Nanny's Milk Gravy

I made fried boneless pork chops for dinner tonight. I boiled up some potatoes, cooked some frozen green beans and diced up a couple tomatoes. With the crispy stuff left in the pan after the chops were fried, I made a roux with a bit more added fat and seasoned flour. Then I poured in milk, stirred like crazy and ended up with some fairly tasty, very lumpy milk gravy. I drained the potatoes, dumped them back in the pan, added butter, salt, milk and mashed them (with a potato masher - no cheating with an electric mixer for me!). Then I put some potatoes on the two plates beside the chopped tomatoes, poured gravy all over both the taters and the maters, dished up some beans on each plate, added a chop to each and took it all in to the table in the livingroom. One of my favorite late summer meals. All that was missing was fresh sweet corn on the cob, fresh from the farm, right off the stalk.

As I stood stirring the roux, I thought about how all of this good food is so bad for you according to the prevailing medical wisdom of the day. Fat, potatoes, fried meat, gravy. Ei yi yi.

What a shame. It is a shame on us as modern human beings that God gives us good food to eat and we call it bad. I only make this meal 4 or 5 times a year. I seldom buy potatoes any more, usually roast the pork in the crockpot with no added fat, and only make milk gravy when I am really, really hungry for it - usually when the tomatoes are at the peak of ripeness in the summer. I, too, am brain-washed by modern medicine. So sad.

Now most people have never eaten tomatoes and milk gravy. Ha! They just don't know what they are missing! The first time Mel saw me put milk gravy on tomatoes he was horrified. I said, "Try it, you might just like it." He tried it. And he liked it. He told me that he considered what he was eating - it's not that different than having cream of tomato soup, seasoned and with the seeds and bits of skin still in it. :-) I guess that's true, but to me tomatoes and gravy are much, much more.

As I stood there tonight, stirring madly, trying to get out some of the lumps, I was deep in memories of my childhood. When I was young I had a great-aunt named Lotus. I couldn't say Aunt Lotus very well, so I called her Nanny. Her husband, Oscar, was Papa. I loved going to Nanny and Papa's. Nanny was a surrogate mother to my own mother - taught my mother all she knows about housekeeping, sewing, cooking and life in general. Without Nanny, I don't know what my mother would have done. Nanny was always more of a grandmother to me than my biological grandmother ever even wanted to be. I loved Nanny dearly. I have many fond memories of "going to Nanny's house" (did I say that before? :) ).

Nanny collected Fiesta Dinnerware when it first came out. She had a whole set of cups and saucers, plates, the pitcher and I have no idea what all. I wonder where that all went when she died? One of the things we would do whenever we went over is have a cup of tea. Nanny would make weak tea for me in whichever cup I wanted that day. Then I always got to squeeze the bear-shaped plastic honey jar. A long, thin, golden strand of honey would swirl down out of the yellow spout and land in the bottom of the cup. Around and around it curled, slowly melting away in the hot tea. It wasn't that I wanted a lot of honey in my tea, it was watching the process that was so much fun. I loved that ritual.

It wasn't until I was much older that I found out why Nanny was so thin. All of her sisters were chunky to down right fat. Nanny had had thyroid surgery as a very young woman, and later due to bleeding ulcers, a large portion of her stomach had been removed. She ate an apple every day to help with her digestion, she said. And all of her meals were very small. Nanny remained tall and quite thin until the day she died. I always wanted to look like her - tall and thin - and wear white blouses and long black skirts. She didn't wear white blouses and long black skirts. No, she dressed quite fashionably for the day, but very modestly, too, and most of it came from Goodwill or other people. I have no idea where the white blouses and long black skirts came from in my thinking!

Nanny made the worlds' very best milk gravy. It is probably from her that we all learned to eat it on tomatoes, as well as on potatoes, and when times were tough, on cubed bread, too. I have wonderful memories of standing at the stove beside her, watching her plop a dollop of bacon fat into a cast iron skillet. The fat melted into a clear liquid with little bits and pieces of bacon sinking to the bottom. When it was good and hot and beginning to spit a bit, Nanny would put in a few fork-fulls of white flour, quickly stir it around until it began to brown. Then she'd pour in milk - just enough. I don't know how she knew what 'just enough' was, but she did. She'd stir it until it got thick, but not too thick, add salt if needed and some pepper and voila! Ambrosia! The food of the gods! Nanny's milk gravy. Never lumpy, always the right consistency, and always - always! - oh so very tasty.

I've pondered many, many times on how she made her gravy. My gravy is usually lumpy. Sometimes it's too thick, and sometimes it's too thin. I've learned to let that flour brown and not rush it - that really changes the flavor for the better. But there have been times when I felt like I'd made salted and peppered glue rather than real milk gravy. :-)

So, as I stood at the stove tonight, stirring the roux round and round the pan so it would brown evenly and not burn, scraping up all the nice pork juice bits off the bottom of the skillet, in my mind I was half a world away and 50 years younger. I remembered Nanny tonight. And a part of me is missing her. And a part of me is missing my childhood. And a part of me is thanking God that I have the memories that I do.

Thank you, Father in heaven, for giving me the family, the up-bringing and the memories that I have.