Mom's Meat

When rationing finally ended, I was about six, just in time to begin to feast on Sunday roast. We didn’t have much money but there was always meat: glorious standing rib roasts, tender lamb legs, crispy fatty pork loins and cheap hamburger from Milton’s once a week.

Every Wednesday Mom sent me to Milton’s store with the $30 grocery check Dad had given her. Milton would cash the check and pay off the tab we ran at his grocery-cum-post office in center of Middle Haddam, a tiny village time has yet to discover. Creaky board floors, trembling fluorescent lights and once a week, a delivery of fatty hamburger, the only real meat in the case if you didn’t count a fat roll of bologna and a smaller roll of liverwurst, sometimes spotted with blue mould. By Thursday, the hamburger would be doubtful, too.

Dust settled on Milton’s canned sardines and beets. Only the candy items moved well as we kids hung out waiting for the school bus and neighbors came to pick up their mail. Milton was an irascible old coot—probably almost fifty, then—who watched us kids like a hawk to be sure we didn’t steal a roll of Necco wafers.

“Don’t be looking in other people’s boxes, you hear?” he’d snarl if we idled too long in from of the post box wall. Each box had its four inch square glass door that opened with two brass knobs. Our combination was E1, P1. I always wondered if that combination would work with any other box. I never got to try them all but I could see who had mail and who didn’t before he drove me away.

Milton himself would unload the big canvas mail bags and furiously stuff the boxes, first letters, then junk mail. Only his daughter, Sandra, a good pal of mine, was allowed anywhere near the mail sorting room behind the boxes and he wasn’t nice to her, either. We all felt sorry for Sandra having such a father. Sometimes I’d dawdle at the postal window where I could watch him, just to annoy him. It sure did. “You got nothin’ else to do? Get outta here.”

“Why is Milton so crabby?” I asked Mom.

“Now dear, that’s not nice.” But she herself called him crabby or worse. “Probably because we don’t shop there enough.”

“But there’s nothing to buy. It’s all old stuff we don’t like.”

No comment from my mother. We did buy stuff but only last minute things like margarine or Uncle Ben’s rice.

“Do you have any cranberry sauce?”

“Of course we have cranberry sauce,” Milton would reply testily. “It’s Thanksgiving, ain’t it? Right over there next the peas.” Sure enough, the familiar purple and white Ocean Spray can, right next to the Green Giant peas but not the tiny, tender peas we preferred. We all knew better than to suggest items for Milton to stock. November was the only time Milton carried cranberry sauce.

Mom was ambivalent about shopping at Milton’s. She felt sorry his store never seemed to thrive although it was smack in the middle of Middle Haddam. But his prices were higher than Mickey’s, two miles up the road. If you google Middle Haddam you’ll find it in the dead center of Connecticut, far, far from the glorious moneyed suburbs of New York City. And yes, there is a Haddam and an East Haddam, but no North Haddam or West Haddam so I couldn’t tell you how the ‘Middle’ came to be. Take a guess.

Certainly Mickey’s store had more selection, almost as much as the A&P supermarket way over in Middletown, twenty minutes away. In Middletown (no relation to Middle Haddam at all) we could shop at an Italian greengrocer—exotic fruits and vegetables even in winter—an Italian bakery and a real Jewish deli: all three sold fabulous food. Oh, the late night pizza in the bakery after the bakers set the loaves to rise and the dripping, warm, freshly sliced pastrami on fresh, black rye bread. Artichokes, fresh string beans, brilliant tangerines, Christmas colors in the wood cases open to the weather all winter. Milton’s store would never compete with that.

Of course Milton knew it and it griped him. If more people would shop with him, he’d stock more inventory but until people bought more, the hell with us. Well, the third-class post office probably carried the store. Along with Necco Wafers.

Once a week we shopped at Mickey's. The store was brightly lit, the shelves were freshly stocked and it smelled of bread. By the cashier, those boxes of Entenman's coffee cakes, soft, raisony, thinly iced. Daddy loved these for his Sunday morning breakfast. He could eat almost the whole box. He was welcome to it. Mom and I thought they were way too sweet. And she never ate any breakfast but black coffee and a Chesterfield cigarette.

Behind the meat case, Mickey Adler or his kid Jackie, a taller and handsomer version of his old man, greeted Mom with a big smile, wiping his hands on his bloody white butcher apron. A short guy with a moustache under his big nose, Mickey could barely see over the top of the meat case.

“So, Sally, a nice Porterhouse today?” he rasped in his lower East Side Jewish accent. “Just got in some beauties. Let me show you.”

Before Mom could answer he ducked into the cooler and returned with a loin of beautifully marbled beef cradled in his arms like a child. “About like this?” he marked a spot with his fingers. “One? Maybe two?”

Mom shook her head. “One’s enough for today, thanks. Same as usual, about two inches.” She was already moving down the long case toward the pork. “And that pork loin looks good.”

Mickey nodded and set the beef down on the cutting counter. He swiped the long curved knife up and down against a sharpening rod and leaned the blade into the flesh. When the steak fell into his left hand he held it up like a gift for her to see before he slapped it on the scale.

“Sure you don’t want another?” Then he was wrapping it and fixing the paper with a yank of tape. He scribbled the price. His wife or a daughter-in-law would ring it up.

For Sunday dinner it had to be a Porterhouse steak or a rib roast. Alongside the roast, potatoes in the pan turned brown all over. When Dad carved, he first set aside a thin slice of the salty, caramelized dark outside, then worked into the pink and red center. I liked both: some of that outside and the rare inner.

If Mom was feeling fancy, she’d make Yorkshire pudding in the pan. But that meant no drippings for gravy, a high price to pay for one meal's crispy popover.

The next night would be cold sliced beef, then hash from roast bits and pieces browned in the fatty parts frizzled up with a dash Worcestershire Sauce and left-over potatoes or just poured over white bread. If there was enough, a divine sandwich in between these meals. My mother loved roast beef sandwiches. No horseradish, just salt. Her big, strong teeth ripped the rare beef like a tiger's.

Wednesday night, hamburgers from Milton’s or spaghetti with Milton’s burger in the sauce. Never, ever, any canned spaghetti sauce, only burger, tomato paste, garlic and water. Just as Lydia’s Family Table makes it. And spaghetti al dente, of course.

In the Middle of Nowhere, Connecticut, on thirty bucks a week, we ate well.