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Health & Fitness

The oe Cooking Show

I have a garden of love story.

After the war my grandparents stayed with us in New York
until they could move back to Hamburg.

My grandfather always talked about his garden in Hamburg and
so when my home room teacher

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Initiated a home garden contest, I asked him for help. Since
we didn't have a garden, we looked around

for some space and found a small plot around a telephone
poll. He guided me through the process

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of creating the space and planting the seeds. It was fun as
each day we would check to see if anything

had broken through. When my teacher came to judge my
efforts, I was so proud and my grandfather added

an over the shoulder smile.

Well, my efforts were rewarded with a first place medal
which I proudly presented to him; and the day that they left to fly back to
Hamburg

he gave it back to me. Now, each time I am in my garden, I
communicate with him lovingly in both English and German.

Steven Behr, Steilacoom, Washington

The above is in response to my story called Garden Of Love
from a week ago.

 

During the Second World War, things were tight financially
with many people. It was suggested that to save money we should plant a small
garden with vegetables. So in the neighborhood, there was a plot of land that
no one knew who owned it and no one had cared about it for a long time. It was
an eyesore. So each neighbor, about five of the adults were allotted a piece of
the plot and our parents were told to clean up their portion and to plant some
veggies in there so they would come up during the summer and we therefore would
have fresh vegetables for our meals and we would save lots of money in the
grocery store. It was given a name, the victory garden.

My dad did what he had to do and he planted some tomatoes
and others too and when they finally grew and their time was ‘ripe’ for
picking, Mom would make the most delicious vegetable soup from them. She would
throw in a piece of inexpensive meat to give it flavor and it was a delight to
eat. Somehow, using these I called as our own veggies, it seemed to be more
delectable. They all seemed to sprout at the same time, so Mom made pots and
pots of soup. We had just gotten a new refrigerator that had this new invention
above the bottom called a freezer. She was able to freeze many containers of
veggie soup and we had it whenever we wanted to consume it.

Other neighbors planted different things and one took a small
spot and planted a rose bush on his portion of the land. Then the neighbors
traded a few beautiful roses for a container of ripe red tomatoes, huge and
sweet.



Dad also had grapevines on the left hand side of the back yard of our home.
From these grapes, he made the sweetest red wine anyone could think about
drinking. He did what he had to with the grapes and somehow it seemed to me as
a kid; that the delicious wine filled these pretty plain glass containers. He
put a label on each bottle and it was called “Joe’s Red Homemade Wine’” Once
that the relatives would sip a small wineglass of it when they visited us; Joe
became the most popular man in the family. Each person who came over
practically begged Joseph for a bottle. He did not give it away easily. First
of all, it cost money to blend or whatever way he did it, added sugar I guess,
the bottle must have cost about thirty-five cents. He ordered these long and
slender bottles from somewhere and once every few months, a package would
arrive from the post office with about twelve of them tucked in the box. There
was an expense, but it was his hobby. He also pickled green tomatoes from the
vines he had too in our back and everyone would exclaim over his green pickled
tomatoes.

 

If you were one of the nice and cherished relatives on Mom’s
side, he would reward you with a bottle of homemade wine and homemade pickled green
tomatoes. I personally did not drink wine, I was too young and the pickled
tomatoes were too sour for a kid. However, when we go to some food markets nowadays,
you can see bottles of pickled green tomatoes next to the green Kosher pickles
in the cooling case. I think of Dad when I see them. Everyone in the family
yearned for Joe’s green tomatoes. He did not put a label on those jars which he
had ordered from a neighborhood store that carried a variety of jars, bottles,
materials for sewing clothes at home. The store was called Blank’s, which was
the family name of the owners. Dad would negotiate with the manager there about
how much he would pay for a dozen pickle/tomato bottles. Then he would bring
home a carton of twelve bottles with their thick lids which had a band of
rubber sealing it.

The relatives would come to chat and hint that they wanted a
bottle of wine or a container of the green pickles. He could not afford to give
so many a way and sometimes he would say he had none and they were so
disappointed. Dad was not a man who ever really lied or even told a little
white one. In this case, he had spent hours with the grapes and more time with
the pickles; so he wanted most of it for us and for a few special family
members, who had maybe done a favor for him at one time.

Once after I was married, they had moved into an apartment
and they did not have the grapes and tomatoes available to create his specials
from. So he went to the supermarket and he bought a basket of green tomatoes
and he set about to make his beloved pickled green tomatoes in the apartment kitchen.
He had a special and secretive way with the ingredients he pickled them with
and it turned out pretty good even though he had not grown the tomatoes on his
vines in back of our home.

By then I decided one day to try a nice pickled green tomato
that had been refrigerated and he had brought it to me when he came to visit us
one Sunday. He was so proud to tell me he created and cooked them for me and he
was sitting there grinning at me as I sliced it up and uttered “these are
really good.” I meant it and after all the years of never eating one of his
veggies that he labored to do, he was as proud as if he was one of these
television chefs who cook up a wonderful meal.

So finally he was delighted knowing he had made a simple
green tomato into something that his ‘baby girl’ really liked and as I served
them dinner at my apartment, he kvelled (shined) and looked over to me and I
knew that my simple utterance of those four words surely made his day and week.

The victory garden’s green tomatoes, our grapevines that
turned into sweet red vine, these were his hobbies. He also had one more simple
food/drink specialty. He would take a 46 ounce tall can of unsweetened
grapefruit juice, chill it and add equal amounts of water from the sink (no
bottled waters in those days yet) add lots of white sugar, stir it until it was
all dissolved and voila, he had twice as much grapefruit juice as had been in the
tall can, possibly even more than twice the amount and he poured them into
glass containers and somehow he had the right combination of juice, water,
sugar and it was the coolest most satisfying drink you could sip and swallow on
a hot day.

We often drank it at dinner as people do with iced tea and
all the relatives who visited again would be served a cold goblet of it. He
would never tell anyone the ingredients, they were his secret.

Looking back now, Dad was a type of cook you now see on all
the television stations doing his own thing. From red wine, to pickled
tomatoes, to a soothing drink, he could have had his own TV show long before we
had a television set in 1948. He could have called it “The Cooking With Joe
Show.” He would have been a hit for sure.

From Steven’s grandfather’s garden in Hamburg, to Steven’s
own garden in New York City to the two garden vegetables of Joseph B.Sohmer’s
in Maryland, these three males were surely ahead of their own time and
preceding any of the cooking shows on now.

These were chefs of delight and fortitude and they deserve
an Emmy they surely would have won, if there had been television way back then.

I am here now to award all three of them, not an Emmy, not
an Oscar, not a Grammy not a Tony; but an award called a Joseph. The statue is
in the shape of a tomato with a grape atop it.

 

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