Just Add Gravy

The quickest way to get old folks to laugh is to bring up 2 words: SCHOOL LUNCHES. Thoughts of Mystery Meat or Guess-a-Meat cause immediate senses of gagging, slobbering, drooling or puking. In our day, the cooks were dressed in white uniforms that made Nurse Ratchet look like Melania Trump. On Friday nights, they used their bras to measure first downs if they could ever unbuckle the 14 snaps in the back. And that was just the width.

I can still remember Nelda Beene’s mother, Tiny Rose Johnson, our head cook. They were later called “dieticians” because the title of cook was too demeaning. Believe me: they could COOK. Mrs. Underwood, Mrs. Ritchie, Barbara Johnson, Mrs. Waldrep, and Mrs. Watson could take everything commodity and turn it into a meal. If you don’t know the food terms starting with “commodity” or “government,” you led a sheltered life. Commodity cheese would sell today in a wine store for $35 a pound and be worth it.

Our favorite? Beef soup. The worst? Some kind of mystery meat from a can, smothered in gravy to hide the texture and color in case something was killed on Highway 20 earlier in the week. Add some great northern beans. (Nothing ever came from the north that was good, especially food.) If the gas from these could be bottled, it would fuel half the buses in the county. Canned turnip greens with enough lard and ham hocks to clog a triathlon’s arteries. To top it off: hominy. To my knowledge, no one in his/her right mind EVER even thought about eating hominy. Go ahead and shoot me if that’s my last choice. Hominy is made from corn and expands like mortar mix when you swallow it. IF you can get it down.

The commodity cornbread had a crust that required Mr. Stancil, the Vo-Ag teacher, to come cut it with a blow torch. A piece once dropped on Tiny Rose’s foot, and she was in a cast for the first 6 weeks of school. You could smell the yeast rolls from County Line Road. They were the size of softballs and tasty enough to be served at the Last Supper. To wash it down? You had a choice of milk or milk. White or chocolate to be exact. An extra milk meant forking over another nickel.

Here is an old memory for my Leighton friends: the left-over scraps (we called Slop) went into 4 industrial sized garbage cans. Coach Manley had a couple of football players load them into the back of his pickup truck every day. After practice, they would be smelling RIPE!  Coach would take it home on second street to feed his hogs. The next morning, he would bring the cans back to the lunchroom. To my knowledge, the hawgs never complained to Tiny Rose.

For many, we brought our lunch to school. Our Dad made our lunch each morning after he had cooked breakfast for years. On the counter, were 3 paper sacks. One read “B.” The other read “Bob.” And the last said “Sue.” I never looked in the bag until I got to school. Complaining meant a story about either Chinese kids starving or a history of the Depression. Daddy would alternate the sandwiches: peanut and jelly, banana with mayonnaise, banana with peanut butter, pineapple with mayo, pimento cheese, bologna and my favorite: tomato. It didn’t matter that the tomato had soaked through the bread. He once surprised me with a pork chop sandwich, bone and all. That came straight from some Heavenly kitchen. I ate around the bone then sucked the bone.

He would throw in some tater chips and a chocolate chip cookie. What would I give today, to see that bag with my name on it?

School lunch was our first exposure to bartering. My wife, Susan, said that at lunch, she would trade something off her plate for the yeast rolls at Stanhope-Elmore High School. My classmate Denton Copeland had a great bargaining chip. His Mother made peach pies that would make Sister Schubert close shop. I am drooling as I typed that last sentence.

When I went into high school coaching, my first (wrong) regret was having to eat school lunches every day. Boy how they changed after graduating high school in 1970 to my first-year coaching at Cherokee in 1974. The meals were awesome. Being single, starving and broke meant the cooks always felt sorry for the coaches. Brag on the cooks and they poured the extra food on your plate. Andy Bolding and I got our fair share in the day. Taco salad, fried chicken, pork chops, a salad bar, cheeseburgers, and desserts that were sweet enough to make you lick the paint off the plate. I never understood the combination of square pizza with a side of niblet corn.

Recently, we visited the lunchroom at my Grandson’s school. They had more choices than the old Morrison’s Cafeteria near Bryant Denny. The difference? The food was better. Of course, today, you are supposed to eat healthier and stay away from foods like cornbread, beans, fried taters and guess-a-meat. I couldn’t complain though about the free-range chicken fingers, organic potatoes, sauteed cauliflowers and apple slices. I had to turn down the carrot juice.

In our day, if you were ever caught sneaking in a soft drink (Coke), that meant a trip to see Mr. Newman, the principal. Cokes were sold in machines at recess in the halls for a dime but don’t dare think of avoiding the lunchroom milk. Before koozies, we had our own clandestine manner of keeping drinks cold. It was called aluminum foil, tin foil or Reynold’s wrap around the can. We would recycle the foil for the next day’s drinks.

Did you ever wonder about food allergies back then? Was anyone allergic to milk? Or nuts? Or gluten? We didn’t even know that cholesterol existed. If Tiny Rose had found some, she would have fried it in commodity lard and served it with a side of hominy.

For years, the only school lunchroom in Colbert County that made money was Brick Elementary where Daddy was the principal from 1971 through 1985. Why? Two reasons: they invited the local farmers and laborers to eat with the kids. These men got a whole lot of food for less than 3 dollars and the lunchroom made money. On Fridays, Daddy brought a mess of catfish that he had caught on his trotline to be cooked for these same workers. Since the statute of limitations is over, the health department pencil pushers would have gone crazy writing citations IF they had visited.

Need a good laugh with your spouse who struggles cooking? Tell them about “old-school” lunches and the special secret:

“Just add gravy to it.”