We were talking about Chicago Italian Beef in an earlier thread, and that got me thinking about other foods I miss from my childhood – that I can’t get anymore.
There was a neighborhood bakery literally right around the corner from me. We lived in a Polish/Bohemian neighborhood that was complete with old ladies wearing babushkas and names that were hard to pronounce. I miss the kolaczki, rounds of flakey goodness filled with apricot or poppy seed or cherry. Other flavors, too, but why eat those when there was poppy seed, apricot or cherry?
On Saturdays the bakery made something called “salt horns” which was a soft white bread in a crescent shape, with chunky kosher salt sprinkled on them. We would get them warm from the oven, and they were so good, absolutely delightful. Nothing at all like a rich, buttery croissant, except for the shape.
Salerno’s pizza. Carm’s Italian Beef. Dumplings. My mom’s macaroni and cheese. Which I have never been able to duplicate because I refuse to make it with velveeta, which I am sure is what gave it the creamy texture, that never separated.
Am I the only one, or do you guys miss foods from your childhood?
Another Memorial Day Open Thread
Raven
Poodles, Villa Park. When we didn’t have enough for a beef we’d get a gravy sandwich!
Raven
When we were overseas they had our pictures on the wall. When I came home and grew my hair they told me to “get dafuck out “! There’s a memory for you.
billcoop4
Following up on last week’s post in the Good News thread.
I met my birth mother, sisters, and 8 year old nephew on Saturday in Salem, MA. We had a wonderful time with lots of laughter and chatter. I did spend some one-on-one time with her, also, and we are going to have more visits, and calls, and texts — she is very handy with an iPad.
So there’s good news — still on a bit of a high.
And to be on topic with food, we had an assortment of wraps to eat while we chatted — turkey, roast beef, and chicken salad.
And everyone who’s seen her pic says I look just like here.
Thanks for letting a lurker share. And thank you for the cheers!
BC
Wapiti
When I worked at the pool during the summer, at 12 or 13, I’d go to the deli and get an abalone (breaded and fried) sandwich for lunch.
Jay
@billcoop4:
yay!!!!!
schrodingers_cat
Do you have the whole day? Since my childhood was spent in India in the food mecca that is south Mumbai, list of the foods I miss is a mile long. Sadly some of it is too spicy for my palate now
What passes in this country for “Indian” food is rather sad with a few exceptions here and there
There was a seafood restaurant that no longer exists. They used to cook whatever was the fresh catch of the day and serve them with piping hot chapatis. Everything was made on coal braziers. The owner was the Indian version of the soup Nazi who would lock up the restaurant and go to his ancestral village all summer on the west coast south of Mumbai.
The restaurant was set in a traditional house with sloping red tiled roofs.
Another Scott
There was a “Gino’s Pizza” down the road from us in Smyrna, GA when I was a kid. Thin-crust pizza with lots of toppings, kinda salty as I remember it. Maybe it had anchovies on it – my father liked stuff like that (sardines from the can, etc.). I remember sitting in the booth with the family having pizza and hearing Zager & Evans’ “In the year 2525” playing on the jukebox. I always think back to that whenever I hear that song.
There was an amazing variety of pizza in Chicago when I was there in the early ’80s. Giordono’s spinach pizza was becoming a big thing. A place in our neighborhood around West 64th street had a yummy pizza with a slightly sweet sauce (but far from ketchup) that I haven’t had anywhere else.
I also miss the hotdogs from Chicago. Yum.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Moar You Know
No. My mother had (and has) a pathological fear of getting food poisoning in restaurants. This combined well with my dad’s utter unwillingness to spend any money at all. The tragedy being that neither one of them could cook worth a shit at all. It wasn’t until college that my brother and I started getting any idea of what good food was, much less how to cook it.
Another Scott
@billcoop4: What a great story. :-)
Enjoy!
Cheers,
Scott.
New Deal democrat
Authentic roast beef on kimmelweck* and Ted’s hot dogs from Buffalo, NY!
