JD: We’re in San Diego on the 15th of December, 2012. Christine Robinson talking about her mom and cooking and so on.
CR: We’re in San Diego at the Chicken Pot Pie shop and we’re having Chicken Pot Pie and I was just remembering what delicious biscuits my mom made when I was a child growing up. The pot pie crust reminded me of her biscuits. She made absolutely scrumptious wonderful delicious fluffy biscuits and it was one of the favorite things that she made that I liked.
JD: You said the crust was, they were flaky?
CR: Brown and flaky and perfectly round. She shaped them with her hand, she use a cutter. We would have them either with grits or we would sometimes have them with corned beef and gravy or sometimes we’d actually have them with syrup too.
JD: Did you also have them with bacon or sausage or any meat with that?
CR: I don’t remember that. Maybe bacon, maybe sausage, but I don’t remember. I just remember the biscuits and grits and sometimes eggs.
JD: What were some of the other favorite dishes your mom would make?
CR: Oh, wow. One of her special surprises was the banana pudding with vanilla wafers and she made the filling, the pudding, from scratch. Yummy! But it was my youngest sister’s absolute favorite. She made cakes. She was an awesome cooker.
CR: You don’t want the ice cream on the pie?
JD: I could do that or I could enjoy it like this too.
JD: So, we’re still recording. You mentioned something about black eyed peas.
CR: I just hated the black eyed peas and cabbage. Those are two of the things I didn’t like that she made. It wasn’t because they weren’t good, it was just I didn’t like them because I was a kid.
JD: What did you usually have for dinner? What was your basic Monday through Friday kind of staple?
CR: My mom was a huge gardener, both flowers and vegetables. Being from the south, most of the meat that she cooked was something like pork chops, or chicken, or something like that. But every single day we had fresh vegetables, every single day. Those were always my favorite. Even today I’m a big vegetarian type, or vegetable, I eat more vegetables than I eat meat.
JD: Did you eat a lot of beef when you were young? Did she cook a lot of beef for your dad?
CR: She cooked beef and pork chops and fried chicken. Almost all the meats she cooked were fried.
JD: How was her chicken fried steak?
CR: You know something, I don’t recall ever having chicken fried steak when I was growing up. I didn’t even know what it was until I moved away.
JD: So after you moved to Missouri what was the biggest culture shock in food?
CR: Well actually when I left Alabama I moved to Chicago.
JD: So what was the biggest food culture shock in Chicago?
CR: I think it was rice, because when I was growing up, I don’t remember my mom ever making rice. She made mashed potatoes a lot, but she never cooked rice. The people I went to live with when I moved away, they made rice every single day. Every single day. That was just very surprising to me.