Slumgullion

It’s a landmark day; I looked up the meaning of Slumgullion for the first time. My folks made this simple hamburger, onion, tomato, macaroni dish for years and I never once thought about the name. My assumption was always that it was made the same in every household. The poor might be able to afford it, its economy was probably part of what helped keep the middle class in the middle and if the rich never had it, well, sorry for them. It is the ultimate comfort food hot or cold (I’m munching it cold for breakfast this morning). Far predating Hamburger Helper, it’s simplicity makes you wonder why folks fall for those prepackaged ingredients full of chemicals you’re body doesn’t need and cardboard that requires recycling. (It just occurred to me that, mid century, our "recycling bin" was a burning barrel-and we lived in the city.)

Ah, but back to Slumgullion and its commercially generated spawn, Hamburger Helper. Does the fact that Slumgullion and its like are so easy to make from scratch say something about the Hamburger Helper fans being challenged by larder stocking skills? Do many people think one meal at a time? Actually, my culinarily creative husband is an inveterate one-meal-at-a-time thinker. “How do I know what I’ll be hungry for a week from now?” he laments when chided. It works, though, because I’ve become a larder stocker. It's something he takes advantage of and I don’t say anything about because he isn’t going to change and he’s such a good cook. Slumgullion doesn’t take a fancy larder, though. No capers needed.

One evening enjoying a gourmet dinner out with friends the subject of Slumgullion came up. “My Mom made that!” a friend exclaimed when told of the ingredients but we called it (I can’t remember the name he used but it was as odd sounding as Slumgullion, starting with a T, I think.) Since then, I've asked alot of people about Slumgullion and everyone with whom I’ve used the term instantly knew the meaning. It might have been made with slight differences in their households but there was a universal understanding. I don’t hang with the super rich, so I don’t know if they were Slumgullion deprived.

Here is our family’s recipe for Slumgullion. You could fancy it up with chopped olives, Parmesan cheese and other stuff, I guess, but plain is still amazing. I do cheat a bit and use Marinara sauce instead of plain tomato sauce. I’d love to hear of other approaches to it and of other names given to the concoction. And, by the way, the first offering of the definition I found bothered me a bit (the word cesspool was in there somewhere) but the last definition fit it to a T – meat stew.

Slumgullion

Ingredients:
1 lb. hamburger
1 large onion, chopped
Tomato sauce (I would guess 2 14oz cans. I used a jar of marinara sauce and about 4 Tbsps. tomato paste because I have good larder stocking skills.)
2 cups elbow macaroni (that’s 2 cups when uncooked)
1 Tbsp. sugar
Salt to taste

Instructions:

Brown the hamburger and chopped onion. Drain excess grease. Dump in tomato sauce, cooked macaroni, sugar and salt. Stir together and heat.

Raised Green

There is an area in India where, because of religious beliefs, many folks do not eat onions or garlic. Now, you’ll find me a most tolerant person of even the most odd-seeming religious convictions but – onions and garlic!? Since my husband and I are of the ‘live to eat’ rather than the ‘eat to live' crowd, I tried to imagine cuisine without onions and garlic.

Unbelievably, I survived the first twenty years of my life without garlic (I do believe I’ve made up for it since). With all the amazing fresh produce that emerged from my Dad’s huge and thriving yearly gardens and with the universal love of anything green and fresh, I don’t now how garlic slipped by them. I think they pretty much stuck to the vegetable array that had filled their plates in childhood. Thinking about that endless stream of green things to our table, though, they really did stick to the basics, onions, green and yellow, literally tons of potatoes, ears of corn, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage (for vats of homemade sauerkraut) tomatoes, big, yellow Hubbard squashes (to be baked with butter and sugar), cucumbers and a few pumpkins for Halloween carving. There was that odd and wonderful asparagus patch my Dad tended lovingly and bunches of rhubarb on the side of the garage. Oh, and his huge and enviable raspberry patch with plants in it that were, he’d proudly explain, ‘75 years old’. How spoiled was I by all those readily munchable raspberries. And by the beautiful quart jars filled of peaches, apricots, and pears that lined our basement shelves each year. One day each year the whole family, grandparents, aunts and kids would trek to Wawawi, a sunnier place some twenty miles or so near a river to spend the day picking fruit for canning.

And, they’d bring home extra cucumbers from those picking trips because every year they would “put up” 60 quarts of dill pickles. Only after my cousin married a German fellow who introduced the “amazing” idea of hot peppers amidst the pickles was there a change from the established pattern. After that a certain number of quarts would get the peppers, for my Dad who quickly developed a taste for the peppery hotness. Hot peppers had certainly not been a part of those gardens or of the food they ate (wrong soil I now know - hot peppers had grown well in the soil of my husbands folks in Nevada and, thus had been a part of what he had learned to love.)

I guess there wasn’t a lot of vegetable experimentation. No garlic appeared in our dishes. I never met a bell pepper until I was grown. An avocado was a foreign animal to them (an adventuresome Uncle would return once in a while and enjoy avocado with salt, I heard said. I vividly remember my mom commenting, “They taste like soap.” Though a vegetable lover and willing experimenter, it took me way into my twenties to develop a taste for avocado (in guacamole) and into my thirties to enjoy it straight on sandwiches. Yeah, I know it’s really a fruit but it seems awfully vegetably to me.

The tomatoes were eaten fresh, not “put up”. Dad ate the thick sweet slices with salt and pepper. Mom and I loved sugar on ours. In the summer, salads (something unfamiliar in their youths because of no refrigeration for mayonnaise) would appear. Iceberg lettuce (my favorite to this day) and chunks of fresh tomato mixed with mayonnaise. On special occasions, a can of shrimp would be added. The concept of a salad appearing as part of what they ate stuck in my Dad’s memory. He told the tale of remembering his mother chatting with friends on the party line all agog over the new idea of a “vegetable salad”. He called them vegetable salads all his life.

Ah the vegetables of my youth, all freshly picked and full of taste. And back to onions, my Dad loved those little green onions, we now call scallions, on a little plate at dinner along side those slices of white bread. He'd eat each one with a little salt. Funny, as so many other dishes were filled with onions, no one ate them straight except dad. I guess there were some chopped into those green salads sometimes.

Since learning to make Indian food, I’m amazed at how they’ve come to combine vegetables. I make a Dahl (a dish with lentils or dried peas). It’s a heavenly mixture of zucchini, onions, tomatoes and green peppers all swirled together with aromatic spices and at the end combined with yellow peas. My folks would not ever have imagined combining vegetables this way. The only combining they did was to dump carrots, potatoes and onions together into a beef stew. The only vegetable combining I truly remember was when the “new potatoes” were on, new potatoes and fresh peas swimming in a cream sauce with a pinch or two of sugar. It was yummy but certainly not the serious vegetable combining of the Indian dahls. And, even though where I was raised is now known as the “Pea and Lentil Capital of the World” no dried pea I ever knew existed outside split pea soup and I never munched on one lentil during my entire childhood.

Ah, see where onions and garlic can lead one? I certainly thank my folks for my love of vegetables. I wish I could share with them some things I’ve learned and amaze them with my vegetable repertoire. I think they’d have loved, or at least tried, anything done with vegetables as long as avocados weren’t in the mix. And, if dad had his garden today, I’ll bet I could convince him to plant some garlic.