MARSHMALLOW MELTDOWN
Hungarian grandmother’s ambrosia salad used to be a childhood favourite,
Some people have cottages. We had the farm.
The farmhouse was in Vienna, Ont., where my grandfather farmed tobacco. We called the white-plastered building the “old farm,” not just because it was built when indoor plumbing was still a dream but also because, later, my grandparents built a farmhouse near Langton. There, we had access to a deep lake and free diesel (a concession for a pipeline right-of-way on the property).
My sister and I spent chunks of summer vacation at the farm, happily digging in the sandy soil characteristic of the area.
On weekends, relatives and family friends would descend by the dozen to swim, stroll, play cards and — most importantly — eat. It’s these epic meals I remember clearly, especially the ambrosia.
Summer eating was good at the farm thanks to my grandmother. Omama fed the crowds from scratch. So what if it was August and the farmhouse had no air conditioning? She placed a standing fan in the kitchen doorway and carried on boiling the goulash.
This was the Old Country way of eating. My grandparents, George and Judy Lysy, came to Canada in the 1950s from Czechoslovakia via Venezuela.
Sometimes meals were small and cold, such as a spread of headcheese, bread and sliced vegetables from the garden. There were 10 p.m. snacks of iced coffee and pastries from the Hungarian baker in nearby Tillsonburg.
Mostly, though, we ate big and hot: Vats of bean soup. Sizzling steaks the size of hubcaps and links of debreceni sausages spurting paprika-tinged fat. Deep bowls of tomato salad, cucumber salad, coleslaw, potatoes and corn on the cob.
This is where the ambrosia came in. This coconut fruit salad originated in the Deep South as a Christmas dessert. By the 1970s, it had morphed into a marshmallow-studded potluck offering. None of the ingredients, save the sour cream used to bind the salad, is Hungarian. So how did my Holocaust-surviving grandmother learn to make ambrosia?
“I took it from the newspaper once. Then you guys liked it, so I made it quite often,” she tells me now. Omama was an urbane European woman who arrived in tobacco country wearing a skirt suit and high heels, only to meet barefoot farm hands. She joined the local curling club to acclimatize. She even got over the trick played by Mr. Harris, a local shopkeeper, who told her Canadians introduced themselves by saying “f--- you” instead of “how do you do.”
“When it came to desserts, I wasn’t a good baker,” she says.
A no-cook option like ambrosia, kept in a crystal bowl in the ancient white Frigidaire, was a blessing. Yes, it was an incongruous interloper into her Hungarian kitchen, but we all enjoyed the creamy canned pineapple chunks, mandarin segments and pastel mini marshmallows.
Well, almost everyone: “Some of my friends liked it very much. Some wouldn’t even have a spoonful,” Omama says.
Tasting it again after 30-odd years, I find the appeal greatly diminished. A perfectly serviceable fruit salad is ruined by slimy marshmallows and goopy sour cream. Nor does it hold charm for the next generation.
“Ewww. That looks disgusting,” says my daughter Rebecca, 10, who gags on a reluctant mouthful.
Ella, her twin, fishes out a few bites of pineapple. “It’s OK,” she pronounces. Their younger sister won’t even try it.
The farm has been sold. My grandmother, at 87, no longer cooks big family meals. My grandfather died last year, following many of those friends who used to laugh around the table.
So ambrosia fails the test of time and altered taste buds. But at least now I realize its significance as a means to acculturate to a new world.
“Life adapts you to many things, my dear,” says my grandmother. In this weekly series, Star writers reminisce about a food that reminds them of summer, apataki@thestar.ca
This coconut fruit salad originated in the Deep South. It morphed into a marshmallow-studded potluck offering by the 1970s