Round Yellow Table

Round Yellow Table
by Beth Arnold | illustration by sarah priest

M y brothers and I were truly spoiled, growing

up in Batesville in the 1960s. And with all those good
a bar and cabinets. From there, we children could

watch her concoct dreamy creamy pies with perfectly

Southern dishes our mother, Bobbye, spread on our table short crusts or fry a fat chicken that she had cut up.

or sideboard, why wouldn’t we be? Eating was our She prepared three delectable meals a day. They

comfort and our forte, bringing us together in scrumptious were how she dispensed her love and her duty (as

merriment and vital ritual. A dining table gave us she, a late-1940s-early-50s Home Ec major, saw it) to

common ground, and all our holiday meals were held at ensure that we were well and nutritiously fed. More

1775 Maple St. If anyone in our family did any traveling, than that, cooking was her high art.

they came to us. For our aunts and uncles who lived Eggs perfectly fried sunny-side up, scrambled creamy,

away, our house was the center, our table the giver of or poached with no icky white stuff, with crispy slices of
here is the deepest secret nobody knows sustenance and life. bacon or rounds of sausage chucked full of sage and
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud On such grand occasions, Sunday lunches, or when a pan of hot homemade buttermilk biscuits was our
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows Mother wanted to enjoy a more civilized meal and typical breakfast. Every winter my father, Bill, bought
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) provide additional home training in such, we gathered a salty country ham that he kept outside in our carport
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart in our Wedgwood-blue dining room with big windows storeroom. He rarely cooked, but on some cold winter days

that framed our corner of the world. We sat down to he brought the ham in and cut off some slices, plunked
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart) formal linens, crystal, and the sterling silver she loved them in a skillet, and fried them. When they were covered

and had a powerful penchant to collect. in the lightest brown crust but still soft underneath, he

But most of our meals were taken at the round table arranged them on a platter. While the grease was still

painted deep golden yellow that anchored the maple- hot, he poured in a little water to make Southern red-eye

paneled breakfast room of the house my parents built. gravy to soak the crispy outside/fluffy inside biscuits that

This room was separated from Mother’s kitchen by Mother carefully rolled out and baked.
48 ARKANSAS LIFE www.arkansaslife.com November 2010 ARKANSAS LIFE 49

Daddy’s gastronomic predilections Brent took Mother’s recipe box with
came from his Southern country her handwritten cards when he moved
upbringing, though they must have to New York. When that wasn’t enough
been passed down from European of her oeuvre, he often called her for
immigrants who brought their other recipes. He wowed his guests
favorite dishes to the New World. with big Southern dinners.

