist, David Rose won both the Arkansas Governor’s Award and the Delta Award. His works are in the collections of Tim Robbins, Bruce Springsteen, & Susan Sarandon. As a writer he flunked every English class he ever sat in. Born in Woodstock, NY, he is very much a product of the 1960s and never really managed to escape that fabled decade. Visit Rose at www.amazon.com/David-Malcolm-Rose/e/B019GBJI9C/ and on Facebook.
