Exchange Student in London: Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session – Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
One of the best memories I have of our trips to London was spending a day with one of my husband’s colleague’s wives making a trifle pudding dessert. Trifles resemble Appalachian Banana Pudding, so this has become a two-part series.
Our
family friend picked Florence and me up early in the morning and off we went to
do grocery shopping at Tesco. We bought
vegetables to cut up for crudités as well as hummus and taramosalata – Greek
caviar spread.
I
liked being able to buy ethnic food items at the local grocery store like
Laurent and I did in Chicago at the Treasure Island store downtown where we
lived in Marina City – the corncob towers.
Back
in London, we bought a package of vanilla custard to make the “trifle.”
I
told Laurent’s colleague’s wife about the banana pudding my aunts used to make
where you would layer the sides and bottoms of a glass baking dish with vanilla
wafers and place sliced bananas on top of the vanilla wafers.
Then,
my aunts would place a layer of cooked butterscotch pudding on top of the
bananas and let it cool and then put a layer of vanilla pudding on top of the
butterscotch pudding. Finally, they
would place a 1-inch layer of homemade whipped cream on top of this and
refrigerate it.
They
would eat a big piece of this with a lot of coffee with milk in it for
breakfast and say it was their beauty secret.
(They all looked like Marilyn Monroe or Lucille Ball even without
make-up. I have tried to pattern a lot
of my domestic life on theirs no matter where I live. They clean their own homes, cook, do laundry,
and tend to work at secretarial jobs when children are small.)
My
sister Kathie babysat me as a child. We often ate banana pudding for breakfast before going out for walks and shopping in all sorts of weather. In
the summer, we went out for a morning bus ride to Palmer Park Woods in Detroit to go for
a walk and feed the ducks Cheez-Its.
On
the way back home, we would sometimes stop at a Lebanese or Chinese restaurant
for lunch or Howard Johnsons. In the
summer, Howard Johnsons would let me swim, if we bought a full lunch
afterwards.
We
both cleaned house after I was six years old.
I could do some simple tasks that my sister showed me how to do.
Laurent’s
colleague’s wife asked me why I did not go to private school as a child. I told her that we all knew about Winston
Churchill’s boarding school experience, because his mother Jennie was
American.
We
really did not like too much corporeal punishment. My family tried to reason with children,
yelled, took away privileges, and would finally swat you once on the behind (in private), if
these other measures did not work instead of hitting children.
I
told her my mother preferred Montessori teaching methods and had books about it
at home. (The Sunday School I went to taught
us the methods in it like cleaning up after butter cookies and lemonade at a
very young age.)
She
raised both of us according to its “castello or castle management”
organizational style in addition to traditional reading, writing, and
arithmetic.
I
added Waldorf-Montessori-Jesuit Catholic to this later in life, because I knew how important art and music and Biblical knowledge are for personal relaxation and ethics.
I especially liked how the Hungarian Esterházys ran a great estate and
hired the composer Joseph Haydn as their personal musician for nightly
entertainment.
This
was the American side of trifle making and child rearing practices. To be continued….
By
Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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