Looking for Indian Pudding

My grandfather, Morton C. "Jud" Files, born in 1910 in Gorham, Maine, always asked the young waitresses in restaurants we visited if they served Indian Pudding. Never once did we find any. It wasn't until I visited Durgin Park in Boston in 2007 that I found some, and it turns out it's made of corn meal. I sure wish we'd gone there when I was a boy--I would have loved to hear what Gramp thought of theirs.

Devil Dogs

Devil Dogs, made by Drake's Cakes in New England, fascinate me. I ate them by the dozen as a boy and still enjoy peeling off the wrapper and scarfing down an occasional Dog when I'm in the northeast. But I find that adults who did not grow up eating them find them inedible--the Saharan dryness of the cake-like parts defeats them before they learn to appreciate the delicious relief of the frosting in between.

For a summer or two around 1980, Drake's put a baseball card in every box of Devil Dogs, and I collected quite a few. I still have the George Brett card that I got. I used it as a bookmark for a long time, though, so it's pretty worn out.

Sandwiches of my youth

In Bucksport, Maine there used to be a small store, Dena's, that sold groceries, beer, and sandwiches--"Italian" sandwiches, which meant they contained either ham or salami and cheese, tomato, green peppers, pickles, onions, and lots of cayenne pepper on submarine-style bread. Dena lived upstairs, owned and ran the store, and made the sandwiches.

For many years my family, friends, and I would go inside Dena's and order a ham Italian or a salami Italian, and even though people often requested a fresh sandwich, which Dena would gladly make on the spot, they were best when they were a day or so old because the flavor intensified and the cheese became more like a cheese spread than a solid slice. And if you weren't careful the cayenne pepper would leave a burning ring around your lips, but that was somehow satisfying, too.

In the summer my pal Glenn DeRedin and I used to buzz up the river to Bucksport in my dad's rowboat, the heavy old Johnson outboard growling, the boat planing perfectly when we both sat on the stern seat, and tie the boat to the town dock and walk just up the bank and get a couple sandwiches. Not understanding that Dena's would not be there forever and we should therefore savor these sandwiches, we would often race to see who could eat one the fastest.

One evening we were eating, sitting on the edge of the dock, and a Coast Guard guy coasted up in his Boston Whaler, tied it quickly, ran up the bank, and ran back a few minutes later with a big bag of Dena's sandwiches under his arm. "How you doin', guys," he said casually, and warped the Whaler away from the dock by putting one of the big Evinrudes in reverse and one forward, and disappeared very quickly down the river. We thought that was the height of cool and were ready to join the Coast Guard on the spot.

And of course this post has an inevitable and maybe even trite ending: Glenn and I grew up, stood up as best men at each other's weddings, are now in our forties and still great pals, but Dena's store and her sandwiches are gone.

No Peas, Thanks

Peas topped my most-hated food list when I was a boy, and I still dislike them. Almost all other items on my list now seem tolerable or even tasty, but not peas. They have an odd skin on them, with odd white stuff inside. You can say this about lots of other vegetables, too, I know, but peas are green. I can't eat them. I won't eat them.

However, if you make soup out of them, I'll eat the soup.

Strange dog episode

In Georgia we lived next door to a terrific family, the Wetheringtons. The dad, Phil, was around my dad's age--at that time he was a captain in the Air Force--and they had four kids around my age and my sister's age. Our families got together frequently for cookouts, pizza nights, camping trips, and so on. Once an old dog, some sort of big Lab or Golden, wandered into the odd ravine between our yards and lay down to die. We kids brought it food and water, but it knew what it was there for and ignored us. Our folks were concerned, so they called people in the neighborhood to try to find out whose dog it was, but had no luck. So after a day or two my dad and Phil quietly shot the dog (they must have done it when we were at school or asleep, because I don't remember the sound of the shot) with Phil's Air Force sidearm. Then they buried it in the woods behind our houses. Two weeks later, a family arrived looking for the dog, and Phil told them that he was sorry; they'd tried to find the owners but had had to put the dog down. And the family dug that dog up and took it home with them. This says a lot about dog owners or central Georgia, or both.

Eating the dog food

When we were little my sister and parents and I lived in central Georgia, where my dad worked for the Air Force. We had a Boxer named Bo, who lived tied up out back, though we let him into the house quite a bit. My dad fed Bo every night, carrying the dog's meal down to him in a big plastic pail, and my dad really enjoyed creating a big dinner in the pail--he'd stir in crunchy dog food, table scraps, a cup or so of warm water, and any meat drippings that were handy. He'd also put some sort of vegetable on top more or less as an experiment, and the dog rarely failed to leave whatever it was--tomato wedge, lettuce leaf, a few ripe olives--sitting alone and clean in the bottom of the food pail. Once as a treat for Bo my dad bought these multicolored doggie doughnuts, and they looked and smelled pretty good, so my sister and I ate some, and they weren't bad. That led us to try out all the other dog food, and it was truly awful.

Very first post

My sister and I were in Bar Harbor one day--this was probably in the early 90s, post-college but before either of us were married or even behaving consistently like adults--and I bought a fancy ice-cream cone, one where much of the waffle thing has been dipped in dark chocolate. It was really good, and when it came time to bite the cone part, a large chunk fell off, landed on the sidewalk, and fell on the asphalt of the street. I quickly picked it up, blew on it, and ate it. My sister was mildly horrified. "A lot of people would call the spot where that chocolate landed 'the gutter,'" she pointed out. This was across the street from the old Red & White grocery store, across the street from Epi Sub.