The post and the comments at Neo’s place entitled When the only lettuce was iceberg led me to some reflections.
In my home, when I was growing up, we used to have salad with dinner most nights, and that salad was iceberg lettuce and a few tomatoes and cucumbers. With Wishbone dressing. There was no thought of any other kind of salad until years later.
We didn’t have salad every night because we were poor, and probably because my mother was not much of a cook and my father’s, erm, not ready to be married ways meant he was not home that often for dinner. Was he? I don’t remember having dinner as a family when I was young. Sometimes, when he brought some game or, erm, poached dishes to the table. But not every night. But, yeah, if we had a salad, even into my college years when I was living in my father and his I’m a little more ready to be married this time wife, salad was torn iceberg lettuce with some tomatoes or onions, maybe cucumber.
Memory one-and-a-half: In those days, I was working as a produce clerk in the early 1990s, and the grocery store in transition where I worked had only a couple types of lettuce. Mostly iceberg, but a narrow assortment of red leaf, green leaf, endive, and maybe some Boston/bibb lettuce. We had almost as many selections of cooking greens, but it was a store in transition, and not on the way up. The produce section of the lesser grocery stores offer greater selections now, and I pity the poor checkout clerks who have to become familiar with that many more mops of foilage.
Memory one-and-three-quarters: One of the commenter mentions:
And as a post scriptum, I had a friend who wrote a hilarious essay for a newsletter about what a delicious treat he would make with a head of iceberg lettuce:
He would cut it in half, and holding one half in his hand, over a kitchen sink, he would cover the open side of the head of lettuce with catsup and devour it by the bite, adding new catsup when he had taken a bite.
Back in those days, a head of lettuce was relatively cheap–like thirty-nine or forty-nine cents ($2000 in 2027 dollars), and I would often just take one for a snack. I’d salt it if I had salt available, or just munch on it as-is. It caused quite a sensation when the wife of the famously literate Swedish mechanic asked me what I was eating as I traversed her back yard to the famous Iron Maiden fan Dave‘s house.
“It’s a head of lettuce,” I said. And she recounted the story to my family and Dave’s family several times, incredulous. But in those late teen years, anything that filled the belly was a boon.
Memory two: Another commentor replies:
Catsup? I rarely see that spelling. Is it a regional thing?
Ah, gentle reader. I myself held onto that spelling long into the 21st century.
Commentors on my Facebook post indicated I was wrong. But, in my defense, the Dillon’s grocery store had this on its signage even then. Of course, Dillon’s is gone, replaced by a King Cash Saver (briefly) that has turned into a Red Racks and auto parts store (I have been here long enough that I can talk about what things used to be, and sometimes natives don’t even remember).
I’m not sure how I spell it now. I don’t have course to write it much, and I’m never the one to add it to the shopping list. But I’m probably still on team Catsup.
So how many memories did Neo’s post trigger? Two, or four, or more?
