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Time for another installment in our series of true-life stories about food and manners, submitted by our wonderful readers in response to our first Inviting Writing prompt. (You can read the first story here.) Today’s tale comes to us from Christine Lucas, a writer in Savannah, Georgia.

Nanna
By Christine Lucas

I learned from a very young age that two sets of manners existed. There were those for at home—where one could fold their legs over the arm of a chair, and use a paper towel for a napkin—and there were those for Nanna’s house. She required that food be eaten like a lady. Sandwiches were cut in four pieces. Donuts were cut in two. Subs, well, they were pureed and ingested through a straw. (Not really, but you get the idea.)

Nanna held court in her dining room. From one end of the table, she’d orchestrate the passing of food like she was calling a game. “Romie’s plate is open! Quickly, Dianne passes the carrots to the far end of the table. Loretta assists with the butter. Christine moves in with salt which is intercepted by Bob who needs it for his corn.” The only real defense against more food would have been to throw your plate out the window like a frisbee, and our manners prevented such an act.

After one Christmas dinner, Nanna had my aunt reach into a cabinet and pull out a box of Russell Stover candy. Nanna carefully removed the cellophane from the box, like a man helping a woman from her dress. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said tilting the box for the rest of us to see. Eight cups of brown wax paper each held a petit four. “Look at how wonderfully they are decorated.”

The box was passed for us each to admire. No one had been given permission to take one yet, so we simply cooed on command as they went around the table. But what was that smell? Paraffin?

“Mother, where did you get these?” Aunt Dianne asked.

“Dr. Roberts gave them to me,” Nanna told her.

“Dr. Who?” Aunt Dianne asked again. She was usually the one to take Nanna to appointments, and she didn’t remember a doctor by that name.

“You know, Dr. Roberts,” Nanna repeated. “From—”

Aunt Dianne’s mouth dropped open as she remembered the person in question.

“Mother! Dr. Roberts died nine years ago! These candies are a decade old!”

Nanna clearly didn’t see why that was important and began offering them to us. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “The air didn’t get to them. They were wrapped in plastic.”

Caught between an ancient piece of cake and a hard place, we each began saying how delicious dinner was. What else was there to do? Nanna had no pets. If we discreetly dropped the waxy treats on the floor, they’d surely still be there at Easter. “The ham was so succulent,” I said. Hadn’t we all had seconds and thirds? “Those carrots were fantastic,” my husband added. We all nodded at each other like bobble heads on a dashboard.

Only after someone flipped the box over and revealed a seeping blue-green stain did Nanna concede that Dr. Roberts’ gift was no longer edible. Too bad. I’m sure she had wanted to dig into the box the moment he gave them to her—but that wouldn’t have been polite.

Depending on your perspective, the little dandelion flowers that dot green lawns with yellow this time of year can be a cheerful sign of warmer days, a pesky weed to be destroyed or, once they’ve transformed into downy orbs, wish-fulfillment predictors.

To others, they represent free lunch. Dandelion greens now appear in many supermarkets, but if your lawn isn’t treated with chemicals (or down the street from an industrial site) there’s no reason you can’t pluck and eat the greens growing in your own backyard—in salads, sautéed or wherever you’d use other greens. Less commonly known is that the flowers and even roots are also edible.

According to the out-of-print book Green Immigrant: The Plants That Transformed America, by Claire Shaver Haughton, “The dandelion is a plant of the Temperate Zones that probably originated in Asia Minor, but it had spread throughout the known world before written history. In the East, where the Chinese call it ‘earth nail,’  its long taproot and green leaves have been used for food and medicine since antiquity.”

Patricia Banker, an edible-wild-plants expert who works with 4H in my area, provided me with the above passage as well as some recipes for dandelion flowers. She says the petals can be added to salads, breads, pastas, soups, or stews, giving them a slightly earthy or nutty flavor. “Describing the taste is not easy,” she says. “It’s a mixture of sweet and nutty.”

The roots can be ground and roasted to make a coffee substitute. The flowers can also be dipped in batter and fried to make fritters, or added to hotcakes and topped with dandelion syrup (see recipes below).

One of the most common traditional uses of the flowers is to make dandelion wine, described by Ray Bradbury (who wrote a volume of autobiographical short stories named for the homemade beverage) as “summer caught and stoppered.” It was once popular across Europe and in the United States.

I had the opportunity to try some of this sweet and fruity-tasting wine last year, when one of my colleagues was writing an article about her unsuccessful efforts to rehabilitate her Polish-American great-grandfather’s hooch still. Faced with federal restrictions and the prospect of lead poisoning, she gave up and made another historic family recipe, dandelion wine. It wasn’t exactly a fine Bordeaux, but it had a certain country charm—sweet and slightly citrusy, a little like California Coolers, for those of you who were around in the 1980s. I would not be surprised, given the current rural-chic vogue in some cities, to see it appear on the drink menu of a Brooklyn bar in the near future.

