Monday, February 03, 2003 6:51 PM Joe Coluccio

Looking for the greens…

The extreme pressure of searching for something humorous to ponder and develop with deep glimpses of insight into the all too human condition has actually stopped me from writing entirely...that and the demands of my schedule at work, which had the effrontery to eat into my vacation and several of my latest weekends.

My mother made minest tonight. Perplexed, I thought how the hell do you spell minest, so out I goes to the internet and look it up. I tried manest. Not anything close, except for manifest destiny. I will in good time reveal what I have come to believe is a gospel according to minest, but first I will tell you that the eating of tonight’s delicious dinner put me in another decade. A decade which frequently substituted pastafazool, or even better green peppers stuffed with a wonderful mixture of tuna, bread and spices baked in tomato sauce, for meat on Friday. I have long since forgiven my mother for the endless meals of Kraft macaroni and cheese.

A decade where my severe, white hair pulled back in a bun, black dress that covered to her calves her rolled down stockings, grandmother on my father’s side of the family would sit in her Carver Street home gazing equally out the window to the back yard into a garden of mint and greens and pop dragons and the weekend afternoon wrestling matches on a luminous black and white kind of oval television screen. What is that geometric shape? The cross between the rectangle and the oval. Rectovular? I’m sure that some cathode ray marketing inventor came up with a technologically adept name. I need only to mention the Superhetrodyne Radio to prove my point.

That was a time when we were all our own television technicians. We would take hot glass vacuum tubes from the set (remember the 6AU6) up to the drug store and stand for a delicious half hour or so in front of the Tube Tester watching for the plate of the glass evacuated tube to glow hot and orange. The more sophisticated testers gave some kind of gauge that read in a science fiction theatre logorhythmic scale, along with a more “user friendly” meter that indicated – green: good – yellow: marginal – red: bad. We would sigh when then needle settled solidly at the red end of the TV Tube spectrum. Purchase a new one of the offending valves (British, you know) from the well stocked bottom of the Tester cabinet and return to plug the lot from our inelegant brown paper carrying bag into the appropriate sockets, button up the back of the set, a happily view that week’s December Bride.

In any case, there sat Grandma Coluccio, on her stove endlessly was a large pot with boiling greens of many sorts (escarole, spinach) billowing steamy into the air making a kind of vitamin rich inhaler for the world to savor and be cured. “What the hell are you making, Ma?” My father used to say in grave frustration, white face turning florid, a dangerous mixture of both disbelief and disapproval that often lead whole nations into armed conflict. “Minest, again? You gotta eat something else once it a while!” My grandmother, tough bird that she was, just used to look at him and snort. And root for the guy in the white shorts who was finally pinning the evil black dressed contortionist to the mat. Sonamabitch!

Minest is a soup made of greens, (spinach) and tomato sauce and pork and perhaps some broth. I don’t know the recipe and like an initiate to the Latin Mass, In Nomine Patris Et Filii Et Spiritus Sancti, I don’t want great detail. Just mange! Enjoy! And, oh yeah, I figure the name is short for minestrone.

Did Gorgeous George ever beat Crusher Lisowski?