City Chicken
(Grandma's City Chicken)
The rain was the Marine’s benediction, softening the soil.
With the ceremony was done, we maneuvered the vehicles out of the narrow roads in the city of the dead and got back on the highway. We formed a little caravan and drove up the road to the old Catholic cemetery across the road.
The Marine’s wife was over there, the mother of my cousins, along with the Grandma and Grandpa, and great-grandpa and great aunt Anastasia.
We trooped down the hill to pay our respects. Of the Wild Irishman’s three lovely daughters, only Mom remains.
Her younger sister is with her parents, there on the Hill. Her big sister is in the ground up in Pennsylvania, with her husband Bob. There are still at least four plots available on the Hill, and they must be paid for. We cousins looked at each other, and decided that none of us were likely to use them.
This could be the last time that important business would call us to the Hill, at least all together, and we decided to go back down by the river and get a bite of real home cooking before we dispersed to the points of the compass.
It is funny how the food connects us to this place. Grandma cooked the rich red beets just the way her mother did, and hard-cooked eggs with the deviled stuffing, and the City Chicken that drove us wild as kids. None of us had eaten food like that in years. It was something from this town that was always there in memory, and comes back at the oddest times.
We parked the cars by the curb right by the last restaurant left downtown, not far from the shadow of the Bridge to Nowhere.
We trooped into Riva’s and had no problem finding a long table that would accommodate us all.
The wait staff teamed up to serve us, and asked what might have brought us all here. I was tempted to say “the home cooking,” like it said on the sign outside, but my cousin said that we were here for a funeral, and the Waitress said they got a lot of funeral traffic, people coming back for the services, getting a bite of home-cooked food, and then going away again.
“Do you remember what City Chicken actually was?” I asked. “It definitely wasn’t chicken.”
My middle cousin pursed her lips in thought. She is a lovely woman, and I see a lot of my mom in her clear skin and pretty eyes. “I think it was pork and veal, cut in cubes and battered with an egg mixture with crackers and bread crumbs. The trick was to get it on a stick.”
I remembered the sticks. That was the exciting part at Grandma’s dinner table. I did not care for the beets, which were red as blood.
We agreed we had a good run in the little river town, and we talked with the waitress about the woes of the high school football team where the Wild Irishman had been a hero, and as she brought us sweet tea, we told all the stories, the good ones and the others.
I have notes, but that is family business and best left with those who care about such things.
“Mom says that they moved here from Dillonvale to live with Great-grandmother when she was in the third grade. That would have been in 1930 or 1931.” I said.
Times were hard then or it never would have happened that way. The house by the southern viaduct of the Stone Bridge was cramped with the three little girls and the three adults. That was the year before Grandpa joined the other angry Vets in the great Bonus March on Washington.
The bonus eventually was paid, not that FDR wanted to do it, and Grandpa must have used the money to move the family to their own place, first on Nobel Street, and then Franklin.
Mom got out of the Ohio Valley shortly after the Wild Irishman died in 1941, at the ripe old age of 44.
Grandma had to scramble to keep things together, and got a job as the Girl Friday in the bank on main street. She remarried, to a quiet man named Evan who worked for the electric company in Massilon, and was the only grandfather any of us remember.
The Wild Irishman had been in the ground on the Hill for a decade before any of us showed up.
The Waitress knew him, or at least knew of him, since is picture is still up on the wall of fame at the high school. She placed a plate of home-cooked meat loaf swimming in real home-made gravy in front of my cousin. She picked at it, as her husband dove with gusto in to the Greek-style tip-steak over potatoes.
Mom is not on the wall of fame, though she probably should have been. She was the valedictorian of the class of 1941. She won one of the Ohio scholarships, and was the first of her family to go on to higher education.
She entered Bethany College with the class of 1942, I think, and completed her four-year degree in two and a half years. She kept up with the boys on the three-year plan and beat them. She had a part time job in the dean's office, and when he went to Manhattan for a job in the magical Chrysler Building, he asked her to come along and join his staff at the Texas Company, predecessor to TEXACO.
Grandma gave her blessing, and assured her that the big move would work out just fine. She got on the train for Pittsburgh and points north in late '44 or early '45. She did not look back. In Manhattan, she lived in Spellman Hall, at 607 Hudson Street in the Village. She was able to greet some of the Ohio boys coming back from overseas. It was an exciting time in the world's most exciting city.
It was quite a contrast from quiet little Bellaire, a crossroads town for people going somewhere else, stopping only for a bite to eat.
We talked about a lot of things, and commented on how good the food was. Real home cooking, and I sensed that all of us were happy that we were not the ones in this little town doing the cooking.
It was a busy week to come, and after the brunch, we got up and left town in our various directions into the rain on Ohio Route Seven along the wide brown river. Northbound for me, and then west on Interstate 470. Southbound by air for the Cousins, back their Thanksgivings in Florida,
My favorite cousin gave me a thin smile. “Last time we will ever be here,” she said, and I shook my head in agreement.
They blew by me in their rental cars as I tried to punch up my destination in Michigan on the GPS. When I had the way-points straight on the device, I wheeled the big Lincoln on to Ohio Route 7, passed the bridge on my right, and headed north.
As to the Marine we left behind on the Hill, he had been on Peleliu, fighting for his life when Mom left for the Big Apple. He had been sweet on her first, before she left for The City, and when he came back from the war he married my Aunt.
Mom still talks about what a figure he cut in high school, with his big old convertible, that blonde hair and sunny smile, a cigar clenched in his teeth.
Immortal.
Grandma’s City Chicken:
CITY CHICKEN
2 1/2 lb. lean pork, cut into 1 inch cubes
2 1/2 lbs. lean veal, cut into 1 inch cubes
3 or 4 eggs
Cracker or bread crumbs
Salt
30-35 wooden candy apple sticks
Flour
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com