*it’s the salty roll that holds up to au jus sauce that really makes the sandwich. And since it’s salty, bars love it!
cope
It probably wasn’t nearly as tasty as I remember it but Sara Lee used to sell a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. It came in an aluminum pan and if nobody was watching, I could easily eat half of one at a single sitting. Of course it went best with a large glass of cold whole milk. I’ve not seen that cake in decades.
WaterGirl
@billcoop4: That’s so wonderful! Am I right in thinking that your birth mother was 93? Or maybe 83? Send me an email if you would like to write up a post about it all, for a guest post in Celebrating Jackals.
Kristine
My Mom made the best chicken in white sauce, which was pretty much giblet gravy, concentrated and well filtered. She cut up and skinned the chicken and removed the fat—she was not a fan of meat and poultry fat—cooked it partially in water to get rid of the yuck, then rinsed it and added the seasoning and veggies. The sauce was thickened with corn starch. She never used flour. It was mild, but still so good. And way too much trouble for me to attempt. I was happy to figure out her stuffing, which was essentially a savory bread pudding.
Spanky
@Raven: I think you’ve just perfectly summarized the late 60’s in that comment.
WaterGirl
@Wapiti: Abalone, not baloney, right?
karensky
Ice cream at the dairy farm!
debbie
I grew up on Rubino’s pizza, and while there are better pizzas, nothing will ever replace Rubino’s in my heart.
Like they say on their homepage:
MagdaInBlack
My mothers beef pot roast, with carrots and potatoes. Yes I can make it, and it tastes exactly the same. Except that it doesn’t, ya know? ?
Roger Moore
I grew up in Loveland and moved to the LA area for college, so I’m in the exact opposite position. My home town was nothing special food-wise, and now I’m surrounded by great places to eat. My mother is actually a very good cook, but most of her effort was spent on making foods that were scarce in Colorado but readily available here.
scav
Kolache (kolacky) were one of our Christmas traditions, along with Houska (paired with sauerbraten, red cabbage and spatzle — collision of strong mixed heritage, one generation back). And we were firmly of the ko-lascht-KEE tribe, not the KO-latsch one (it’s a small sect).
WaterGirl
@MagdaInBlack: I vividly remember the first “real” meal I cooked when I moved out the dorms. My mom’s stuffed cabbages. I could not believe it when they tasted just like my mom’s.
I guess I thought there was some magic there that was not reproducible, and sometimes there is!
Citizen Alan
At the risk of sounding pompous, I am literally the only person in my extended family with any real aesthetic appreciation for food. Every holiday, we eat the same things, most of which are bland because my mother and sister consider pepper to be the most exotic spice that can be used on food. They also consider cranberry sauce out of a can (not even stirred up! just a jiggly tower of cranberry sauce!) to be superior to fresh made. My late father insisted that we go eat at the exact same restaurant every Friday night literally for years because it had all you can eat fried catfish. He saw no reason to every visit any restaurant that didn’t serve fried catfish, all-you-can eat. Which probably explains why I’ve struggled with obesity since I was fucking four.
Glory b
@The Moar You Know: Ha! That reminds me of a very short-lived reality series (can’t even remember what channel) about a group of kids (young privates) going through boot camp.
It included one Indian girl also (hey, schrodingers cat!!). Anyway, they all talked about how they missed the food at home, except for one set of twins. Hilariously, they rapsodized over how great the food was, and how they couldn’t wait for meal times. I figured it was probably more about the quality of the cooking at their home, but poverty might have played a role too, I remember they were from Appalachia, but no more than that.
raven
@debbie: I knew the mayor of Bexley.
WaterGirl
I cannot believe that I forgot to include pierogi! I knew I had forgotten something! Potato and onion was my favorite. But I’m also picturing sauerkraut – did they put that in pierogis?
FelonyGovt
Egg creams! Containing neither egg nor cream. A New York City treat with milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer.
