George Rebane

Now I don’t claim to be any kind of an expert in cooking.  But over the years I have demonstrated that I can whip up a dish or two that requires more than a piece of dead cow and BBQ sauce.  Back in the 70s I accepted the challenge of coming up with a recipe for the cheapest (and least desired) vegetable in the grocery store.  Jo Ann informed me that this was banana squash selling for eight cents a pound – nobody much cared for the stuff.

Well, I puzzled on that hard and uninviting piece of biomass sitting on the kitchen counter until a light bulb went off.  Soon I was grinding and chopping and slicing and baking.  Not long afterward, the house smelled good and out of the oven came the square Pyrex baking dish with something bright yellow(ish) in it with nicely oven-browned tips.  It was not all that unattractive, and when we threw a tastebud on it, everyone said ‘wow!’ – I had invented a tasty dish for the lowliest vegetable that many considered a notch above fodder.  In order not to divert the established momentum and thrust of this development, I will simply report that my bride promptly named it Santa Claus Squash.

During the next year or so Jo Ann served the dish at family gatherings, then to close friends at dinner parties, widening the circle at each turn.  The recipe got uniform rave reviews, even people who refused it on the first go-around asked for a helping after listening to the comments coming from around the table.  Everyone wanted a copy of the Santa Claus Squash recipe, and soon my wife received letters and postcards relating their own successes in serving this hopeless and hard yellow pinkish thing that had few friends in the produce section.

One evening while reading her Sunset magazine, my bride had an idea.  The magazine then ran a monthly section called ‘Chef of the West’ that featured a signed male-concocted recipe which had to pass muster in their test kitchens.  Jo Ann said I should submit my recipe for SCS, and I said ‘Awww no, those are all fancy dishes, and who would ever publish something in Sunset magazine made from the humble banana squash?’  So she up and submitted it for me.  Well, you know where this story is going.

The shortened version is that I got a letter six months later (everyone had forgotten about the submittal) telling me that I would be October’s Chef of the West, and I needed to return the signature card, and tell them whether I wanted the chef’s hat or apron.  And sure enough, October’s issue had the SCS recipe in it with an interesting graphic that showed Santa Claus riding a bucking banana squash.  I’m sorry to say that the graphic is lost to us and only exists in the archives of Sunset (1976).  But now that I was a genuine published chef with a chef’s hat to prove it, the culinary world lay at my feet.  Come to think of it, it is still laying there.

Over the years SCS has become a family staple, served at a minimum as a definitive part of our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.  And that brings us to today.  Jo Ann mandated a big grocery shopping trip after church to pack the larder for kids and guests arriving shortly to celebrate Thanksgiving with us.  My job is mostly pushing the cart during the times I’m allowed to come along on these military precision foraging expeditions.  Jo Ann is very organized, always with clipboard and list, nothing gets left out or forgotten, and often we ‘augment’.  I’m actually not rated for selecting most items on the list, save a few deli-counter meats and cheeses.  Today in the produce section I was commissioned to get THE banana squash for Thursday’s dinner.

Off I went with a certain cocky air, after all I was the one who invented SCS.  And as such a personage, I was probably one of the few paying customers still in the market for that frequently under-appreciated item.  But I couldn’t find it.

Not wanting to admit failure, I quietly summoned a produce man and informed him of my mission.  Usually they tell me that I’m standing in front of it when I ask for such help.  Not this time; the man said he knew where it was and would take me there.  I followed him with my overloaded cart; but it wasn’t there either.  The man then summoned a colleague, and the search was expanded.  Jo Ann noticed the team effort from across a couple of fruit bins and came over to see what the problem was – the banana squash had simply gone missing.

Then after dissecting the matter at deeper and deeper levels, the two experts were ready to render a verdict.  With some hesitancy one of them stepped forward to tell us that not only do they not have banana squash, but they have quit carrying it.  Why? Because they have been buying one box a year, selling one maybe two squashes out of it, and then throwing away the rest.  Not only that, but these produce guys in the county talk to each other, and we were further informed that no one else in western Nevada County carries this neglected vegetable any more.  Banana squash has now been shunned.  It appears that the Rebanes were the last of the Mohicans consuming their two or three squashes a year until the system simply could no longer support them.  Talk about being in the tail of the distribution.

We wound up buying spaghetti squash instead, and hope to pass it off in the SCS recipe to our unsuspecting guests.  And as we left the grocery store, we wondered if under the new order arising around us, there would be a penalty for smuggling in a banana squash or two every year.  It would increase our carbon footprint a mite, but savoring that succulent dish on Thanksgivings and Christmases to come could be well worth the risk.

[23nov09 update]  From the recipes of Jo Ann Rebane:

Santa Claus Squash

Grate yellow, banana squash (piece 5”x8”)
Mix spices together, grind up together:

 1 tsp oregano leaves
 1/8 tsp garlic chips
 1 ¼ tsp salt

Toss spices & ¼ C vegetable oil into the grated squash.
Toss grated cheeses into the squash:

 2 cubic inches cheddar
 1 cubic inch swiss
 ¼ C parmesan

Spread all into oiled baking dish.
Sprinkle with additional parmesan cheese.
Bake at 425 for 40 minutes or until soft when poked with a fork and browned on top.

Published in Sunset magazine, autumn on 1976 – George Rebane, Chef of the West

This is how Papa recorded the recipe – he stated the amount of cheese in cubic inches because he had used leftover hunks of cheese, what was at hand.

This transcription of my handwritten scribbles is what Jo Ann apparently sent to our daughters many years ago.  I answer to ‘Papa’ in our family.  The ‘cubic inches’ caused Sunset some problems since my engineering approach had to be translated into standard recipe units of ounces/grams.

[24nov09 update]  Well, things are lookin’ up.  This afternoon our good friends Ellen & Russ Steele delivered a care package of banana squash that they rounded up in Roseville for us.  The traditional Rebane Thanksgiving table is preserved, no jive spaghetti squash will grace our table.  We will serve the real and genuine Santa Claus Squash!  Thank you.

And to commemorate our initial disappointment with a happy ending, a longtime friend, colleague, and SoCal RR reader sent the following little piece of eye candy.  Thank you Robert!