Words and Memories
Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 05:56AM As most of my readers know, I am a word nerd. I love words and definitions. I get excited when I come across a word I don't know. I feel triumphant when I am able to discern the precise meaning by reading the word in context or discerning its Latin or Greek root. I talk about words, make lists of words, subscribe to blogs about words and, of course, occasionally I blog about words.
This morning I came across a word that I thought was just a family word. A word my mother learned from her mother and that I learned from her. Slumgullion. (Although my grandmother pronounced it 'slumgOlliun.') Slumgullion was her word for a delicious skillet dish she made from ground beef, onions and peppers, tomatoes, and macaroni. Lots of people make this dish (no one, not even my mother, who is a fantastic cook, could make it better) and I've heard it called goulash, Hungarian goulash, hot dish, but never slumgullion. So, I was excited and curious this morning when my Google Reader presented me with a new post from World Wide Words that included the word slumgullion:
The word sounds vaguely unpleasant, a good example of form matching meaning, since Americans have for more than for 150 years used it for a variety of things that are unpleasant to various degrees. . .
Today it means a cheap stew made by throwing anything handy into a pot with water and boiling it, an improvised dish which has had many other names, such as Mulligan stew and Irish stew. . .
American dictionaries guess that it may be a combination of slum, an old English term meaning slime (nothing to do with a squalid urban area, the word for which is an old bit of slang of unknown origin) plus gullion, English dialect for mud or a cesspool. This is still known in Scots and is probably from the Irish goilín for a pit or pool.
My grandmother was of Scottish descent. She knew how to take whatever 'little bit of this and little bit of that 'that she had at hand and make a meal--a delicious meal, mind you--and even during the depression, my mother's family never went hungry. And I promise you, there was nothing unpleasant about her concoctions!
I still make slumgullion, but I call it goulash now. I still make several dishes that my grandmother made and I think I must have inherited my skill at resurrecting leftovers and recreating them into completely new dishes from her.
I still love her 'Hungarian Bean Soup' which was a hearty soup she'd make from leftover navy beans and ham. To the thick, end-of-the-pot beans she'd add a jar of her own canned tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Mmmm. I remember how good that smelled and how good it tasted with bread and butter--a staple at my grandparents' table.
I remember her taking some leftover roast beef, carrots, potatoes, and onions from dinner the night before and presenting it the next evening as beef stew. She whipped that meal together in no time flat and somehow the stew tasted as though it had simmered on the back burner all afternoon and was only ever meant to be beef stew.
I loved watching her make egg noodles. She'd put a cup or two of flour on the kitchen table and sprinkle salt over it. Then she'd make a well in the flour with her finger and fill the well with egg yolks. Nothing was measured. Then she'd scramble the yolks with a fork and she'd start working in the flour. Sometimes she'd add more flour, sometimes she'd leave some on the counter. Somehow she knew just when to stop adding flour. I asked her once "how do you know when to stop adding flour?" Her answer? "You just know." The noodle dough was rolled out thin as could be and rapidly cut with a knife into long strips. Then they were either immediately put into the meat and broth that was simmering away on the stove or, if the noodles were for another day, they were gathered up and shaken in a brown paper bag with some flour and then draped over the back of the kitchen chairs to dry.
Isn't it funny how one little, obscure word can open a floodgate of memories?
What memories do you have of cooking with your grandma?
Reader Comments (3)
I never knew that slumgullion is a real word; I never thought to actually look it up in the dictionary. When I was in college (I'm not saying how many years ago) six of us lived in an upstairs flat and shared cooking responsibilities. One of the gals would use "slumgullion" as a name for various casseroles/stews; I always thought she or her family had made up the word.
I don't have memories of cooking with my mother's mother, but we siblings all remember that when we visited on Sunday afternoons she always served saltines with Velveeta at coffee time. She was on a limited budget and we always enjoyed our visits and her refreshments.
I didn't actually know my paternal grandmother; she died when I was seven years old. I do remember, though, that she was an excellent pie-maker. My father says I inherited that from her. She did not teach me to make pastry, but she did teach my aunt (she is married to my dad's youngest brother, and she lived with my grandmother for a year while she and my uncle built their house) and my aunt taught me. My aunt taught me a lot about cooking, canning and baking. I remember one time making a concoction she called "meat muck," but was officially called Cucumber Chutney. It had cucumbers, alright, but it had onions and vinegar as well, and it made my eyes water every time we made it. It was kind of like a relish, but I never cared for it. The family ate it with roast beef.
Both of my grandmothers died before I was born, so I used to seek out older women and sit close, hoping against hope that they might want to have me as a granddaughter. None did, but my Aunt Anna loved me in a very grandmotherly way. Although I never met her, I am a lot like my mother's mother. I only know this because as I started to cook and become a homemaker, my mother would share little vignettes of how her mother used to do things the way I did.
My mother had seven children and a greenhouse and florist shop to run, so she did most of her cooking on the run- I learned most of my cooking skills from Betty Crocker and Julia Childs. And yet, I seem to cook a lot like YOUR grandmother! That is exactly how I make noodles, and bread- I have to work hard to come up with measurements when I post a recipe.