And also, real Brooklyn pizza.
JMG
You can’t really get a good cheesesteak or sub anywhere outside the Philadelphia-South Jersey-Delaware area. New England tries, but no. And I miss the milkshakes at the Charcoal Pit in my home town of Wilmington, Del.
Roger Moore
@Spanky:
It’s more than just the ’60s he’s describing: it’s the conservative attitude toward “the troops” in a nutshell. They love “the troops” as an abstract construct and a tool with which to flog the liberals for being insufficiently militaristic, but they don’t have much use for the actual people serving. It was true during Vietnam, and it’s still true today.
jeffreyw
There was a small A&W root beer stand in my hometown that was set up in the summer. They had those heavy glass mugs they kept in a freezer. Two gulps and the drink was gone but for the brain freeze.
raven
@jeffreyw: And it was on tap, right?
WaterGirl
@scav: So many ways to spell those! I wonder if the recipes are all slightly different, or if just the names are different.
I have tried to make hem twice, but they are not right. I swear people leave stuff out of their magic recipes on purpose. And the woman that made my favorites has been gone for 20 years. So sad to lose people and then even our recipe/food connections with them.
Josie
As a child growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, I remember walking across the bridge to Reynosa and going to the market there. They sold a candy called Leche Quemada, made with goat’s milk that was to die for. I haven’t had it in years, but I found a recipe online and plan to make it soon. Isn’t it wonderful the stuff you can find on the internet?
B_Rogers
Growing up my dad would occasionally stop at Frank Davis Resort on the way home from the power plant and buy a plastic tray of their eclairs. There were enough to last us a couple of days if we rationed.
Which we seldom did.
Nora
Cottage ham, a ragged piece of ham, cooked all afternoon with onions. You would add new potatoes and green beans at the end. It was tasty and a little greasy. Cottage ham does not exist outside of the midwest.
DCrefugee
There was a Bresler’s ice cream parlor in the local strip mall. They had 30-something flavors.
One of them was a concord grape sherbet…
WaterGirl
@Josie: Your comment made me remember the amazing tacos!
My friend Connie LaMar and I would get stoned and drive into whatever the mexican equivalent of Greek Town was called. We would go to this authentic place in an otherwise rough part of town, and they would serve the tacos on two thin white corn tortillas, where you could see them being made in the window or in the back.
They served them rolled in parchment, and the dripped as you ate them. I remember it so vividly, and I can almost get the smell and taste, but not quite.
Great memories.
SFAW
@billcoop4:
Wonderful story. Thanks!
WaterGirl
@Nora: What is a ragged piece of ham?
Lacuna Synecdoche
WaterGirl @ Top:
Just as an FYI: Annie’s Shells & Cheddar™ is (or used to be) made with the same powdered Kraft white cheddar Annie used to make Smartfood™ Popcorn.
Fair Economist
I don’t miss much food from my childhood. My tastes have changed, and I prefer more vegetables and a Mediterranean style compared to the midcentury Southern food I grew up on. The things I still like, such as my father’s gumbos, I make. The main things I miss are things I can’t eat much for health reasons, like fried chicken, cheese grits, and desserts, especially pies/cobblers.
I tried an Ina Garten recipe once, and didn’t have any separation problem.
TheOtherHank
My mom grew up on a dairy farm way out on the prairie in Minnesota. My dad was in the Navy so we moved roughly every other year while I was growing up, so the farm was the one place in my life that was always there. I miss my grandmother’s farm cooking (lots of fresh things from the garden in the summer, lots of home-canned things in the winter). Remember, we’re talking Minnesota, so interesting spicing was not a thing, but I loved it.
PS – When A Prairie Home Companion was a thing people asked if I listened to it. I resisted for a while then gave it a try. Everyone raved about the Lake Woebegone segments, “They’re so funny!”. After listening a few times I couldn’t figure out why barely fictionalized stories about what my family was like were so funny.
evap
Speaking of Chicago, I was an undergrad at U Chicago. Pizza at Giordano’s (the original, before it got famous) followed by Gertie’s ice cream. No matter how large a group we were, the server would never write anything down. We would all order different flavors of ice cream and various toppings, and it was always correct.