MY PARENTS ATE things I wouldn’t even look at. I was totally beasts to his gamut along with wild ducks. Our supply of both measuring and stirring, the magic chemistry of the raw ingredients the unruly vines grew tall, Daddy tied them onto the wire fence
nonplused by the sorghum molasses they sometimes poured on became steady. she popped into the oven to bake and the mouthwatering results that with strips of rags to hold them up. In fall, Mother and Brent grew
buttered biscuits. That color certainly wouldn’t do first thing in the Of course, Mother baked the trout they caught and fried their bream, emerged. When he became a father, he baked beaucoup pans of decorative gourds beside them. Our pecan tree was not far away,
morning. Chance a smell? I don’t think so. How could something as perch, or bass, including the delicate eggs long before I understood Christmas cookies with his children just like Mother did with us, like and in some years when the birds and squirrels didn’t get to them first,
light as sugar cane turn into something as brackish as that? They about caviar. I liked fish but it was iffy since fish bones were the only I did with my children until they were older and I ran out of cookie we had good yields. Pecans were our nut of preference.
didn’t share my bias and lapped it up. My mother’s grandfather had ones I didn’t want to pick. Getting a bone stuck in my throat wasn’t steam. Unlike my mother, I’ve never had a hankering to bake. I just In 1950s small-town Arkansas, it was a modern comfort not to
his own sorghum mill, and the thick syrup had been a treat for her my idea of fun and often took the pleasure out of eating fish. wanted to eat what she did. have to tend a big garden like people had done in the old days.
growing up, just as it had been for my father. Times were hard in the My brothers and I expected nothing but yumminess at our round Brent took Mother’s recipe box with her handwritten cards when Who had time, anyway? But we heard stories of the sizable garden
rural South when they were young, and as inexplicable as it seems, yellow table, and we were horrified the time or two Mother tried he moved to New York. When that wasn’t enough of her oeuvre, Grandmother Abbie grew in summer after she’d taught school the rest
some people just like it. to serve us Spam when it hit grocery shelves. We sat down in our he often called her for other recipes. He wowed his guests with big of the year. A large party of some of her nine brothers and sisters and
My father liked to eat weird Southern tidbits like pickled pigs feet breakfast room and expected a feast to be laid out three times a day. Southern dinners. their families could show up for a weekend lunch unannounced, and
and brains and eggs. Being a good wife, Mother had the steely We naively thought all mothers did this, and maybe most households she had to forage and prepare a meal for them. No thought was ever
determination to occasionally cook them for him, though she didn’t were like this in the 1950s, though not all mamas cooked like ours or SOUTHERNERS LIVED THE kitchen garden principle, though we given to this being an imposition. Telephones weren’t exactly in every
eat anything too strange or wild herself. I would have to leave the went to all the trouble to cater to their children’s every culinary whim. didn’t know it. It didn’t exist in the nouvelle Alice Waters sense in rural house, and some people were on “party lines” with neighbors
room even at the mention that she was cooking brains. I don’t think Batesville, Arkansas, or anywhere else in America’s heartland in down the road.
we even knew about our Alsatian or French Huguenot heritage in ONE OF MY earliest memories is sitting on the kitchen counter or on those days. It was cultural heritage, pure common sense, and the Besides, families came to visit. They just showed up in those days.
those days, and it’s so French not to waste any unmentionable yet top of our white refrigerator with Blair in our little house on Bates Street nature of rural life to eat fresh vegetables when they came in season. My parents owned a farm outside Batesville in a community called
reportedly tantalizing part of an animal, for example tripe and tête before we moved to the big house on Maple. Blair and I watched Starting in spring, my family picked poke for Mother to double-boil for Jamestown, which was next to the land my great-grandfather had
de veau. Daddy’s gastronomic predilections came from his Southern Mother mixing cookie dough or cake batter, and then she gave us steaming servings of Poke Sallet or to scramble with eggs. Poke has owned and where my grandmother had grown up. She and my
country upbringing, though they must have been passed down from the spoon and beaters to lick. She scraped every drop clinging to the a certain bitter flavor and some people didn’t like it, but they weren’t grandfather eventually bought the family farm and moved back
European immigrants who brought their favorite dishes to the New bowl with her spatula. She didn’t waste a smidgeon. the Arnolds. We never met a green we didn’t like, and we also drank there with their children, so my father grew up there as well. After
World. Eating, let’s say, unusual parts of animals seems to come Blair and I loved to watch Mother cook, and so did Brent once he the liquor from the pot after the limp vegetables were chowed down. my grandfather had died and my Grandmother Abbie retired from
from high gastronomy or the dirt poor until they’re homogenized into was old enough to join us. We were enthralled with the whole process The other spring treat Mother and my father’s mother, Grandmother teaching, she settled in Batesville. Her stone cottage with enormous
mainstream food culture. of everything she prepared but especially the sweet confections Abbie (whom my mother called “Mom” like my father), served was backyard was a ten- to fifteen-minute walk from our house. But my
because the creamy goo was just as good if not better before it was Wilted Lettuce. They tossed fresh spring greens with young green grandmother’s niece, Ethel, who was closer to Grandmom’s age than
MY FATHER WAS a lifelong and avid fisherman and hunter, and put in the oven to brown. What is my answer to the question of onions, boiled eggs, and crumbled bacon and doused it with my father’s, still lived in Jamestown, and we sometimes stopped by
walking his native fields with his bird dogs and hunting quail was whether I like cookies or cookie dough better? I don’t know, but we vinaigrette made with the grease. There’s nothing better. to see her and her husband, Hugh.
near heaven for him. This primal act connected him to himself and never had a store-bought cookie in our childhood lives at our house. In the summer months, juicy red tomatoes, yellow squash, Kentucky Ethel and Hugh were the salt of the earth — country through and
God and the Nature he felt in his bones and truly admired. When Mother baked them from scratch just like she made her own soups wonder green beans, okra, and much more thrived to go from garden through — and we loved paying them visits. Hugh still plowed his
my older brother, Blair, was old enough to aim a gun and pull a instead of buying Campbell’s. to our round table where we ate most meals. Country people grew earth with mules, and Ethel churned their creamy butter. They raised
trigger, he and Daddy shot rabbits and squirrels to bring home their own gardens and canned vegetables and fruits in big mason chickens whose necks were wrung, and the birds were plucked,
for Mother to cook for the rest of us, though she didn’t “eat” them IT RANKLED BLAIR that he had to split Mother’s sugary doughs and jars or filled Tupperware containers that they then stacked in their cooked, and eaten. They gathered fresh eggs daily. Going to Ethel’s
herself. We occasionally dined on venison that was given to us. batters with me. She always said that he would’ve been the perfect freezers if they had one to extend their bounty for the barren winter. and Hugh’s was a trip back in time to another world.
Unlike most Arkansas sportsmen, my father didn’t relish trips to the only child, that he had never gotten over the fact that first I and then We Arnolds lived in town and weren’t much for gardening, though We had a churn at our house as a decorative antique, but we’d
deer woods, though after he died Blair added those magnificent Brent had been born. He loved his mother’s cookery. He loved her we always grew tomatoes next to our bird-dog pen in summer. As never seen any butter that wasn’t wrapped in sticks and bought at


