You must log in or # to comment.
Church potluck every Sunday when I was a kid. A whole buffet line of jello based not dessert dishes. Usually peas in green jello, shredded carrots in orange jello,or hotdog in jello abominations. If not jello, there were at least 10 mayonnaise based atrocities.
I ate a lot of dinner rolls.
Mayonnaise PLUS jello, with hotdogs. Perfect.
In defense of my old church:
Pizza biscuits.
Get Pillsbury biscuit dough, slap down one, slap down mozzarella, marinara, pepperoni/sausage, slap down another biscuit over top, do this 12 times, cover and bake.
Sorta like a poor man’s calzone… or, arguably, they’re just super sized pizza pockets.
Don’t pair well with grape juice imo, but they were honestly pretty good.
We did eventually get an Italian soda station bar type thing, no clue if we just aped that from the Mormons or came up with it independently.
Dude! We made those exact pizzas as kids after temple. They were quite good.
Ahem.
Cheesus Crust.
That is all.
I would have eaten those for sure.
I still can’t do potlucks because my parents forced me to eat all sorts of random bullshit at the church potluck, because they felt like being seen eating someone’s dish conferred some weird church status.
“Go over and tell Miss Borley how much you liked her chicken liver and salmon casserole.”
On the other hand, this also contributed to my powerful disdain for church, so I guess that’s something. The only way out is through… a senile lady’s disgusting casserole, or something.
God, I feel for you folk. When my parents forced me to try something, it was like sushi, fried okra, or pesto.
I was a stubbornly picky eater. So thankfully my parents never made me do that, as I would have simply accepted a punishment rather than take a bite of any of that shit.
“Go over and tell Miss Borley how much you liked her chicken liver and salmon casserole.”
Okay, Mommy!
goes over and vomits all over Miss Borley
Sometimes the holy spirit just moves through you.
Nah, that’s the liver.
Apparently I missed out. Post church social time was coffee and pastries. The big meals were normal (turkey with mash, green beans, and cranberry sauce, for example).
But I’ve read the cookbooks.
Y’all’s churches were weird. Growing up catholic in a German part of America we just did fish fries with beer battering and pig roasts, both with copious beer, though the kids had to stick to a single sip of wine. My wife’s catholic upbringing was more Italian American and her church did meatballs in tomato sauce.
I’ve always thought this was some sort of mass hysteria. Who ate any of that stuff and thought “oh, hell yeah, so good”? Who would make it twice? Let alone more?
I’ve always figured it was a remnant from the depression that overstayed it’s welcome. A lot of those horrid old recipes feel like some of the old depression recipes with too many resources, like buying up all the potions ingredients in Skyrim to make random shit. Hope you like 33 flavors of damage stamina and damage health.
WWII for the canned food. That’s why them and Boomers hold onto a bunch of food items that only happened for 15-20 years.
I feel like the food rationing for some things during WWII wasnt enough of a large scale change from the depression era rationing to be notable. Regardless that’s still about 15+ years of food scarcity to have a major cultural impact especially since much like right now the buildup to the great depression fully stetting in started as early as 1925 in some areas.
I once read a theory that those recipes were a form of protest by women in the 1950s-60s. "I can’t get a divorce, have my own bank account, or get a credit card? Then enjoy this jello, mayonnaise hotdog salad motherfucker. "
How to quiet quit life: hotdog jello.
I must have lucked out, the oddest thing at my childhood churchs’ potlucks were the ambrosia/watergate salad where they used ingredients that they liked instead of what the typical recipe calls for, or waldorf salads which had just a little too much mayo and not enough whipped cream.
Ha. I know where you went to church.
Probably. Because we were there together. I think. Those were nasty jellos
Some family recipes are heirlooms. Others are evidence.
My Irish American grandma on my dad’s side had two recipes. 'Roast Butt ', some pale greasy meat that was boiled until it was falling apart, yet still resisted cutting and chewing once it cursed your plate: the left overs of this were tossed into a pot with a can of La Choy ‘Oriental Style Vegetables’ and a bottle of some sweet sauce and dubbed ‘Chop Suey’, which was probably from a recipe she got out of an ad in the back of a TV guide in the 60s.
The woman could boil a mean potato, though.
My Oklahoma dust bowl era meemaw never really cooked anything that didn’t come from a can, but she baked bread and ‘English Muffins’ from scratch that held up well when frozen.