If you’d rather go non-alcoholic, here a couple of recipes from Patricia Banker:

Dandelion Syrup

This is a very old recipe that most likely came from the earliest European settlers who brought this “weed” with them as a food and herb source. Obviously they did not have access to oranges or lemons! It can be used as a substitute for honey in any recipe calling for honey, drizzled on French toast, ice cream….use your imagination! Also great in teas, and added to make medicine go down easier.

1 quart dandelion flowers. Be sure to leave as little green as possible.

1 quart (4 cups) water

4 cups sugar

Optional: ½ lemon or orange chopped, peel and all. It will give your syrup a lemony or orange taste. If you want pure dandelion flavor you may omit it. You may also substitute 1/2 chopped, tart  apple, peel and all. The apple flavor is less obtrusive and the natural pectin will thicken the syrup a little quicker.

Collect blossoms late morning when they are fully opened. Rinse in cool water to remove insects.

1. Put blossoms and water in a pot. Never use aluminum!

2. Bring just to a boil, turn off heat, cover, and let sit overnight.

3. The next day, strain and press liquid out of flowers.

4. Add sugar (and sliced fruit or apple pectin) and heat slowly, stirring occasionally, for several hours or until it becomes a honey-like syrup.

5. Can in half-pint or 1 pint jars.

*This recipe makes a little more than 1 pint.  You can triple or quadruple this recipe. Great Christmas gift!

Dandy-Lion Hot Cakes

1 cup white flour

1 cup cornmeal

1 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

¼ cup oil

½ cup dandelion blossom syrup or honey

2 cups milk

1 cup dandelion blossom petals

1. Mix dry ingredients first.

2. Add wet ingredients and mix together thoroughly

3.  If mixture is too dry, add a little milk. Add flour if too thin.

4.  Cook on hot, oiled grill.

5.  Serve with  butter and Dandelion Blossom syrup.

A few interesting items of food-related news making headlines recently:

1) The Icelandic volcanic eruption disruption (sorry, couldn’t resist the rhyme) of flights in Europe has dominated the news this week, but would-be travelers aren’t the only ones suffering. The New York Times reported yesterday that Kenya’s agricultural sector has been hit hard by the lack of flights to Europe. Most of the country’s produce is exported to the continent to the north of Africa; there is no local market for the stranded products, one source said, because “flowers and courgettes [zucchini] are not something the average Kenyan buys.”

2) While British chef Jamie Oliver tries to make over the American school lunch on network television, a group of stateside healthy-food advocates has an idea, reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, to help accomplish a similar goal: establish a Food Corps within the AmeriCorps program to assist schools in bringing fresh produce into school cafeterias. “We want this to be the Habitat for Humanity for school meals,” said one of the plan’s proponents.

3) The Rural Blog is following hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill, which begin today. Key issues will include how and which (and whether) crops are subsidized in light of pressure to reduce the deficit and the sometimes competing needs for renewable energy and livestock feed.

4) No word on whether discussions will include talk of the latest spin on renewable farm-produced energy: chicken poop. As any livestock farmer can attest, manure is one of the most renewable resources going. Now, as National Public Radio reported last week, a Mississippi chicken farmer, in tandem with researchers and scientists at Mississippi State University, have developed the first successful “chicken poop digester” to convert the environmentally harmful droppings into electricity.

5) Food television junkies will soon have a new way to feed their addiction: The Food Network is launching a spin-off called the Cooking Channel on May 31 targeted at a younger, hipper audience, The New York Times reports today. Programming will include more diverse ethnic cuisines and fewer butter-boosting Southern ladies.

6) Finally, this story gave me heart palpitations, since I am in the middle of copy-editing a cookbook: An Australian publisher had to reprint 7,000 copies of a cookbook because of what has to be the worst typo ever (just Google that phrase to see how many agree): A pasta recipe, instead of black pepper, called for “ground black people.” How does such a typo even occur, I wonder? Auto-correct? Voice recognition software?

As you may have heard, America’s last sardine cannery closed down last week in Maine (though it may get a second life as a processing plant for other seafood).

I was startled and a little confused by this news, because sardines seem to be so trendy these days, showing up on menus at both fine and casual restaurants in cuisine that ranges from Italian to Vietnamese.

There’s even a group called the Sardinistas in California, who hope to overcome the little fishes’ rather stinky reputation by touting their tastiness, sustainability and health benefits. As Washington Post food writer Jane Black explains, the group’s basic message is: “These are not your grandfather’s sardines.”

