Eating through a family reunion

I made up a batch of Red Lobster garlic cheese biscuits to take to a family reunion last weekend.  I went back to check a few minutes after I put them out, and I think everyone was being polite—they’d taken ’em all so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by having leftovers to take back home.

Actually, I’m sorry I didn’t have a notepad with me.  It would have been interesting to make a list of all the dishes people had brought to the reunion—to feed about a hundred people, there was a table a good forty to fifty feet long covered with every kind of reunion-type food you could think of, and one or two you normally don’t think of in connection with family reunions.  The Reunion Association paid for the beef (a couple of hundred pounds of roasts, that had a dry rub put on and then open-pit barbecued all night), and three or four of the cousins who have been doin’ the barbecue for years stayed up all night last night tendin’ the fire and tellin’ tales—which is about what you do at one of these proceedin’s.  Everybody else brought all the rest of the food in time for lunch at 12:30.

I didn’t get out to the reunion grounds in time for breakfast this morning.  The grounds are about ten acres out of the old family place, which the Reunion Association finally bought a few years back to ensure that we’d continue to have a place to have the reunion—after 104 years, it’d be a pity to break up the party.  Breakfast is usually served about sunup (in central Texas in August, that means about 7:30), and is always the same:  scrambled eggs and breaded pan-fried breakfast steaks cooked over an open fire, and cowboy coffee made in cast-iron washpots.

The eggs and steaks are cooked in these huge, square spider kind of frypans, about two feet on a side and with handles made from welded-on horseshoes.  They had one of the local blacksmiths make those pans years back, and pull ’em back out each year just for this whing-ding.  The fire is a combination of live oak and mesquite; we’ve got a ton of it, just for going out and gathering of it.  Usually, the barbecue cooks will rake out some of the coals they’ve been using all night and start the breakfast fire with that, then begin feeding the fire out of the barbecue woodpile.  The sine qua non for a campfire breakfast, though, may be the coffee.  You dump in coffee and water together; stand the washpot over the fire awhile, then dip up with a battered tin dipper.

After breakfast, those who are going to church go, and others go off to look at the family graves in the community cemetery.

This can be a hoot to watch; there are two unrelated families by the same name buried out there, and you’ll get cousins who are pretty confused about who is who and really don’t understand everything they think they know about who’s kin.  The explanations of how George Washington Cunningham (who’s one of the other bunch, and no kin at all) is really a brother to Richard Tankersley Cunningham (one or our bunch’s original twelve children), when given by a cousin who hasn’t been to a reunion in ten years, remembers three facts and got two of them wrong, can leave you somewhere between falling out laughing and fuming at the idiocy of this dim-bulb who fails to notice that this putative “Uncle George,” who is supposed to be Uncle Dick’s younger brother, is somehow sixteen years older than Uncle Dick.

Everyone else sits around at the grounds and gets caught up on visiting.  About noon, church starts turning out and everyone begins drifting back in with their covered dishes.  L mentioned that this year there were more fresh fruit and salads than in prior years.  That doesn’t surprise me; temperatures have been running 102 and 103 up there every day and barely any rain worth mentioning for weeks, and with weather like that, who wants to get in the kitchen and cook over an ol’ hot stove?

Just as a kind of unscientific whatever-I-can-remember, this was some of what was on the table:  broccoli-and-rice casserole, banana pudding, Waldorf salad, fresh mixed fruit salad in a watermelon basket, sauerkraut slaw, corn salad, baked beans, blackeyed peas with bacon and jalapeños, poppyseed muffins, pinto beans, buttermilk pie, pecan pie, pineapple upside-down cake, macaroni and cheese, an assortment of bought cakes (from those who shouldn’t be let near a kitchen), two or three different potato salads (no kartoffelsalat, though).  Bread was mostly store whitebread (I really can’t say I expected any better, although I keep hoping—I took a basil loaf last year, but it didn’t go over well).  The barbecue cooks did pretty well this year—the meat was still moist and tender (in bad years it approaches shoe leather), and the chunks were huge—the average single serving was six to eight ounces of beef, and folks were taking more than one.

The drinks were flat-out horrible.  They had a five-gallon thermos of unsweetened tea (instant!!  ICK!!), a five-gallon thermos of sweetened tea (also instant!!  TRIPLE ICK!!), a two-gallon thermos of red Kool-Aid (which, thank God, was labeled so no unsuspecting soul got suckered into it), and a five-gallon thermos of water.  Everything got drunk up, mostly because it was hot and dry and we were more worried about whether it was wet and cold than about how it tasted.

And then there was the catfish.  One boundary of the reunion grounds is a little creek, which has about half-dried up in the drought.  There are still several pools of water, but it’s not much to write home over.  Anyhow, some of the kids got out fishing poles and went down there to fish (I think more for the amusement than anything else), and someone actually hooked a channel cat out of one of those pools, which had swum down there in wetter times and got caught when the creek went down.  They weighed him out at 28 pounds and he measured about two feet and some—not as big as the monster channel cats and yellow cats I’ve seen taken out of the Army Engineers reservoir, which run upwards of 75 pounds and five feet long, but plenty respectable for a li’l ol’ bitty dried-up creek.

The fish caused an immense fuss.  I expect it was the first time in years anyone had even tried fishing that stretch of Mercer’s Creek, much less caught anything in it, and thirty or so people went galloping across the grounds to see this critter.  I didn’t bother—I’ve seen catfish before, and ever’ one I ever met had a serious case of the uggles.  Didn’t figger this one was any different.  The last I heard, one of the cooks was over there fileting him out and was gonna send him home (never did find out with who) to be the guest of honor at a fish fry.

Wolfgang Puck braises a Magic Mushroom in Liquid Paper for Oscar Zeta Acosta.  Fnord.