Too Hot To…

Whoever said, “It is too hot to eat,” didn’t like eating in the first place. I wish I were one of those people because the heat we are enduring this week would be a great way to drop a few more pounds. Unfortunately for me there is something called air conditioning and I am doing my best to stay close to it.

Being too hot to eat had to come from the pre-refrigeration and air conditioning days when food would spoil quickly in the sweltering days and if you ate said food it would probably make a surprise reappearance.

I can remember when I was a kid in Connecticut we did not have air-conditioning, nobody I knew did. Not that it did not get plenty hot in the middle of the summer, but our 300-year-old-barn-turned-into-a-house had too many holes in the barn siding to keep cool air in, it also made heating it an issue, but that’s a December blog. My mother used to say it was too hot to cook. Turning on the oven in an already hot kitchen was prohibited. I don’t know why, the heat mostly stayed in the oven, but it was a great excuse not to cook dinner.

So summer suppers often consisted of vegetables from the farm stand by the club that could be sliced and served or at the most boiled on top of the stove for the minimal amount of time. We had sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, yellow squash and onions and corn on the cob. If we were lucky there might be a deviled egg or two leftover from a bridge luncheon. My mother was famous for her deviled eggs.

My absolute favorite summer bridge leftover my mother made was tomato aspic with cottage cheese and a dollop of mayonnaise on top. She put sliced olives, celery and horseradish in her aspic and it was the perfect cold food on those really hot August days. Bridge days were always welcome at our house.

Hot as it is in North Carolina in June I have not served any of these things for supper at my house. Maybe I should roll out the, “It’s too hot to cook,” excuse. I know the “It’s too hot to eat” one will fall on deaf ears.