Ah, yes, my grandparents’ sardines—I can picture those: Slick, gray-skinned, nearly-whole creatures plopped into pop-top tins, often carted back in suitcases from vacations in Norway. I don’t recall if I ever even tasted one; the smell alone made my squeamish. My family liked to tease me about this, saying there must not be any “real” Scandinavian blood in me if I wasn’t born loving sardines. (Then again, they allowed, I sure did love potatoes—so maybe I could pass the test after all.) And at a picnic with the other side of the family, I had a male cousin who decided he loved sardines after realizing that the sight of their soft spines made me run away squealing. My brother soon discovered this neat trick, too.

But I realize that I’m an adult now, and a silly little fish shouldn’t scare me. In fact, I’ve been trying to convince myself that I should like sardines. They’re considered a highly sustainable seafood choice because they’re low on the food chain and reproduce rapidly. Nutritionists like oily fish like sardines and herrings because they’re packed with omega-3 fatty acids which help your brain and heart, along with calcium and vitamins B-12 and D. They also tend to contain less mercury and other accumulated toxins than larger fish species like tuna.

So, on a friend’s recommendation, I ordered the salt-cured sardines at 2 Amys, my favorite pizza place in D.C. I was surprised to see what the waiter brought me: thin pink strips of flesh, almost like lox, laid out on a plate with a drizzle of olive oil. Not what I remembered from childhood! The smell, however, was still something of a challenge. At first I draped a sardine over a hunk of bread and lifted it toward my mouth, but put it back down when the olfactory signals to my brain screamed “cat food!” Using a fork worked better, since it minimized the under-nose time. The taste was very salty—in the way of good, strong olives—and the texture was tender. I didn’t hate it. (Faint praise, but hey, it’s progress.)

Now that I’ve gathered some courage, I’ll move onto tinned sardines, but I think I’ll still need to disguise them a bit. I like Alton Brown’s idea of smashing them on toast under a layer of avocado.

As I explained a few weeks ago, we’re trying something new here at Food & Think, a semi-regular feature called Inviting Writing. Each month, we’ll offer our readers a general theme to chew on—this month’s was “manners”—and an example of a related story. Then, we hope you’ll feel inspired to e-mail us your own true, food-related stories on that theme.

Thank you to those of you that responded to our call for submissions! We’ve selected a few of the best, and will run them on Mondays for the next several weeks. If yours wasn’t chosen, please try again next month; we’ll announce a new theme in May.

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Barbecue Etiquette
By Katrina Moore

I grew up in a small town in East Tennessee, in a neighborhood where the ladies looked perfectly put-together every day, paid their landscapers, took on charity projects and went to church with their husbands on Sundays.

“Manners Class” was my seventh-grade term for an etiquette course taught in the home of Mrs. Thorson, an elegant Southern woman with the cleanest house I’d ever seen. There, we learned poise by walking with books on our heads, which was cause for much giggling in a group of clumsy adolescents.  We learned what colors looked best with our skin and whether we were a spring, summer, fall, or winter color palate.  We discussed attending social events and talking to boys; I think we even had a lesson on waltzing. This was saccharine Southern charm at its sweetest and most sinister.

In one of our lessons, Mrs. Thorson sat us around her kitchen table.  We learned the purpose of each fork, knife, spoon, and plate.  We learned not to eat with our fingers unless the situation directly called for it. When buttering bread, for example, one is to tear off only the amount one can put in her mouth, rather than buttering and attempting to bite into the whole thing at once. We were excited to try out our new skills at the graduation dinner, a dress-up meal at a fancy place in the city.

The dinner involved much dainty sipping, meat cutting, and napkin folding, but I was so focused on perfection that I neglected to have any fun. Looking back, I see an awkward 12-year-old desperately trying to fit into a genteel environment. I thought I might grow up to be like these neighborhood women: charming, smiling, and poised.  Before I understood that the smiles were all too often replacements for sincerity, I wanted to be like them and didn’t understand why I wasn’t.

About a week later, I attempted to eat barbecued ribs with the same delicacy I employed at the graduation dinner, but the ribs refused.  A fork and knife proved to slide them all over my plate, smearing it with red-brown sauce. With some prodding from my family, I finally acknowledged the necessity of picking up the ribs—but I still tried to use only the tips of my fingers, and pulled back my lips as far as possible to keep them clean.

After the first bite, I realized that I was never going to finish my dinner that way, so I dug in with gusto. My lips burned with spice, and I could feel the fatty meat and astringent sauce commingling on my tongue. So what if there was some sauce on my face and hands?  When I freed myself of strict social limitations, the food actually tasted better. I even licked my fingers as I reached for the moist towelette, satisfied.

Don’t tell Mrs. Thorson!