Chicken Bones and Christmas Carols

On Saturday I texted food-phobic Kathleen to torture her: "Lunch=10-day old rotisserie chicken bits in couscous. Now I am boiling down the carcass until I get a nice good broth."

"Yuck."

"Some people drink bone broth because it's so good for you. When it cools it's like jello from the collagen."

"Okay, you're grossing me out."

Because she is a concerned friend (and a scientist), she emailed me 2 studies that discuss gastric distress, diarrhea, and debilitation from food-borne bacteria. She explained, indignantly, "They recruited people to drink E.coli!  Who would DO that?" I might do that regularly in my kitchen, I'm not sure. She has decided I have a genetic immunity to E. coli.

I always share my "I grossed out Kathleen" successes with Mom, because I learned all my food habits from her. I grew up on bone broth, and lots of stuff much grosser than that. Mom's reply was lovely:

You know what I had to think about the other day when you said that Kathleen was turned off about your boiling the chicken bones for broth? I just remembered all those times when I was a young girl that I rode my bike over to Anna Rohrer’s house to give her chicken bones!! She always seemed really happy to see me with those bags of bones, and let me come in. She had an icebox and I was always so happy if I was there when the ice man came and put this HUGE block of ice in her fridge. How cool - we just had a boring electric fridge, no big ice block!! I would often ask Mom if I could ride the bones over to Anna’s whenever we ate something with bones in it. Sometimes she told me, “No, not these bones."

Anna lived down the road. She was not married, and took care of her Mother. Her Mother lived with her and she always wanted to talk to me. She always sat on her rocking chair and I sat on a little stool that she probably rested her feet on when I was not there. I remember thinking she was SO old but I wonder just how old she really was. I bet not that old! I wonder!

Anna and her mother lived on the end of an Amish house, Joe King's place. They were not Amish, they were Mennonite like us. I think Anna had nothing, and Joe King just gave her a place to live. The whole neighborhood would give her things, so basically we all looked after Anna Rohrer and her Mom. She came to our house to use our phone, and Mom gave her stuff from the garden. Even if she had nothing, Anna used to be a giver with the little she had. This always amazed me. At Christmas time, she would take my sister and me and another farm family’s 2 daughters (we were all the same age) down to southern Lancaster County. She knew very poor people there. The four of us girls would go door-to-door with Anna and sing Christmas carols to these people and Anna gave them each an orange. "Where did she get those oranges?" I thought. The houses we went into were indescribably terrible. I have a picture of the 4 of us girls taken right before we went on one of these trips. I put it out at Christmas just as a reminder of our Christmases with Anna. So anyway, chicken bones have nice memories for me.

Anna's chorus, about 1955.