Chicken Pot Pie and TV Dinners

Either on Saturday or Sunday evenings, growing up in Sylvan Terrace in Savannah, Georgia, my folks would go out for the evening, leaving us in the company of whatever baby sitter was available plus — and this is a critical plus — some frozen-food dinner that we normally were never allowed to have. At the tope of this list: Stouffer’s spinach souffle and its chicken pot pie. There were other so-called TV dinners on the docket, but these were the ones at the very very top of my list. We’d watch Mission Impossible if it was a Saturday night, Lassie and/or “the Wonderful World of Disney if t were a Sunday night and plop down in front of the TV set on these fold-up TV trays and have dinner. I fucking loved those dinners.

The whole notion of so-called TV dinners is itself its own sociological phenomenon: A fully-prepared “nutritious” meal that simply had to be heated up, have aluminum foil removed, and plunked in front of the kids while they were glued to the TV. We refer to helicopter parenting on occasion these days; this was its precursor: Helicoptering dinner in, pre-measured, pre-made, pre-cooked even as a sideshow to the main even of entertaining the kids for a while. Brilliant.

The chicken pot pie itself was a thing of beauty, a classic southern dish that mom never made herself, which was probably part of the allure. The top was brown and crusty, the inside, a wonderful gelatinous mix of pieces of chicken, peas, and carrots in a thick broth, and the interiors of the pie crust were a bit gooey from all this stuff and starting to lose their shape and become part of the soupy mess. Gorgeous. The so-called spinach souffle was similarly constructed, was a favorite for years, and was the standard against which my first true souffles were unfavorably compared to. It’s quite possible that souffle was my first french word. It was certainly my first french dish even. This was dining high on the hog, for sure.

I don’t think it’s ever happened before today that a blog I’m writing precipitates the preparation of a dish. It’s always the opposite, where some dish I’m preparing in our soul food kitchen evokes memories and reflections. Here the reflections are inspiring the preparation of a dish.

So hang on. Back to you in the near future on how this dish pans out, some 50+ years later. It might be chicken and dumplings, though. Same church. Different pew.