By Scott Graber
It is early, Sunday, and cool enough to sit on our recently renovated deck. Susan and I have our coffee — Peet’s Dark Roast — paired with a Entenmann’s brand doughnut.
When I was a child, my father believed that a soft boiled egg was the perfect breakfast. There was no possibility of a bagel or blueberry muffin. This was a time (the 50s) before the discovery of the frittata, quiche and the bacon biscuit. This was a time when every kid was eating Cheerios out of its miniature, milk-filled box.
Lunch was equally dismal in the sense that most of my friends subsisted on a slab of balogna, milk in a small Gene Autry-themed thermos, and maybe (if the stars were in alignment) an apple. I am told that sugar and coffee changed the Western World; but in my youth sugar was only found in the lemon meringue pie that my mother baked on weekends.
For a short time I was a Boy Scout and our troop was connected to Fort Sam Houston, where we all lived. Sometimes we were given World War II-era C-rations as an alfresco “snack” when we went camping in West Texas. These usually came with lima beans, a processed meat and chocolate — and this chocolate bar would be my first, serious, sustained relationship with sugar.
As I got older, I would be introduced to the Krispy Kreme (glazed) doughnut — usually in the custody of my grandparents — and lemon squares when I went to funerals (with my grandparents) in South Carolina. But my father drew the line at Coca-Cola, and I could only imagine how it tasted from the musical commercials that celebrated happiness — “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony …”
But there were lapses, inconsistencies with Dad’s strict embargo of sugar from our formica- and chrome-accented table. We went, for example, to Vienna one Christmas, and my mother was focused on two things — acquiring a small charm for a bracelet that would memorialize this particular destination and eating a slice of Sachertorte that was served at the Hotel Sacher.
I remember that cold morning, the dining room, the imperious waiter, but mostly I remember that first forkful of rich, Apricot-flavored chocolate cake. I remember thinking that these strange Austrians — who had somehow linked up with Hitler — really knew how to make great cake. Maybe, I thought, I should re-examine the Austro-Hungarian empire.
I was still, by any standards, a sugar neophyte when I got to The Citadel in 1963. I do remember the ice cream — it came in rectangular blocks of vanilla, chocolate and there was a combination of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry they called Neapolitan. Unfortunately, (that first year) we mostly served the upperclassmen, went on under the table “missions,” and deferred our own nutritional needs knowing, later, there would be doughnuts.
Every night, after Evening Study Period and just before Taps, a cadet would arrive selling — at a small mark-up — glazed doughnuts and sandwiches.
The grilled cheese sandwiches were surreptitiously manufactured during ESP using an iron, an ironing board, and Wonder Bread collected earlier from the Mess Hall. These sandwiches were of no interest to me.
The doughnuts, however, were authentic Krispy Kreme-made pastry, fried in regulation oil, then “glazed” in an actual Krispy Kreme kitchen just off the Savannah Highway.
For many “knobs” these grilled cheese sandwiches, paired with a dozen day-old doughnuts, were the only nutrition that they would be getting that day.
Right after I met my wife, Susan, I invited her to Charleston to walk the Battery, smell the lemon-scented Jasmine and to taste a Krispy Kreme. As she bit into the hot, just-out-of-the-oil pastry her face clouded-over as if she was reconsidering our romance.
It was the same reappraising look I would see when she took her first bites of sweet potato pie, Chattanooga’s Moon Pie and, of course, Nashville’s inimitable Goo Goo Cluster.
As she swallowed that first bite, I instantly knew that this was her last voluntarily bite of a Krispy Kreme. I knew if this matter was left unresolved it would be like unexploded ordinance — ordinance that could then explode anytime, any place.
And so we embarked on a years long struggle to find a compromise pastry finally settling on Entenmann’s plain-cake doughnut.
And yes, I know, this cake confection is nothing like the yeast-raised dough one gets with Krispy Kreme.
But it’s not a bran muffin.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