MattF
Used to go to the bagel store on the weekend. Next door was the shop that sold lox (belly lox or nova), sturgeon, whitefish. Didn’t know those were all delicacies.
billcoop4
@WaterGirl
She’s 83, in excellent health–and very much with-it
BC
TaMara (HFG)
A lot of the recipes I write are based on classic dinners my mom cooked, so a lot of childhood food memories. When I go home and cook for my folks, I always try to choose those favorites that I know my mom doesn’t cook anymore.
And when I was a kid, and were stationed in Colorado Springs there was this fish-n-chips fast food place – that had “newspaper” wrapping and table coverings. I have no idea if it was good – but it was unique and kid-friendly.
jeffreyw
@raven: Oh, yes!
laura
All our family memories focus around San Francisco, or the City as my elders called it. Cesar’s at the corner of Bay and Powell heart of North Beach was the go to restaurant. A unionized restaurant that hosted every Union Christmas party, that had a portrait of the Pope and JFK over the cigarette machine in the bar. Their chicken cannelloni- my Grandma Mary called them little clouds. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Caesar-s-Italian-Restaurant-closing-3829629.php#photo-3389716
Another fondly missed food was an amazing sponge cake Aunt May would bring up from the city – Blum’s Coffee Crunch cake, tied up with striped string in a pink box. A sturdy sponge sandwiched with stiffly whipped cream and covered with shards of broken coffee crunch – like a bitter coffee brittle hand patted into the cream. It was the star of every infrequent occasion when we had a family luncheon of small sandwiches, macaroni salads and deviled eggs.
raven
Grandma Ingeborg made Kumla.
Almost Retired
@Roger Moore: I can totally relate to being liberated from the bland food of my childhood. I grew up in a one-restaurant town in the rural Upper Midwest, and there wasn’t a spice rack within 100 miles. And then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 21, and it was like the culinary heavens opened up. I haven’t had a tater tot since.
WaterGirl
@DCrefugee: 31-Flavors had an amazing Sparkling Bing Cherry ice cream that had great flavor and huge chunks of bing cherries (one of my very favorite fruits).
Comrade Colette
The bakery at a grocery store (Von’s, maybe?) on Point Loma in San Diego sold their version of Portuguese sweet bread, which was closer to Hawai’ian sweet bread than to other fancy-pants bakery versions of the Portuguese stuff. Soft, eggy, slightly sweet, great all by itself. I’ve never been able to find anything that duplicates it – including in Portugal.
TaMara (HFG)
@TheOtherHank: LOL.
As a fellow Brat, I get it. My maternal grandparents’ farm and my dad’s hometown were my substitute homes.
Did your gram fry eggs in lard? My memory is wonderful crispy “heels” on runny eggs covered in black pepper. I have never been able to recreate those, no matter how hard I have tried over the years.
Betty Cracker
@New Deal democrat: My husband is from Buffalo and on my first visit there, he introduced me to beef on weck and Ted’s and also a place called Jafafa Hots that had a specialty that people called a “shit canoe.” It was a hot dog with beanless chili and was good despite the name!
I make beef on weck at home sometimes. I make the kimmelweck by painting a water/corn starch slurry onto the tops of Kaiser rolls, then rolling the rolls in caraway seeds and kosher salt. I heat top-quality deli roast beef slices in beef broth, then layer that onto the kimmelweck and load it up with horseradish. Good stuff!
dmsilev
@WaterGirl: As a topping maybe; I’ve never seen it as a filling. When I worked at the University of Chicago, there was a fleet of food trucks that showed up around lunchtime, one of which specialized in pierogi. Little bit of sauerkraut, some sour cream, maybe some mustard if you got the sausage to go along with the pierogis. A good lunch.
