Ellie and I lived in Vermont in 1969/70 when I went to grad school at UVM. Ellie grew up on Lake Champlain on the New York side, literally looking across the narrow waters to the Green Mountains. From the New York vantage it is easy to recognize why Camel Back Mountain (the tallest of the Green Mountains) is so named. Ellie’s family outings often ended up at a famous restaurant in Middlebury, where the poet Robert Frost, then in residence at Middlebury College, might be sighted at Sunday dinner.
I love Vermont. And forty years ago it still had an old-timey feel, here and there in the countryside.
One of my fondest memories of that era involved a late summer/early autumn meandering drive into the hill country. We happened upon a typical little town perched among the mountains, East or West or South Something or Other. The single white clapboard church with weather-vaned steeple had a handpainted sign in front: “Dime a Dip Today.”
We saw folks entering the side door and were soon following them into the familiar surrounds of a modest social hall with a curtained stage at one end. Several long tables, covered in white paper table cloths were set for supper. By the stage, another long table held large and inviting casserole dishes: baked beans, mashed potatoes, egg salad, escalloped potatos, macaroni and cheese, string bean casserole (proverbial church beans), carrot salad, ham salad, cole slaw—all the familiar unpretentious and hearty dishes of potluck dinners. Behind the food were women in bib aprons and print dresses with ice cream scoops in hand—the old fashioned ones with the thumb bail that lifts the ice cream from the metal hemisphere.
By now if you didn’t know already, dime a dip is quite literal. You choose a dish and present your plate. Your server takes her scoop to the dish, secures a scoop, inverts the scoop over your plate and releases a mound of food.
The price 40 years ago was literally 10 cents a dip; a final woman at the end of the table tallied the dips, received the money, and made change from an old metal cashbox.)
There was something fascinating, even charming about a paper plate festooned with little round mounds of food: mashed potatoes in the center, coleslaw to the side, string bean casserole next to the coleslaw, egg salad and so on.
To close the culinary circle, a slice of cake or pie was also a dime, while apple or cherry cobbler was also served by the scoop.
We vividly remember that supper--setting, sensations, and circumstances, including one year old daughter Katie, plum baby food smeared all over her face and on the paper table cover that she ripped to shreds from the perch of an old high chair the women had procured from a closet and wiped clean with a wet cloth.