Piggly Wiggly. Ethel and Hugh milked their own cows, poured the attitude was Why tamper with perfection? If one is going to mess WONDERS NEVER CEASED once we stepped out of 1775 Maple St. to out the marrow which was something the rest of us could only watch
wholesome liquid into a canister, and hocus-pocused it up and down around with Nature, I now prefer sea salt, olive oil, and basil. take a trip abroad. Another short jaunt into a sizable time warp was in awe.
with a cross-slatted stick to make the yellow spread. It was magic. The green tomatoes were coated with cornmeal and fried, and driving to see my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Mabel and her husband, All that is long past. My father died in a diving accident in 1969,
Ethel gave us fresh butter and cream to take home. Mother could hardly cook them fast enough before we popped them Uncle Clyde. They heated their clapboard house with a pot-bellied when we kids were teenagers. Brent died in 1990, at age thirty-four, of
Batesville didn’t have a farm market as such, but there were in our mouths. stove, and a lunch at Aunt Mabel’s popped our eyes out. When we AIDS. (My husband, Jim, and I used to say we should leave a good
roadside vegetable and fruit stands, and We were big bean and pea eaters, but stepped into her dining room, she had roasted a slab of beef, fried turkey carcass on Brent’s grave. He would appreciate that a lot more
truck farmers who drove their beat-up trucks getting them out of the pod was work. chickens, and sliced a ham. There was a slew of hot vegetables and than flowers, or even a whole bird.) Mother died seven years ago,
into town. The beds of their pickups were
filled with fresh produce, and they went
Our ripe tomatoes were sliced Shelling peas was a boring job unless
you shot the breeze with another family
salads, yeast rolls, biscuits, and cornbread to devour. God knows how
many cakes and pies she baked. The table and sideboards were
maybe of a broken heart. Blair and I are all that’s left of the Arnolds
in the flesh, him in Arkansas and me in Paris. Today our round yellow
door to door selling it. We heard a knock at
the door or the bell rang, and some farmer fresh with no condiments added. member, neighbor, or friend who was also
a designated sheller. Women sat on their
covered in platters, bowls, and casseroles for an old-fashioned country
lunch like farm women had once prepared to feed their big families
table is packed away in a dark storage unit in Little Rock. One day it
will be my daughter’s.
stood there in his overalls or field pants. porches and in their kitchens and stripped and field hands. Not a bad way to describe the way my family ate. To But we still have our memories, many of them centered on that
Mother might know him or not, but he filled
her in on the variety of fresh vegetables
Some people like a dollop of off the coverings of black eyes, purple hulls,
butter beans, and cream peas until their
top off the effect, Aunt Mabel had a range but still cooked part of the
meal on a wood stove. I never understood how she could regulate it.
round table where we derived sustenance in the greatest sense of
that word. At our round yellow table, we devoured the hearts of the
he had picked that morning and was now
waiting outside. Mother placed her order, mayonnaise with their tomatoes, fingers were blue and worn out. We threw
the shells in a paper sack and the ripe peas My oldest friend recently told me about sitting at our round
quail our father honored and hunted, and brought home as winged-
trophies to feed us, for us to gnaw every scrap of meat to the bone.
and he carried in a bushel of purple hull in a bowl and gabbed, never running out of yellow table for one supper that especially impressed her. We were Now, for my own nourishment, I send a silent blessing in memory of
peas and sacks of yellow squash, pole
beans, okra, and green and ripe tomatoes.
but Mother’s attitude was Why conversation.
When they were ready, Mother dumped
eating our favorite, fried quail that my father had shot and killed,
and my parents were reminding us to watch out for the tiny grains of
that family that was. It comes from e.e.cummings:

Mother might steam the squash or boil the
okra, which we thought was disgusting until tamper with perfection? them in a rich broth with a meaty ham hock
she’d been stewing for hours. Our reward
black shot that might be hidden in the juicy breasts. My brothers and
I were fighting over the heart of one of the succulent birds like lion
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
we were older, but most of the time she pan was a pot of pork and peas that she served cubs. My friend loves that joyful image of us. and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
fried them Southern-style with a light dusting with scratch cornbread or corn sticks to sop Blair, Brent, and I also fought over fried chicken hearts. Any one of higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
of flour for the squash and cornmeal for the okra with salt and pepper. up the liquor. She baked them in one of her seasoned iron skillets us might take the gizzard, depending on who got to it first. My father and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
Our ripe tomatoes were sliced fresh with no condiments added. Some or corn stick pans. We paid saintly homage to these skillets as to loved it. The liver was up for grabs except to Blair who didn’t like liver
people like a dollop of mayonnaise with their tomatoes, but Mother’s everything that was cooked in them. of any sort. Brent might even crack open the chicken bones and suck i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)


Round Yellow Table

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Round Yellow Table