Delk
I used to walk to Carm’s when I lived in the West Loop (long before it was trendy) but I preferred The Patio’s beefs around the corner on Taylor.
geg6
I miss my mom’s meatloaf and her pot roast. I have both recipes but they don’t taste exactly the same when I make them. They are good! But they aren’t my mom’s.
My mom was also a wonderful baker. I am most definitely not. I can make a few things but nothing like my mom. Her pie crusts were perfect. She had six kids, a husband working two jobs, she had a part-time job and was finishing up her journalism degree and she still made at least a dozen different Christmas cookies and pastries every Christmas. I do not have the patience or will to do any of that.
I am, however, making her baked beans for our little two person cookout today. Those I have perfected. Delicious.
WaterGirl
@billcoop4: I am really happy for you. For all of you.
Comrade Colette
@laura: Monsieur Colette, an SF native, has fond memories of Blum’s. I may have eaten at Caesar’s once or twice when I first moved here, but it wasn’t anything special by then compared to the newer, more regional-focused Italian restaurants.
A Ghost to Most
White hots and beef on wick from WNY. Bushels of crabs in MD.
billcoop4
My (adoptive) mother had been trained as a home economist and therefore (1) followed recipes very strictly, (2) was very very good but not creative, and (3) didn’t clean up as she went along (because in her work someone did that for her) but complained about all the clutter in the sink…..*sigh*
The two things I make of hers that are staples for me are her Baked Chicken and French Toast — also baked but not at the same meal :) Other than those two, I’ve learned to do my own and be more adventuresome–and recipes are guidelines even the first time.
I also clean up as I go.
Oh, it’s been years since I had a Good Humor Toasted Almond. Those were special.
BC
scav
@WaterGirl: Indeed. In terms of recipes, our “traditional family” recipe is the one on the back of the Solo cans (& I’m the 3rd generation to use it) which makes us of the round, flat, cream-cheese school, but I’ve had round flat yeasted, square flat flakey, square flakey folded . . . .
Another Scott
@jeffreyw: Ha! There was an A&W in Ohio that we went to occasionally. Great stuff. Loved the chili dogs.
There was also a place called Dogs n Suds in north Bellefontaine, OH that had car hops, etc. It was always a great treat to go there as a kid. (I see it’s a chain that still has lots of locations in the Midwest.)
Cheers,
Scott.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: Annual Kumla dinners are still a big deal in the area where I grew up ( Sheridan IL ) Both Newark, IL and Norway, IL, on Rte 71, have them.
Not a fan, myself. Blech
Kringla, on the other hand oh yes ?
namekarB
Three dot columnist Herb Caen of San Francisco Chronicle fame once said:
“The town of Chico is where velveeta cheese can be found in the gourmet food aisle”
Yutsano
Hmm…the problem with growing up as a Navy brat is you get rather limited in your food choices. I do remember going as a group with another Navy family to an all you can eat buffet specifically for shrimp since my dad is allergic to shellfish. For me, however, I was the cook. It was my responsibility to get dinner at least started before Mom got home. I wasn’t really allowed to be creative, just take ingredients out of fridge and get going. So maybe that’s why I don’t have many fond memories of food like that.
Almost Retired
@Another Scott: My Grandfather’s family was originally from Logan County, Ohio (therefore, I know how to properly pronounce “Bellefontaine”).
TheOtherHank
@TaMara (HFG): I was never a fried egg kid, so maybe she did and I complained that I wanted then scrambled.
She did make homemade donuts that she sprinkled with powdered sugar. If you were in from the fields when she was making them you could have them so hot from the oil they burned your fingers.
My paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor whom the lord called to a new congregation fairly regularly (or was an asshole who got fired by his congregations after they got to know him; reports differ). So I got to learn the flip side of rural life when we visited those grandparents in bleak, lonely towns all over the Dakotas
Kristine
@New Deal democrat: Buffalo kid here. We left when I was 6, but I still remember roast beef on kimmelweck. I tried ordering some rolls from a Buffalo-area bakery last year–that didn’t work. They sent the salt/caraway seed mix in a separate container, which made sense–the salt would attract water and dissolve and make a mess. But the rolls were called “semi-hard rolls,” which were essentially glorified burger buns. It’s hard to find a good crusty hard roll these days. Most everyone seems to prefer pillow bread.
Also, the Friday fish frys. This was the mid-60s, so I’m sure everything was fried in lard. So good.
raven
@Another Scott: Sog and Duds
raven
@MagdaInBlack: Yea, i recall it being greasy. My people came from Stavanger, I see there is one just south of Sheridan.
MagdaInBlack
@TheOtherHank: Ok, there’s something else I miss. My mothers homemade donuts, fried in lard ?
Betty Cracker
There was a place in Tampa called Howard Avenue Market that made THE best pressed Cuban sandwiches. It wasn’t even a restaurant — just a slightly grubby, family-run convenience store. I’m not sure what made their sandwiches so great. Maybe the quirky old foil-covered sandwich press that charred the edges of the salami and ham made it extra-special.
There was also a place called the Seabreeze Restaurant that had THE best deviled crabs. (Deviled crabs are a Tampa thing that I’ve never seen properly done anywhere outside of Tampa.) The Seabreeze has been gone for many years, but even now, food trucks will pop up claiming they serve deviled crabs using the Seabreeze recipe, and people who remember the original will mob that food truck!
You can still get awesome Cuban sandwiches and deviled crabs in Tampa, but I do miss those two places. Also, a place to the east of Tampa called the Branch Ranch had THE best red velvet cake. It’s also gone. Now I’ve depressed myself with all these lost food memories! :)
Madeleine
@WaterGirl: Yes, they do make pierogis filled with sauerkraut, or something like it. It’s called kapusta. A long ago significant other made pierogis and I liked the potato-onion ones but would not eat the kapusta ones.
Coming from near Rochester, NY, I used to miss white (and red) hotdogs—more like sausages. But Weisswurst fills the white hotdog bill.
I’d say I miss wonderful doughnuts from a bakery there, but I avoid doughnuts now—too tempting.
hitchhiker
My house was mostly chaos of the unfriendly sort, but there was a day. One day, when I was maybe 6 and my older brothers were 8, 9, and 10 and my younger brother was 2. We lived in Duluth, and it would have been late spring, so my mom was not yet pregnant with Baby #6. Babies #7 and #8 were not dreamt of.
She somehow had enough money to send us four older kids to the movies. We walked downtown and saw a film I can’t remember, but it wasn’t scary or sexy … maybe a western. And here’s the meal part.
When we got home in the early twilight, tired and happy, our house was clean and warm. She’d made fried chicken and mashed potatoes, which tasted like absolute heaven. She and our dad were in the habit of taking their plates to the living room so they could eat in peace, but on this night they sat down in their places.
I remember this particular food so clearly, because we were hungry for it and everyone — each of us — felt happy and calm. That one hour, unusual and specific, still stands up for me 64 years later, like a signpost of what might be possible.
H.E.Wolf
One of many fond memories of my dad is that in his early 70s, he arranged a detour during our trip to Switzerland so that he could try to find tutti-frutti ice cream in Interlaken, where he had eaten it at age 4 on a trip with his family. :-)
geg6
@WaterGirl:
All the little old church ladies who make pierogies as fundraisers every Friday around here make cheese and potato, sauerkraut and a sweet prune. They are all good.
Lacuna Synecdoche
WaterGirl:
Where I spent part of my childhood, in a backwater corner of Appalachia in NE PA literally called Back Mountain, what food was labelled had very little relation to what it actually was.
For instance, Pork Barbecue was not pulled pork in barbecue sauce – it was boiled sliced pork roll with relish on a white bread hamburger bun.
So, umm … no, I don’t miss much food from my childhood.
