Blue-plate specials and anatomically correct toddy mugs

If you glanced into the kitchen cupboard of my home when I was a kid, you would think we lived in Random Acres.

That’s because nothing matched up. Our juice glasses may have had partners at one time, but now they were paired with jelly jars. Our steel-handled silverware was teamed up with antler-ware and wooden-ware. Our dishes came from whatever gas station was running a promotion at the time.

But the prize among the assemblage was our one blue plate, and my brother and I fought over it every suppertime.

Somewhere we had heard the term “blue-plate special,” and we assumed that it was the term used for the kind of meal reserved for kings or captains of industry. To keep the peace, Mom made sure I got the blue plate one night and brother Bill got it the next.

When she served it up, she always said with a flourish, “And for you, the blue-plate special!” Whatever grub it carried tasted especially fine, seasoned with a dash of “nyah-nyah” directed at your brother scowling in the seat next to you.

Mom might have saved herself the trouble if only she had told us that “blue-plate special” was a term given to a cheap bargain meal at diners. When cooks are trying to get rid of the chicken before the maggots and mold make a festival of it, they stew up a big pot and propel it out of town with an attractive price. They probably put it on a blue plate to distract you from the fact that the food is turning green.

The blue-plate special. Here it is. No substitutions. Take it or leave it. Good luck.

But we didn’t know that at the time, so Mom’s royal blue-plate special was a flourish-worthy honor devoutly to be wished by my brother and me.

Our eclectic kitchen cupboards weren’t unusual at that time — at least, not in my neighborhood they weren’t. We lived on a crowded street of tiny two-bedroom wood frame houses, and the men and women who owned those homes worked hard for the little money they earned. They had grown up in the Great Depression, had weathered the rationing of the Second World War, and they knew that a cracked dish or a shattered juice glass was no reason to dump the whole set.

Still, as privileged children growing up in a house where our greatest deprivation was having to eat a hot meal from a plate that wasn’t blue, my generation longed for a day when we might host a dinner party at a table where every plate, cup, and saucer matched. And our parents wished that for us as well.

And in time, with their help, we succeeded. Today, my wife and I can sit down at a table with matching dishware that would have looked regal to our parents. In fact, we can host Thanksgiving on autumn-colored plates or Easter on floral plates or Christmas on pure white.

And yet, if you were to glance into my kitchen cupboard today, you might still get the sense that our zip code belongs to Random Acres.

That’s because I cannot let go of some of my favorite coffee cups, which have traveled with me all the way from my childhood home through as many as a dozen moves.

As I write these words, I am sipping my coffee from one of them, a little plastic thermal mug that Mom used to drink her hot rum toddies from when she sat around the evening fire on our camping trips. By now it is scratched and stained from decades of use, but it has remarkably survived without cracking or leaking.

In fact, the best clue to its advanced age is on the bottom. Turn it over and you will see no mention of dishwashers or microwaves, and no reference to China — proof enough that this mug is a half-century old if it is a day.

It is a small mug with a yellow bottom and white top — and a tell-tale bulge in the front, if you’re right handed.

The bulge was the result of Mom’s habit of setting her cup on a flat stone close to the campfire to keep her hot rum toddy warm. On one trip to Canada sometime in the mid-1960s, she set the cup too close to the fire and the outer surface began to melt. She rescued it only after it had formed a cameo profile.

“Hey,” I said, “it looks like a nose! You should paint eyes and a mouth on that cup!”

Mom studied the cup’s new contour and shook her head. “That’s not a nose,” she said. “It’s a breast. I’d say about a C cup.”

I’m not sure if Mom would have offered that comment in front of me if she hadn’t been well and truly toddied at the time, but it brought a roar of laughter from everyone else around the campfire. From me it only brought a blush of embarrassment. Once past infancy, a breast should never come up between a mom and her son, should it?

But it was a moment that earned Mom’s little toddy mug an honored place in the Kerth Kitchen Cupboard Hall of Fame forevermore.

And so it has — right next to the perfectly matched plates, cups, and saucers in my kitchen that have no story to tell at all.

• Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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