The bread was really dry and tasteless unless you really slathered on condiments. The ‘muffins’ were flattened little lumps of dough that were as dense as a dying star, not a single nook or cranny in sight, with a chewy raw consistency not unlike chewing gum.
I actually liked those a lot, and was disappointed later in life when I had store bought English Muffins, which were more like a mutant crumpet than anything else.
My mom and sister have the recipes, but neither have attempted making them. I’m afraid to read them because they’ll probably just say:
One box Jiffy baking mix, water, salt. Bake until done.
You have a way with words. I’m dying at “as dense as a dying star” lmao
mormons got it covered lol. there’s a fair bit of survivorship bias here
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people. Just because they did this to live most definitely does not mean you are to live this way. Britons and “headcheese”.
Family recipes are great though. Not women’s job, but they are great and should be preserved. Unless they involve gelatin.
I dont necessarily agree - my family (including my mother who has run a few restaurants
into the ground) didnt have any recipes worth passing down - unless you count dumping a jar of ragu in a pot with some spaghetti.By the time I was 20 I could match or improve the flavour of any dish from childhood (about the only good thing to come out of going to a culinary
scamcollege), and I ended up not cooking… Basically any of it. I still pop open a can of smoked oysters on cheese and cracker nights, but thats more for remembering my grandma than anything else.I blame the fact that everyone in my family smoked like a chimney and had no tastebuds left.
Hush up and eat your hooves
Turns out I don’t actually dislike vegetables, I just dislike how my mother’s and grandmother make them. Did you know they can be served with colour still on them?
Boggles my mind oven roasted asparagus and broccoli were not a thing as a child.
My gourmand grampolycule even did grilled lemon almond mzithra broccoli once in the 90s. They spoiled us.
Well that sounds like a good… someone. Gourmet grandpa?
oh sorry. i forget not everyone was here for the full explanation. one of my bio grampas was in a polycule and i call it the grampolycule because i had So Many Grampas
Oh, lol, I was wondering how autocorrect might create that. So what’s Gourmand?
*Someone who likes food.
Turns out I love Brussels sprouts, so long as you don’t cook them til they’re grey.
Also, the new cultivars are WAY less bitter. You can still grow the old type yourself at home, and it’s really a huge difference.
This is the important part. Modern Brussels sprouts are NOT your grandma’s sprouts from the 1990s or earlier. From wikipedia :
In the 1990s, the Dutch scientist Hans van Doorn identified the chemicals that make Brussels sprouts bitter: sinigrin and progoitrin.[11] This enabled Dutch seed companies to cross-breed archived low-bitterness varieties with modern high-yield varieties
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2241/
Goddamn. They really do have a comic for everything.
Do you mean to tell me vegetables can be cooked some other way besides boiling? And you can put seasoning on them?!? My grandfather would be disgusted by the thought.
Even boiled vegetables taste good if you don’t go stupid mode about it.
I got fucking microwave steamed frozen veggies with no seasoning at all not even butter and if I didn’t eat the freezer burnt slop I wasn’t allowed to leave the table.
Trauma bonding hell yeah. 👊
I get the microwaved steamed veggies now. But I at least toss them in some olive oil or butter and season them. Usually I’ll microwave them halfway to thaw them then fry them in some oil to get a nicer char. Not gourmet, but perfectly fine.
I used to stir fry my veggies, but they’d end up soft due to the resulting moisture.
Then I baked them in the oven hoping that’d be better, but I’d overcook them just a bit and they’d be too hard.
I finally decided to air fry my veggies, and they were juuuuuuuuuuuuust right!
This was me with soup. My mom would use all the dregs of whatever she had around to make “soup,” and it was disgusting. Real soup made with the good parts of fresh ingredients is amazing, and I didn’t even know until I was in my mid-20’s!
I’ve made delicious strawberry ice cream. One way to get the strawberry flavor in there is to steep the milk/batter with berries and let the berry juice seep out of the berry. Fun fact! If you do this, you get white ghost berries so strain them out. If you want berry chunks, add new berries afters.
Frozen is way better than canned
Canned veggies aren’t that bad. But my mom used to treat them like they fresh.
So instead of just warming them up in the liquid, she would rinse them, then boil them like normal (which was already too long).
The very bad neighborhood of Flavortown.
I will never understand why some people prefer to boil hotdogs instead of just microwaving them. They taste better and it’s way faster.
I will toss them on some foil in the toaster oven rather than boil them.
