Memorial Day 2021 Issue

COOKING
WITH SCRATCH ©
Comfort Food
My
husband,
Aaron, gets
annoyed when he sees
meatloaf or macaroni
and cheese on a restaurant menu.
Irked, he will ask, “Why would you want to
have that when you are going out to eat?”
According to him, these dishes don’t belong
in fancy restaurants. These are foods that
could—and should—be made at home, on the
cheap. Aaron does, however, admit they are
delicious.
The trendiness of comfort food in restaurants
is definitely lost on him. Comfort foods,
however, have been menu bestsellers since the
‘80s. In 1988 the upscale foodie magazine Food
& Wine declared comfort foods to be “hot.”
Not that we need a definition, but just
what exactly are comfort foods? According to
Sciencedirect.com, they are foods that have
nostalgic or sentimental appeal, reminding us
of home and family. They are generally high
in sugar and carbohydrates that the body can
process into temporary stress relief. Comfort
foods are usually associated with childhood
and home cooking. (Could Aaron possibly be
right?)
Now into our second year of quarantine, I
often find myself dreaming of my childhood
and craving the comfort foods my mother,
Gertrude Kertscher, used to make. I recently
had a flashback to a supper she prepared for us
once in a while when I was growing up on the
lake. Velveeta cheesebread with spinach salad
was a treat she didn’t make often, but we all
loved it.
36
by BARBARA SIMMONS
Photos by KAREN FUCITO
LAKE HOPATCONG NEWS Memorial Day 2021
She never made it for company. In fact, it
wasn’t in her usual rotation of supper dishes at
all.
During the week, we had things like goulash
and noodles, pork chops, baked chicken with
Rice-a-Roni, spaghetti and meatballs with
brown gravy, meatloaf and, in the summer,
baked trout. Every meal was accompanied by a
green salad and dessert, even if dessert was just
canned fruit cocktail.
She may have made cheesebread when the
budget was stretched, and we couldn’t afford
to have another dinner featuring some kind of
meat. Good old Velveeta to the rescue!
My German mother, a professionally trained
“Hauswirtschaftsleiterin” (domestic engineer
or professional housekeeper) always kept a box
of Velveeta in the refrigerator. She’d use it in
her excellent macaroni and cheese with Spam
(Vol. 10 No. 5 Labor Day 2018) and every
now and then for cheesebread. And not much
else, really. Maybe grilled cheese sandwiches
for lunch once in a while. It lasted practically
forever. We liked to joke that Velveeta had a
radioactive half-life of 50 years.
Garlic salt was another one of the ingredients
that made this bread so delicious and even a
bit exotic. The unusual fragrance—for German
palates—of garlic wafting through the house
was absolutely intoxicating for us.
In the spring, just after the ice melted off
the lake, but before
it was really warm
enough to play
outside, my brother,
Frank, would have
rather stayed indoors
to build model
airplanes. I would
have preferred to
embroider or draw,
curled up next to
the fireplace in the
living room. But there was always work to be
done outside.
My father, Horst Kertscher, anxious to get
his hands in the dirt and the yard in shape,
would start cleaning off the flower beds while
my brother Frank and I would set about
completing our chore—raking the lawn.
It was a task we both dreaded.
Our fingers would get numb from the cold,
our backs stiff and our arms would be sore
from raking. The wind would be blowing off
the lake, the weather would be damp and gray.
The towering oak trees that surrounded our
yard produced tons and tons of acorns, which
were hard to pry out of the lawn with metal
rakes. It was hard work, and we were miserable.
I’m sure it was a mother’s instinct, but
Gertrude had a knack for knowing the perfect
food to serve to her cold, miserable work crew.
After a day of working in the cold, with blisters
on our fingers, fragrant, crispy, buttery, garlicky
cheesebread was our perfect comfort food.
To compensate for the butter and carbs,
Gertrude served a fresh spinach salad with a
tart vinaigrette. Back in the ‘60s we didn’t have
triple-washed baby spinach in plastic clamshell
boxes—the supermarket spinach was gritty and
sold in a bunch fastened with a thick rubber
band. It needed to be washed a few times and
stemmed before she could add it to the salad.
Be grateful for fresh salad greens in plastic
clamshells!
I scoured the internet in search of a recipe
for Velveeta cheesebread but only found one
photograph on Pinterest. It looked somewhat
similar to Gertrude’s creation.
Here is the recipe for Gertrude’s authentic
version, to the best of my recollection, as it was
never written down. Feel free to jazz up your
version with spiffier cheeses, fresh garlic, herbs
and extra virgin olive oil.