How Do You Uneat an Elephant?
When it’s all you’ve ever known?
It was my favorite recipe in Momma’s blue plastic 1960s recipe box. It had been typed on her Smith Corona typewriter, and there was the slightest smudge of ink on the upper left corner. The recipe was for Elephant Stew.
Perhaps your mom had one, too. I heard there were slightly different variations, but what they all had in common was the task of cutting the elephant into bite-sized pieces, and depending on the variation, you were to add two chickens, geese, or squirrels for flavor with salt to taste.
As a little girl barely old enough to read, I knew this was not a real recipe because my mom put sautéd onion in everything. No onion meant a fake recipe—that and the fact that we were vegetarians.
But the thought of a giant pot of elephant stew bubbling on the back of our wood cook stove intrigued me. Back then, I’d never heard the phrase, “There’s an elephant in the room.” I loved animals, and elephants were a favorite — because my parents joked that I had the memory of an elephant. I felt some sort of kinship to the elephant in our living room and that relationship started before I even realized there was an elephant.
Stephen King must like elephants, too, because he really describes what it’s like to grow up with an elephant in the room.
