My husband uses entirely too much steak sauce. When we used to have steak (especially the way we used to cook it—shoe leather is way too nice a description), he would pour a lake of A-1 on his plate.

Every time he did this I would watch, unconsciously holding my breath, and I would have amazingly panicky thoughts for such a small thing: He’s using so much! Why was he using so much? He’s wasting it!

I never said anything, but I would pick up the bottle of steak sauce and pour a tiny, pea-sized drop on my plate, thinking he would see this and realize how over-the-top he was being with the steak sauce.

Nope.

He would just pour more.

And I’d push my dry, tough steak through the microscopic remnants of my A-1, looking vainly for any moisture so I could choke it down.

This situation really bothered me (and not just the cooking!) I got a real feeling of dread in my stomach whenever my husband picked up the bottle of steak sauce. My reaction was so out of proportion, it was like he was pouring out my blood on the plate, and then rinsing it down the drain when he (inevitably) didn’t use it all up.

One time, I finally said, “You know, it really bothers me when you take so much steak sauce.”

“Really?” he said, pouring more. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. He kept eating, apparently unfazed by my disapproval.

That’s when it finally occurred to me to wonder why it bothered me so much that my husband liked to have his steak swimming in A-1.

“I think it’s because of my dad,” I said slowly.

I remembered my father berating all of us kids for “wasting” steak sauce—or sugar, if we spilled a few crystals of it while sweetening our cereal.

As an adult I can see that my dad grew up in the Great Depression and he was hungry more than once, but as a child I was terrified of displeasing him—which happened every time he saw me using—and wasting—things like steak sauce, maple syrup, sugar, mustard, etc. I was a kid, and kids spill things.
My father is a generous man and never begrudged us what we ate, but he didn’t let us forget it if we wasted four cents worth of maple syrup.

I think my father focused on things like steak sauce, maple syrup and sugar because 1) it couldn’t be put back, and 2) that was what we put on our own plates, rather than having portions served to us. If we didn’t eat our steak or potatoes, those foods could be put away and used at a later meal.

Once I realized where that awful feeling of dread came from, I no longer believed it. When I was a kid and I wasted food (or condiments, whatever), I felt like a bad person. When I saw my husband using an abundance of steak sauce, I didn’t think he was a bad person. How much A-1 you use has nothing to do with your worth as a human being. That sounds ridiculous, but unconsciously that’s what I’d been thinking.

This really old belief from my childhood actually ruined a number of excellent mealtimes for me over the years. Now that I’ve examined the thought, “I’m a bad person if I use too much steak sauce (maple syrup, mustard, etc),” I realize I don’t believe it.

Now I laugh about it as I pour a quarter-sized dollop on my plate. No sense going totally overboard!