Friday, May 22, 2015
Treats
We moved into a three family house. My parents lived upstairs. My husband and son and I lived in the front half of the downstairs. A Mexican family lived in the back half.
One day I took my son for an outing. When we came back the children of the family living in the back were playing on the porch. I greeted them and we talked for a while.
I noticed the snacks they were eating and I felt so sorry for them. They were eating tortillas with butter on them. I went inside to put the baby down for a nap.
Suddenly I realized that I was feeling sorry for those children and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I'll bet tortillas and butter were a treat for them. I began to remember some of the things we ate when I was a child.
Our favorite treat was bread and sugar. We pressed a slice of bread onto a plate with sugar on it. Then we ate it. On the farm we would catch a little cream from the separator then sprinkle sugar over that. It was like adding icing to it. It was the best treat ever.
We often made cinnamon toast too. We spread a bit of butter on the bread then covered it with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. That was placed under the flame in the broiler of the stove. Once it bubbled and looked toasted it was done.
When you bake a pie there are little scraps of dough form the crust left over. Mom would take those and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar. She placed them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven for just long enough to crisp up the dough. She called them kiddie cookies. I made them for my children too.
A special treat was graham crackers and frosting sandwiches. Mom hated making them because of course there were no cans of frosting like we have now. She would make frosting then spread it on graham crackers. Another graham cracker placed on top of the frosting made a sandwich. They had to set for a few minutes so the frosting would not flow all over as we ate them. They were a lot of work to make back then. I still make them once in a while but I use canned frosting because I am lazy.
The Mexican family would most likely have been appalled at our bread and sugar. Mothers use what they have to make a treat for their children to hold them until supper. And to be honest my own children prefer the buttered tortillas to the treats I loved as a child.
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Hats off to every mom who made pie dough cinnamon treats. My brother-in-law's mother made them as little rolled up triangles. She called them hypocrites. No one knows why. It's too late to ask, of course.
ReplyDeleteThey sound delicious. I will definitely try them that way.
DeleteThis reminded me of a story from my childhood. A neighbor came to our door and said she wanted to make sandwiches for her kids but had nothing but bread and mayonnaise. My mother gave her a can of pineapple. She couldn't believe it! Didn't we have any cold cuts? No, I remember my mother saying. (Which was true, we ate pineapple sandwiches or tomato sandwiches in the summer). I remember thinking, if someone GIVES you something, gee whiz, just say THANK YOU and go home! (And to be honest, we most likely couldn't spare the pineapple but my Mom gave what she had.)
ReplyDeleteI have never had a pineapple sandwich (sounds good) but I love tomato sandwiches. I eat them often. And yes. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Deleteoh, your treat is very similar to ours, only that instead of bread, we used sweet potatoes. imagine, sweet potatoes are already sweet by themselves, but when we rolled them in sugar, it was such a heavenly treat then :) now, I of course seldom do that, i eat plain sweet potato :)
ReplyDeleteI have never eaten a raw sweet potato. I have had pieces of raw potato though. I will have to try it.
DeleteAhaha treats indeed! I believe those kids were enjoying a hearty treat. I do the same, I like tortillas on butter-dunno why, it just tastes so savory! :)
ReplyDeleteI also know about bread snd sugar. My sister does so but I liked using ketchup as a spread on bread when we were kids. Funny treats adults find weird. But as kids, we love them, don't we? :)
I think whatever Mom gives us to hold us over until supper is what we remember loving.
DeleteMy favorite treat as a kid was.....pickle juice! My mom would give me little Dixie cups of it every now and then and I loved it:)
ReplyDeleteEverybody made faces at me when I drank the pickle juice. I loved it. When I was about 9 months old my cousin and her family came to visit. She is 6 weeks younger than I am. We ate most of a jar of dill pickles. They are not only good but they are great for babies who are teething.
DeleteHello greetings and good wishes.
ReplyDeleteSimple but interesting treats which you enjoyed as a child. I loved to eat chappathi === Indian bread === with jam. I loved eating a spoon full of milk powder.
Children are simple. You give them a small toffee and their face will light up whereas a huge slab of chocolate may not make a grown up person smile.Children have angelic qualities which they lose as they become adults.
Interesting post.
Best wishes
I think you described it best. Keep things simple for children. We always had homemade jellies and jams in the house because Mom made them. But to use them required a spoon or knife. We had to open and close the jar. It was so much easier to just press the slice of bread into the sugar. Simple.
DeleteForget the butter on bread, I can remember that as a kid, I used to take pieces of soft white bread and flatten them down and then eat them.
ReplyDeleteMy third son would ball up the slice of bread into a round fairly hard ball. Then he would stick it in his mouth and try to swallow it whole. One time a friend was alarmed as my son sat on my lap gagging around his bread ball. She screamed, '"Emma, he's choking!" I calmly looked at him and said, " Yes, he is."
Delete