Almost everyone has heard some version of the complaint at the heart of "Pass the Taters": a parent, fork in hand, sighing that nothing at the table measures up to the food of his own childhood. George Burnett Devine builds a small comic poem around that complaint and then, in its last stanza, turns it neatly back on the man who makes it. The result is a gentle joke about nostalgia, and a sharper observation about how memory works.
The poem is addressed to "pal," and the speaker talks as if leaning across the table to an old friend who shares the memory. "Remember how your pop would say," he asks, and the poem becomes a little scene replayed in the mind: children at the table, a father holding forth, a mother quietly dealing with it. Notice that the grandmother is never given any detail beyond the menu. She is credited with "tender chicken, goose and quail," a list that sounds more like a banquet than a family dinner, which hints that the father's memory has been polished by time. The dishes Pop remembers are grander than anything on the table in front of him.
The children's reaction is one of the funniest touches. They "nearly drop our knife," shocked that anyone could criticise food that is, in their eyes, "simply great, / From steaming spuds to juicy chop." The vocabulary is wonderfully of its place and time: "My gosh," "What the heck's got into pop?", "these here eats." Devine writes in a deliberately homespun, spoken voice, with "you was" for "you were" and "fixin' up the fam'ly chow." The grammar isn't carelessness. It makes the speaker sound like a real neighbour telling a story rather than a poet addressing an audience, and it keeps the humour warm instead of mocking. Even the title, with its "taters," puts us at a plain family table before the first line begins.
The structure supports the joke. The poem is made of six quatrains with a loose alternating rhyme: the second and fourth lines tie together, as in "kid" and "did," or "tale" and "quail," while the first and third lines mostly go their own way. Lines alternate between a longer, indented line and a shorter one, giving a rocking, sing-song, almost ballad-like movement that suits an anecdote told aloud. Some rhymes are slightly strained, such as "wow" paired with "chow," but that looseness fits the casual tone. Nobody expects polish from a man telling a table story.
The mother is the quiet centre of the piece. The children "turn" their eyes to her, and she "never seemed to be impressed, / She'd often heard that tale before." That understated line carries the whole poem's affectionate irony: the person actually doing the cooking is the one person unmoved by the compliment to someone else's. Her reply in the final two stanzas is a masterpiece of calm. She doesn't argue or defend herself. She simply agrees, "your grandma must have been a wow," and then delivers the twist with a perfectly straight face.
That twist is the point of the whole poem. Pop, it turns out, is part of a chain. He "also heard your grandpa say: / 'You can't cook like my mother did!'" The same sentence has been handed down from generation to generation, like a family heirloom nobody asked for. The mother's closing quotation marks even let her have the last word, which feels like a small, deserved victory.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it says in plain language. It suggests that the "perfect" meal of childhood is partly an illusion, made of affection and distance rather than recipes, and that every cook, in turn, will be measured against someone else's memory, then become a memory themselves. The children who gasp at their father's rudeness will probably grow up to say the same thing about their mother. Devine lets us laugh at the pattern, but the laughter is kind, and the poem ends up being as much about love as about dinner.