A Little More About Slop

I feel badly that Slop did not get its just desserts last weekend.  It was a bit of an afterthought to my manic weekend, when I hastily wrote my blog in order to claim it accomplished for the end of Sunday.

In truth, Slop does deserve a vignette of its own… and not just as the footnote of weirdness and a supper club menu.  Slop is, afterall, a Brennan family tradition.  Well… sort of.

Anyway, I decided to make it again.  Mostly because I’m trying to empty out my refrigerator this weekend and I had the pineapple, cherries, and whipping cream to use.  So why not make some more and actually take pictures this time?

As I mentioned, my only real memory of having it myself was at one of my grandmother’s birthday celebrations, when many of these ‘traditions’ were placed on a spring buffet in the dining room.  Never you fear, I will explain some more of those in essays to come.  But this was both amusing… and kind of a flop.  I think the whipping cream wasn’t whipped and just added… so it was really, really sloppy and unappealing.

But I revisit this intriguing recipe not merely as a way to give it a more just due, but to reflect on the fact that some of these ‘traditional’ recipes come from frugality.

It is something that is frequently laughed at now.  Something that is amusing in the retrospect of my mother and her siblings.  But you figure, this family had to live off the income of my grandfather (and he was very enterprising, not to mention HARD working - but just one man).  This family consisted of seven kids and four adults.  Not to mention continual visits from cousins of various degrees and other children in the neighborhood.  Slop was undoubtedly an easy way to satisfy the sweet tooths of many a child who settled in one of the kitchen red chairs at Mt. Pleasant Ave.

I think about how they made it work when I am just one person contemplating how I can splurge on an iPod or a nice pair of shoes… and I think wow, they had seven pairs of feet for whom to buy shoes.

When I sat down with my grandmother last spring to go through some of the pictures, every once in a while she would point to a dress and say she got it from a friend of my great aunt Marga or some other friend of the family.  It was kind of humbling and equally admirable to hear her talk about that… especially when it was pointed out in my absolute favorite picture of her and my grandfather.

But the thing is… you look at this picture and you see it doesn’t matter what she’s wearing, or that this bar is in the basement of a three decker haphazardly decorated to hide the fact it’s a cellar.  What takes my breath away every single time I look at this picture and several other pictures of them together is how much love there is between them.  And that, a lesson I am feeling leak into my soul quite a bit this year, is a wealth that is very very simple to attain… and yet one we overlook so often.

So back to Slop aka Rice Delight.  I didn’t type out the recipe before.  Here it is in simplicity.   

Rice Delight
(the parenthetical notes are hand-written on a weathered and somewhat dingy typed recipe card – mis-spelling of Marshmellow intentionally kept)
½ c. uncooked rice
½ c. sugar
Whipped cream (1/2 pt all purpose)
Marshmellow fluff (1 jar – which I discovered is SMALL jar)
Crushed pineapple (small can drained)
maraschino cherries (6 or 8 cut up)

Chill

(Additional handwritten instructions on the back)
Heat 2 ½ cups water, dash salt.  Add ½ cup regular rice when boiling (cook on low heat for 20min).  Stire rice after coming to boil.  Cover and simmer on low heat until tender.  Drain.  Stir in sugar, pineapple (drained) + marshmallow fluff when warm.  Chill until cold.  Add whipped cream and cherries.

It is simple and pretty basic to make.  A very good thing to make life sweeter.  But isn’t it the most basic and simple things that make life sweet?  Not to mention,  with whipped cream (REAL whipped cream – none of that squirts from a can crap) and cherries on top, how can you go wrong?