Depends on the hotdog. Beef franks in natural casing? Boil. Chicken/pork dogs? Do whatever you want with them, it ain’t gonna save them.
Don’t you degenerate my Oscar Meyer! He died for our hot dog sins!
Pan fry or outdoor grill. I want that skin blistered and browned.
Microwaves with the wire rack instead of the glass plate end up giving 'em grill marks as if they were lightly BBQd if you put them directly on the wire rack. But grilling is still the better option when you have time.
I don’t know what the fuck that monstrosity is, but what I do know is that it is neither a snack nor a sandwich!
There’s 4 bread layers, spread with some kind of cream cheese/mayo abomination and laid down with gherkins, ham, pistachios, and mushrooms before being pressed in the fridge overnight and “frosted” with I dunno, horseradish or CoolWhip or something. The bread makes it a sandwich I guess.
No.
I don’t care what’s in it or what other fevered rationalizations someone might try to make; just No.
The mushrooms worry me the most. There’s sizeable gaps between them, which seem to have been filled up entirely with whatever the white stuff is…
Hey maybe it’s marshmallow fluff!
i thought that was asparagus LOL
gherkins don’t make it any more appealing
has anyone ever tried this?
Here’s another thing, they used to cook the shit out of food. Not burnt? Can’t serve it. And don’t get me started on ketchup. On your steak? Seriously?
Both my mother, and my mother in law will not eat a steak unless it is well done. Even when it is cooked well done, they have been known to microwave it after just to be sure.
My mother burnt cookies. Every.damn.time. I thought she was just bad at it until a year ago my dad burnt his toast. I asked if he liked it that way. Yup. She burnt things because he liked it that way.
I grew up on shredded carrots in raspberry jello. Both the texture and the taste left a lot to be desired lol
Mid-century recipes were buck wild. People who’d grown up with six ingredients suddenly had access to exotic raw materials like cheese from Switzerland, and they were doing mad science in a casserole dish. It was fusion cuisine from people who would not recognize sushi as intended for human consumption.
This is my grandmother’s recipe for ribs, which means it’s 1950s American suburban cuisine. It’s not high culture… but it’s not bad, and you’d never try it otherwise.
Par-bake 5 lbs of pork ribs, in a deep pan, in the oven, at 325 degrees Farenheit.
While that’s happening, mix a sauce from the following:
8 oz dark corn syrup or molasses
40 oz ketchup (seriously)
1 small onion, diced
3 cloves garlic
~16 oz canned mandarin oranges (or pineapple)
12 whole cloves
1 cups vinegar (white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar)
3 tbsp “salad oil” (i.e. some lightly-flavored vegetable oil)
4 oz French’s yellow mustard (again, seriously)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
3 oz Heinz 57 (a steak sauce, similar to A1)
2 tsp Worcestershire
1 tsp Tabasco
3 tbsp butterApparently I don’t have the intended cooking times on this computer, so you’d have to bodge other recipes for ribs in sauce. Use a mat thermometer and don’t worry about it. Basically just get them half-done, then pour on this “Polynesian” sauce, and check temperature / baste every so often. The result is a very sweet, tangy meat, with abundant extra sauce intended to go over fresh short-grain rice. Because I expect my grandmother died without ever hearing the word “basmati.” My family stole the basis for this from Good Housekeeping, and they’ve only sent goons after us, like, twice. Incidentally you get about twenty pounds of ribs per goon.
This actually sounds like it could be pretty good! I’m cracking up at the 3T butter though.
I assume it’s a binder.
Is it weird that I can’t recall my grandmother ever cooking for me? She may have at some point, but there was never any special reverence for her cooking the way I hear a lot of families have. As far as food goes, my strongest memories are about how she’d keep a cup of jelly beans in her car. I was always excited to ride with her because of it, haha.
The big deal cook in my family is my dad, who would have everybody lining up for his chili when he’d cook food for games and fundraisers. He became known for it. When a home game was coming up, football players would ask my marching band brothers if our dad would be cooking for it.
It’s interesting too, because despite being born in a foreign country, and nearly my entire extended family being of the same culture, he doesn’t cook in that style. His recipes are entirely his own. The key difference is that he uses a lot of sorrel, which is rare in the US but very common in the country he’s from. We grew it in our backyard garden, and he gifted me a potted plant of it when I moved out.
I used to get annoyed when he’d invite himself to join me whenever I cooked… but I miss it now.
🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂
