I’ve often heard it said that once a person serves in the military, it changes them forever. I’m not sure if this is actually true–I’ve never served in the military myself–but I do know that, until the day he died, my father clung very fast to the years he spent in the Navy as a night fighter pilot flying off The Enterprise during the last days of World War II. He entered the military when he was eighteen, and learned how to fly a plane before he knew how to drive a car. When he died in 2002, I spent hours tearing through long-sealed boxes in search of his discharge papers so that the VA would provide us with a flag for his coffin. We are not military people in my family, and my father was not a military man in any way, shape, or form; but his service had to be recognized as we laid him to rest. That’s what he would have wanted, above anything else.
Whether appropriate or not, my father saw fit to share with me countless tales of his experiences in the Navy, as a Brooklyn-born Jewish boy away from home for the first time in his life. It informed a lot of our conversation and even our vacation time; on a trip to Vero Beach, Florida when I was in high school, we had dinner one night at a seaside restaurant called The Ocean Grill. Waiting at the bar for our table to be set, my father peered out the window and smiled; about half a mile out were the skeletal remains of the Breconshire, a British vessel that had gone down in 1894. Its hull was just visible through the water’s surface.
“We used that for target practice,” he told me, while the bartender nodded. “And this place was my officer’s club.” That night, sipping on what was one of the last Shirley Temples of my youth, I could have sworn I saw ghosts wearing their dress whites. My father drank to them with a gin Gibson.
As proud of his service as he was, my father was unaccountably even more in love with Navy food–so much so that he used to make it for me on a regular basis. Most kids would wake up on Sunday mornings to French toast or bagels and lox. I woke up to creamed chipped beef on toast– more affectionately known as S.O.S.–and a dish that may actually have its roots in the World War I-era Boeuf le Creme de Argonne [sic], in which roast beef was prepared with a cream gravy and rushed up to the front lines in France. I was fifteen before I found out what S.O.S. actually stood for; this doubtless accounted for the many looks of horrified dismay that were cast my parents’ way when, at seven years old and on a trip to California, I stood on my chair and loudly ordered a plate of the stuff at Chasen’s in Beverly Hills. They actually made it for me, and even there, with Fay Wray sitting at the next table, it still looked like shit.
A few years later, my father excitedly returned from one of his early Sunday morning dog-walking jaunts, plunked a brown paper bag on the kitchen counter, extracted an odd, rectangular can from its depths, popped the lid, and began frying up what could only be described culinarily as glorified pet food.
“I haven’t had this since pre-flight school,” my father exclaimed, while our Airedale drooled so badly that it looked like he was swallowing shoelaces. The little slabs of god-knows-what fried up crisp and brown, and by the time my mother emerged from the bedroom, I was sitting at the breakfast counter, eating Spam and eggs like they were blini and caviar.
My parents divorced shortly thereafter.
Although my father’s wartime reminiscences were geared more to what he saw, ate, and drank than the innate horrors of the situation, my father died with the honor of Naval duty coursing through his veins. An hour after his funeral, when his family and friends had dispersed and the limousine had taken me back to his house, the driver–an older man with a cough and a flat top haircut– helped me out of the car and handed me the detritus of the funeral home, all stuffed into a green plastic shopping bag: the signing book, assorted cards, and the rolled-up flag that had been draped over his coffin.
“Hold this end tight,” he said, unrolling the flag, and handing me one of its edges. He folded it in half lengthwise, then corner over corner, until it was a perfect triangle. And then he handed it to me, and saluted.
I honestly didn’t know what to do. But somehow, I felt as though I’d known him for years.
S.O.S.
There are no decent words to describe in detail the way this dish looks when made correctly, but it is, in fact, delicious. If you have the time, replace the dried beef with ground chuck and the toast with mashed potatoes. But then it wouldn’t be S.O.S.
Would it.
Serves 4
1 4 ounce jar dried beef
1 tablespoon unsalted butter or margarine
1 tablespoon flour
1-1/2 cups milk, low-fat
4 slices toasted white bread (buttered, if you have a death wish)
1. Place the contents of the dried beef in a colander, and rinse well with cool water. Pat dry with paper towels, chop, and set aside.
2. In a medium-sized, stick-proof skillet, melt the butter or margarine, and add the beef to it. Saute until lightly brown. Sprinkle with the flour and stir well to combine.
3. Drizzle in the milk and whisk continuously until the sauce is smooth. Serve over toast.
We used to have this as kids…sometimes on baked potatoes for something different…haha…I haven’t had it in ages and not sure that I want it again, but it was fun to see that recipe/thoughts by someone else 🙂
Very much enjoy your writing and stories.
A
Thanks so much Amy!