Childhood Sweets
This is the continuation of me blogging meals that I ate forty years ago. The series is based on the conviction that most of my best food memories come from the time before I reached fifteen.
I have always liked sweets, which is why I have the shameful, self-inflicted, type 2 diabetes, and while I could go on and on about the cakes, chocolates, and candy bars I ingested as a kid, I figured I would focus on only two items, the Fluffernutter and the dusty miller. I chose these two foods not only because they both are regional taste treats, but also because neither appeals to me, or most of my siblings, any longer.
The Fluffernutter
My mother was from Westerly, Rhode Island. My grandmother had a house by the ocean where we stayed each year for the month of July. My grandmother was born around 1902, so to stay in her house was to skip a generation and be immersed in the food mores of the nineteenth century. My mother was a child of the 30s and 40s, so she too had some legacy food beliefs that seemed out of step when I was a kid.
Both of them were wary of “starches” and “sweets.” You were not supposed to fill up on bread or potatoes. Juice was served in a four ounce glass. We seldom ate any kind of pasta, and my mother once said, “all that pasta is why Italian boys are fat.” You may not know that Italian kids are fat. See, not only…
