I always tried to sit close to our football coach, Jack Clayton, at team meals. He loved desserts and would swap his T-bone or ribeye steak dinner for your piece of apple pie or chocolate cake.
That seemed strange back in my college days when a big steak was just an appetizer. But I understand it now that sweets have become my favorite food group.
Coach Clayton used to have us over to his house after games. His wife Nellie made dozens of fried fruit pies earlier in the day, heated them in the oven and served them with ice cream.
Eugene Christmas, the team’s physical therapist, solidified his reputation as the nicest man any of us knew during one of those post-game gatherings.
Miss Nellie accidentally gave him a meat pie, which looked the same on the outside as the fruit pies. He was halfway through the meat pie and ice cream when she noticed the mistake.
She apologized profusely while Eugene continued to consume the weird fusion of foods. He wouldn’t let her exchange it, saying, “The ice cream really gives the meat pie a good flavor.”
These days, I rush through fried chicken and other main dishes I have always loved to get to dessert. Like Coach Clayton, I am giving in late in life to a long-time weakness for sweets.
Some sugar-laden treats like donuts and chocolate covered cherries are so addictive to me that I try to avoid them altogether
Our six-year-old granddaughter Charlee Ann spent the night with us last week and wanted donuts the next morning while I was fixing eggs, biscuits and other halfway healthy breakfast foods.
Regina took her to the donut shop after I explained that I don’t go near donuts because I like them too much.
Charlee ordered a kolache with honey but no butter, a glazed donut with sprinkles and a blueberry donut for herself and a plain donut for Regina.
Then she told the owner that her Poppy didn’t want a donut “because if he had one, we would have to get him a dozen.”
It’s the same with chocolate covered cherries. My late friend Robert Crew and I often talked about how much we loved them and agreed we could never eat just one.
A couple of times, we sneaked out of the office, bought a box of chocolate covered cherries and ate them all sitting in the car.
My love for sweets was inherited from my mother. She was the best cook I ever knew and never used a recipe except for desserts.
Her cobblers, coconut pies and banana pudding were coveted in our neighborhood, and Regina and I still use her tattered recipes for many of our desserts.
For my birthdays, she always made a white cake with cherry filling and a white icing that was creamy at first but got crusty after it sat a while.
I told Regina about it while we were going through my mother’s recipes not long after her death. There was no recipe for the cherry cake, but Regina said she made the same cake for her ex-husband Ron on his birthdays.
When she baked me that cherry cake the first time 20 years ago and it tasted just like the ones my mother made, I told her how sorry I felt for Ron for having to give up those cherry cakes in the divorce.
His birthday and mine were just a couple of weeks apart, and I suggested that she should start making him a white cake with cherry filling and crusty white icing for his birthdays.
She did, and it helped prove that even folks who can’t be married can still be friends.
I would never trade a piece of that cake even for one of Coach Clayton’s ribeye dinners.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES