I wrote this in 2005, not that long after Bob's Little Acre began. I believe it was my first attempt at branching into food writing, or raving on about my family. I never stopped either, and I still make the squash casserole, too.
A History in Squash
Vegetative Reminiscences by Robin Ford Wallace
Recently, I returned after a three-week vacation to find –
Well, you don’t want to know. After three weeks of neglect, my garden could be more aptly characterized as Bob’s Little Rain Forest. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by the more productive sounds of the lawn mower buzzing around in a business-like fashion, secateurs decapitating deadheads in a grim rhythm reminiscent of the French Revolution, and your narrator cussing muscularly as she dislodged weed after weed like Madame DeFarge dispatching aristocrats.
My corn had either not come up or it had been subsumed into another time-space continuum, where, presumably, it is keeping the flowers out front company, because they aren’t there either. So after having spent most of the winter planning a magazine-cover garden, I must now be content with a “WLHL” theme – Whatever Lowe’s Had Left..
The one pleasant surprise was that the tiny squash plants I’d left were now teeming with vegetables, some the size of Western states. What else was there to do but to make Aunt Fanny’s Cabin Squash Casserole?
If this were a normal gardening column, I would now give you a recipe for squash casserole. It isn’t and I won’t; you must wait while I maunder on about Aunt Fanny’s Cabin and my brother Jack.
When I was growing up, Aunt Fanny’s Cabin was situated on Campbell Road in Smyrna, Ga., in between my house and my high school. Today it would be so politically incorrect that if you went there you might actually fall over dead in mortification. Back then it was just shocking.
Outside, it was made to look like an old slave cabin. On the sign, the N’s in Fanny were turned around the wrong way to show that Fanny was no Rhodes scholar. Inside, the place was posh, with pictures on the walls of celebrities who had eaten there.
The waitresses at Aunt Fanny’s were required to be black and enormously fat, and they were all dressed like Mammy in Gone With The Wind. I remember 25 years ago thinking how degrading it was for them; now, 40-plus and spreading myself, I am wryly amused at the idea that there used to be a place you could make stripper-level tips when you weighed 280.
After you sat down, a little black boy would come to you with a blackboard hung around his neck like a Saint Bernard. This was the menu. Really I suppose the little boy was the son or grandson of one of the waitresses but even 25 years ago I don’t know how they got away with it. To say nothing of the chair-squirming indignity of it, weren’t there child labor laws?
The menu was simple and expensive. You could have steak, fried chicken or perhaps catfish, and whatever you ordered you would get the vegetables, all of them cooked to death with masses of fat, in fact delicious in a myocardial-infarction-inducing kind of way.
Aunt Fanny’s catered, surprise, surprise, to the tourist trade. At the Cabin, diners could pay out the nose for a taste of what was being marketed, anyway, as The Old South. But the prices were way too high for those of us in the working-class neighborhoods surrounding it, so despite the fact that I passed the place a couple of times a day on the school bus, I would probably never have crossed the threshold had it not been for my brother Jack,.
In high school, Jack got a job as a busboy there. He was the kind of kid who always had his own money from the time he was 5, usually from ways that wouldn’t bear investigation. Working at the Cabin, he made enough money to buy a car before he was old enough to drive it, so he’d push it out of the driveway without turning on the motor, hoping no one would notice. This worked except for the times he had an accident or got stopped by the police. Then there would be hell to pay but Jack was used to it and took it as a matter of course. He was dashing and corrupt and the girls were all mad for him.
So were the 280-pound waitresses and the customers, and whatever his faults Jack was a good worker. He was promoted and after he graduated he became an assistant manager at Aunt Fanny’s.
So there Jack was, 20-something, making good money and living at home where there was free rent and laundry service, enjoying the careless, sinful life every boy dreams of, at last freed from the injurious strictures of the public education system. The only thing he’d ever liked about school was the girls.
This fondness for high school girls endured far past Jack’s graduation, in fact, and was reciprocated generously. One of them, a busgirl at Aunt Fanny’s, was so crazy about Jack that she used to climb in his window at my parents’ house at night, with the predictable result.
The predictable result is now attending college in South Carolina and is called Tess. Jack and Lisa have a boy as well, though they got out of the restaurant biz and anyway Aunt Fanny’s shut down in the ‘90s, whether from financial trouble or embarrassment I don’t know.
Now. Wasn’t I saying something about squash casserole?
Take squash and stew or steam it with onions until it is almost mush. Then drain, add cracker crumbs and an entire stick of butter and, with a fork or potato masher, reduce it the rest of the way to mush. Salt and pepper it to taste, put it in an iron skillet and bake at 400 until the top is brown.
You may vary the amounts depending on how much squash you’ve got. The only secret is to add enough butter to make a doctor drop you as a patient.
THE END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
