A Final Thought: "Thank God it was you."
By Mitch Allen
A few years ago, before my parents passed away, they were having dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant in my hometown of Columbus, Georgia, when a flush-mount speaker fell out of the ceiling and hit Mom on the head. Speakers, as you may know, contain a heavy magnet and the blow knocked her unconscious for a moment.
Mom and Dad had eaten at this restaurant at least two times a week for many years and had become friends with the owner. As the EMTs were wheeling Mom out to the ambulance, the owner looked down at her and whispered, “Peggy, thank God it was you.”
Mom laughed out loud. She knew what the owner knew: love before litigation.
Friends don’t sue each other.
My parents were like that. In their final years they dined out a lot and got to know the owners and servers at many locally owned restaurants. They were generous tippers and often picked up the tab for others, particularly soldiers in uniform.
Mom was a good cook. She collected cookbooks and marched her way through classics like Julia Childs’ The Art of French Cooking, teaching us kids how to make cream sauces (never stop stirring) and how to sauté onions s-l-o-w-l-y for soupe à l’oignon.
And she always insisted that it is utterly impossible to salt grits enough once they’ve cooked. You have to salt the water. She even wrote her own cookbook titled, Generations’ Creations: Treasured Recipes of the Morgan-White Families, which is filled with mostly Southern dishes like Country Captain and Coca-Cola Chicken.
After moving to Northeast Ohio, I gave a copy of her cookbook to a friend of mine, John Scalzitti, a native of Erie, PA, who now lives in Brecksville. He told me he made the Coca-Cola Chicken using Diet Dr. Pepper and said it came out just fine. I told Mom about it and she shook her head and lamented, “How in the world did the Yankees win the war?”
This was important to her because Coca-Cola was invented in Columbus, Georgia, after Confederate soldier Dr. John Stith Pemberton was sliced in the chest by a Yankee saber in the Battle of Columbus—the last land battle of the Civil War (the battle actually took place a week after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, but none of the participating soldiers knew the war was already over because the telegraph lines had been cut).
In Pemberton’s post-war efforts to ease the pain of his injury, he became addicted to cocaine and developed the formula for Coca-Cola as a milder, less-addictive alternative.
Thus replacing it in a recipe with Diet Dr. Pepper is a veritable sacrilege.
As a result of Mom’s culinary knowledge, she never ate at chain restaurants except on the rare occasion when she craved Red Lobster’s cheddar biscuits. She valued quality food and long-lasting relationships too much.
“Why would anyone eat at an Olive Garden?” she would say. “You don’t know what they cook with and you never know who your server is going to be.”
Most people say they like national chain restaurants because they’re “consistent,” which generally means a convenient location, large portion sizes and not having one’s palate challenged by a chef who likes to experiment with locally-sourced ingredients.
And you’re also less likely to experience authenticity. The lawyers and accountants in the home offices and the chemists in the corporate food labs make absolutely sure of that.
For example, you won’t find any flour at Panera Bread because the dough isn’t made on-site. It’s pre-made at “regional dough manufacturing facilities.”
As for me, like my mother, I’ll take my chances with locally owned restaurants. Yeah, sometimes one of the TVs may be on the blink or there’s duct tape on my seat cushion, but I’m okay with that as long as my piccata sauce is house-made.
And if a speaker happens to fall on me during dinner, I’d be honored to hear someone say, “Mitch, thank God it was you.”
After all, Mom turned out fine. She just had accordion music stuck in her head.