Once upon a time, long before a certain family home had air conditioning, in a land far far away, a mother prepared cold suppers on hot summer days.
Her children would gather at the table in the sweltering kitchen and sit down, at exactly 5:45 pm Daylight Saving Time, to nibble at chunks of cold ham splorted out of a can, limey-green Jell-o speckled with suspicious-looking vegetable bits suspended in wiggling viscosity, and a potato salad tossed with celery and hard boiled eggs, lightly dusted with paprika to make it look fancy.
Next night, the mother would scoop out the meat of giant Beefsteak tomatoes fresh from the market, and fill the hollows with canned shrimp, chopped up and mixed with tomato, green onions, celery and cucumber, all dressed in jarred mayonnaise.
This particular mother lifted her summer repertoire directly from the church ladies' luncheon cookbook. Her "Cold Plates" were refreshing, but not exactly filling, though the motivation was iron clad, "It's too darn hot to cook!"
That was in the olden days. Cooking and baking, if any were to be done at all on a hot day, were completed in the cool of the morning, preferably before noon. Pre-cooked items popped into the fridge to be eaten, chilled, later on. Popular wisdom had it that cold food was healthier for consumption in hot weather. So maybe mother was on to something with the refrigerated fare. "We'll just have a cold plate for supper. It will cool us down. And nobody needs to be heating up the kitchen making dinner anyway."
In 40 years of preparing food, I don't think I have ever fixed a "cold plate" and called it dinner. Does anyone do this anymore? I know what you're thinking — but you can't count salads. Everybody eats salads, but a salad alone, no matter how big, does not qualify as a true,1950s honest-to-goodness cold plate supper. You need to think more along the lines of what you scoop onto your plate at an all-you-can-eater buffet at the King's Plate diner out on Rte 75. Or a community hall pot-luck where there are small mountains of sliced turkey and ham and olive loaf, macaroni salad, sliced cucumbers in oil and vinegar dressing, three-bean salad, and watermelon.
Most analogous in the contemporary idiom is the ultra-cool "Charcuterie" board. This is a feature on every hipster menu in town. Imported cold meats, hand made rillettes and pâtés served in darling tiny Mason jars, honey from local apiaries to drizzle on artisanal cheese, nuts roasted in Sriracha, those teensy-tiny sweet red peppers, and parmesan-herb-crusted crisp breads, all arranged so artistically that you hate to disturb the composition. Delicious, but where's the celery sticks with Velveeta?
My personal favorite approach to hot-weather meals is to carry on pretending it isn't really 90 degrees outside. I blithely boil potatoes, and steam lovely summer farm-fresh produce, all in the comfort of an air-conditioned kitchen. Get a good hot meal on the table, in other words. And send the Mr outdoors to grill. I wave at him from the window as sweat pours off his forehead.
"Hot enough for you, sweetheart? Good thing you got out of the kitchen."
