Childhood Sweets

This is the continuation of me blogging meals that I ate forty years ago. The series is based on the conviction that most of my best food memories come from the time before I reached fifteen.

I have always liked sweets, which is why I have the shameful, self-inflicted, type 2 diabetes, and while I could go on and on about the cakes, chocolates, and candy bars I ingested as a kid, I figured I would focus on only two items, the Fluffernutter and the dusty miller. I chose these two foods not only because they both are regional taste treats, but also because neither appeals to me, or most of my siblings, any longer.

The Fluffernutter

My mother was from Westerly, Rhode Island. My grandmother had a house by the ocean where we stayed each year for the month of July. My grandmother was born around 1902, so to stay in her house was to skip a generation and be immersed in the food mores of the nineteenth century. My mother was a child of the 30s and 40s, so she too had some legacy food beliefs that seemed out of step when I was a kid.

Both of them were wary of “starches” and “sweets.” You were not supposed to fill up on bread or potatoes. Juice was served in a four ounce glass. We seldom ate any kind of pasta, and my mother once said, “all that pasta is why Italian boys are fat.” You may not know that Italian kids are fat. See, not only can I channel the food mores of the nineteenth century, but also the prejudices and stereotypes as well! Did you know that the Scotts are cheap, or that the Welsh can’t be trusted? We should talk some time. I can explain why Swedes are silent and Finns carry long knives. I‘m sure you’ll thank me, because, really, how have you made it this far without that knowledge?

I’m thankful for my mother’s casual prejudice because it didn’t make any sense even at the time. Italian kids were fat? I don’t know, this kid looks pretty fit to me:

Given two generations of food police, I’m not sure how Marshmallow Fluff made it into my grandmother’s pantry, but there it was every summer.

Marshmallow Fluff, for those of you who have never heard of it, is a regional food from Lynn, MA. There are other “marshmallow cremes” on the market, but I don’t know if any of them have the following of fluff.

When we stayed at my grandmother’s house we often ate fluffernutters, which is a peanut butter and fluff sandwich. I have no idea why we were given them, but I remember loving fluffernutters.

I still buy a jar of fluff each summer when my nieces and nephews are coming to visit. My younger brother confessed that he “never liked fluff” and none of the next generation are huge fans. I eat about half a fluffernutter each year, but there is no going back. Most of the jar gets thrown out in September.

I should know better. When I was a young teacher in the Boston Public Schools I had a fifth grader named Billy M. who spoke as if he had a pack-a-day smoking habit. One day he said with great excitement, “Mr. Gutbloom, guess what I did last night.”

“I don’t know, Billy, what did you do?” I asked.

“I ate a whole jar of fluff.” He said.

… it sounds much better if you speak the “a whole jar of fluff” line with an East Boston accent, but you get the idea. I said to him, “Enjoy that while you can, Billy, because when you get to my age, it won’t even appeal to you.”

The Dusty Miller

The second summertime sweet that I’ve tried to pass on to the next generation is a dusty miller sundae. I have a very specific definition of what a “dusty miller” is. It is vanilla ice cream that has been scooped with a conical ice cream scoop, topped with chocolate syrup and a HUGE amount of malt, and served in a styrofoam bowl like the one below.

For most of my life I thought that the dusty miller was a Rhode Island regionalism. Everyone in the town where I grew up knew what one was, and if you google “dusty miller sundae” you often end up with a discussion of it being served at the Olympia Tea Room, which, as a kid, I called “the Greeks.” (FYI, “Greeks are good at food”).

I didn’t get my dusty millers at the Olympia Tea Room. I got mine at the snack bar of a nearby beach club.

The origin of the dusty miller is hard to pin down. I don’t think that it was an invention of the Tramis brothers (the Greeks, of “The Greeks”). The origin of the dusty miller seems to be Midwestern. I think it may have originated in Cincinnati, which makes sense, because there was a large Cincinnati connection in the little seaside town where my grandmother had her house.

I have made and eaten many dusty millers over the past decade. I like them, but I have to say I am one of the few who do. I have to buy the malt through Amazon. I can’t find a conical ice cream scoop, and my older brother won’t eat them. A few years ago he declared that he “never liked dusty millers.”

What is it about my brothers? They wait forty years to tell me that they don’t share a love for our ancestral foods? This has led me to ask many questions. It turns out that the only foods we all agree on are; my mother’s stew, BLTs, grinders from Jimmy Rheal’s, and poor man’s stroganoff (which none of us will eat anymore).

I would tell you about those items but this has gone on long enough.

Others in this series:

These are the food blogging entries of meals from my youth. We didn’t have Instagram when I was a kid so there are no pictures of the items discussed. I know next to nothing about food and virtually no sense of smell, so you really shouldn’t listen to anything I have to say on the subject.

• Why the best meals are the ones you ate before you were 15
• Toast (6/9/16)
• The BLT (8/28/17)
• Tortoni (1/6/18)