Like the Native place names that roll off Mainers’ tongues, succotash has been jaggedly assimilated into the regional American idiom, or maybe it’s more like the language has adapted to it, the way salt-tolerant rosa rugosa has naturalized itself along Maine’s rocky coast. For a household whose weekly menu planning regularly included unpronounceable Greek food names, succotash stood out oddly, a funny-sounding foodstuff that didn’t carry an English name but belonged to the language in a way that dolmathes and keftethathes never could. Maine’s Eastern Abenaki probably called it something like mesikoota. It’s based on an Algonquian word, msiquatash, entering English usage from the Narragansett tribe of Rhode Island. For an irreligious man, succotash was for him a kind of Lenten repast it returned to him a sense of community, a homely reminder of a shared table. The rest of the family wouldn’t follow him very far down that road, but we respected his solitary foodways. My father ate succotash as if on a pilgrimage. I believe one could add an onion, and a chopped bell pepper wouldn’t hurt, but the substance of his dish was plain as a dirt road. It was canned corn, simmered with canned limas until hot, then drained, buttered, seasoned and consumed. His version of succotash was simple and as easy as canned corn. No handwritten index cards, treasured and kitchen-spattered, were passed down from Grammy Raymond (née Foy). He followed no recipe and certainly didn’t need one. When my father made succotash, he ate it alone. I’d learned to tolerate a Greek lentil soup, and baked beans with salt pork were a traditional Saturday supper, but a dish based on lima beans was too legume-centered to tempt a kid who’d tasted Hamburger Helper. As I kid, I felt this way about my father’s bouts of succotash. There are well documented cases of people possessed by a craving to eat dirt. My mother did her best to cook for a hybrid palate, relying on recipes culled from “The Joy of Cooking” and from checkout aisle women’s magazines, supplemented by America’s bounty of packaged and processed foodstuffs you’d see on TV, like Hamburger Helper and Rice-A-Roni.Ī few times a year, after being served platefuls of moussaka and Prince spaghetti, perhaps overcome with a hankering as primal to his identity as a salmon nosing back to its ancestral stream, my dad would reach past the soup and Rice-A-Roni in the pantry and grab cans of corn and lima beans to begin the rite of succotash. It sounds like something out of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” but buttered saltines and a can of Habitant pea soup don’t usually hold their own against a spread of souvlaki and spanakopita, baklava and kourabiedes. My mother’s family was Greek, and, like many Greek American immigrants, they’d set themselves in the restaurant business. Subscribe - Holiday Gift Subscriptions Sign In My Account Logout Primary Menu ☰ X
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