I appreciate that so many of you have written to say that you especially enjoy those essays where I delve into my childhood and the nostalgia it evokes for your own early years. I firmly believe that our pasts beat within us like a second heart.
But I am hesitant to write about one particular childhood memory because it is so common to all of us that it seems more of a cliche than a vivid reminiscence. But why not, since who of us does not enjoy that shared memory of the ultimate childhood comfort lunch: tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich? I suppose the grilled cheese part could have varied a bit, depending on what kind of bread and what kind of cheese was used, but it would be almost impossible to think of any other soup but tomato, and any other company that produced it but… Campbell’s.
I can still see my mother standing at the stove with the red-and-white Campbell’s soup can that she had filled with whole milk, slowly stirring it into the glop of condensed tomato in the saucepan. At the same time, she would be grilling the buttered Wonder bread slices with American cheese nestled inside. Oh, the beauty of that perfectly singed sandwich, hot from the skillet. No wonder I nearly salivated last week when a friend told me that he decided to paint his kitchen in the shade of “golden brown.”
It was around this same time that our junior high school took us all on a field trip to the John Herron Art Institute of Indianapolis. We’d seen famous pictures before, but this was our first exposure to “abstract expressionism,” with displays of modern art everywhere — squiggles on canvases hanging on walls and mounted floor exhibits of bizarre-looking alloy sculptures. Mostly, they just confused us. One of my classmates was staring intently at a small, bright red metal contrivance mounted on a display wall with a black arrow pointing downward. Our teacher informed him that it was just the fire alarm.
Many of us Sixties kids were resigned never to understand this new abstract art, but then suddenly Pop Art appeared, and the liquid part of Mom’s comfort lunch was at its forefront. I still remember my first sight of Andy Warhol’s series of paintings entitled Campbell’s Soup Cans on a poster in college. Finally, here was modern art that did not flaunt its abstraction and difficulty of interpretation but instead celebrated the material culture that had nurtured and delighted us baby boomers. We all instantly understood that. It was a better modern art—the modernity of our everyday life.
I confess that after my initial joy in viewing Warhol’s astonishing new medium, I then became fascinated with reading the labels of the cans and noting which varieties I’d actually tasted. There were the usual suspects: tomato, chicken noodle, cream of mushroom, vegetable beef: yep, yep, yep, and yep. But smack in the middle of Warhol’s soup fest was a can label that read PEPPER POT. Now, there was one I’d never seen on the grocery shelf, let alone sampled. And a sudden idea sprouted.
I would buy that brand at the university grocery that very day and make it for lunch on my hot plate in my dorm room. I would recapture the childhood solace of Campbell’s soup now that I was nearly an adult.
I decided to forego the grilled cheese sandwich. Yes, I could make it on my hot plate, but I lacked the culinary skill necessary to make a decent one (as I probably still do: be happy you are reading my essays, not attending my dinner parties). I “borrowed” a can opener from my suitemate, who foolishly had left his door unlocked when he left for class.
I poured the soup into my saucepan, added water, stirred, and served it up in my Indiana University mug, normally reserved for pennies that I’d spy on the ground as I walked to classes. Of course, I’d carefully wiped the mug out with my one remaining clean sock. One can’t be too careful.
I took a spoonful and waited for that first taste of nostalgia…
BLECH! It wasn’t nostalgic; it was nauseating. Could I have possibly flubbed warming up canned soup? No. What was in this ghastly gruel anyway? I read the ingredients: potatoes, onions, carrots, peppers, broth, tripe…Tripe? I opened my dictionary (talk about nostalgia— you remember dictionaries, don’t you?): “TRIPE— the tissue of the first or second stomach of a cow. Also known as OFFAL.”
Go ahead, insert your “offal” pun here.
So much for being transported back to my simple childhood days. I should have stuck with tomato soup, but I was lured away by the new and exotic, a definite breach of nostalgia etiquette. Besides, I think I may have rushed my aborted trip down memory lane. At 19, I was barely on the road to late adolescence. Now, at 76, I have come to agree with American sage and Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, who once drolly noted, “Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.”
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here