Gravie
Cuban sandwiches, oh yeah. No one in other parts of the country really understands how to make them, and of course they don’t have access to real Cuban bread, which is foundational. I miss all the Tampa goodies of my youth, a great mix of Spanish, Italian, and Southern cooking.
schrodingers_cat
@Glory b: My mother is a great cook. After school snacks with afternoon tea was something I looked forward to every afternoon when walking home from school.
Another Scott
@Almost Retired: It was tough for me to get my head around the name, especially coming to the area from Cobb County, GA. Of course, down there one has to cope with things like “DeKalb”.
I’ve been in NoVA for 30-mumble years now, and Alexandria has a street named Wythe that is fun. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
Watergirl;
Velveeta is an actual cultured cheese. At one time it was the only cheese developed in the US, not a copy of a European cheese. There are ‘process’ version of cheese. The ‘process’ version of Velveeta is called American.*
*I’m not a fan of either.
RandomMonster
I grew up in Sonoma County and my mom (quite a baker) would make apple pies using local Gravenstein apples (a rather tart, under-appreciated apple). She made her crusts with shortening and said the trick for a flaky crust was to avoid handling the dough too much. She always did a cinnamon-sugar-butter baked crumble top.
TheOtherHank
This isn’t childhood food, but I don’t work in South San Francisco anymore, so I don’t get to go to the La Tapatia grocery (on Grand across from city hall) store’s burrito counter and get a thigh-sized burrito as often as I used to. According to Ancestry.com, I am almost entirely a mix of Swedish and Norwegian, but when they were really busy, the guys working would the burrito counter would ask for my order in Spanish. That always made me happy.
narya
One of my childhood food memories is my grandmother’s pot roast and polenta. ( I was amused when polenta became “gourmet” there for awhile.) And . . . my mom just happened to make it the day we showed up. The other food memory is pizza from a specific place–and we had THAT with my brother the other day. My grandmother was a great cook, as is my mom, so I have a ton of those memories, but it was nice having two of them recalled this week. Haven’t had a cheesesteak yet; may not get to that one.
Betty Cracker
@Gravie: Spanish, Italian and Southern — exactly! I live about 100 miles from Tampa, and you cannot get decent Cuban bread here. I’ve tried making it myself, but it doesn’t turn out right. So, every time I go to Tampa, I swing by La Segunda and/or Faedo’s and come home with a carload of bread, which I cut into manageable lengths and freeze for later use. :)
@hitchhiker:
I have those types of memories too. So well said!
Original Lee
A friend of the family used to make mincemeat from scratch. We would get a big jar of it every Christmas, big enough for 2 deep-dish pies. She refused to share her recipe and I have yet to come close to duplicating it.
This same friend also had a 100-year-old sourdough starter that made amazing biscuits. We used to get one cup in a margarine container every eight weeks or so, enough to make one batch of biscuits. Sadly, the starter did not travel at all well, so it died when she did. My husband and I have a batch from King Arthur Flour that is 5 years old, and we are just now getting close to that wonderful nutty flavor of her starter.
Another Scott
@Dan B: I always thought it was weird when I’d see towers of Velveeta boxes stacked up in the aisles in the grocery store while “real” cheese was kept in the refrigerators.
;-)
For a while, a decade or two ago, I was making macaroni and cheese with a little olive oil and fresh-shredded cheese. Yeah, it never flowed the way the Velveeta stuff did, but it tasted yummy.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: Yeah, the sauerkraut must have been a side dish.
geg6
This is a very particular Pittsburgh thing and my mom used to make it for Sunday after mass lunch: barbecued chipped ham. There used to be deli/soda fountains around southwestern PA called Isaly’s. One of the specialties, along with the skyscraper ice cream cone, was their chipped ham, which was a particular kind of ham (no idea what) sliced tissue thin. You’d make a sauce of ketchup, mustard, a little brown sugar and some sweet relish in a skillet and then drop piles of the ham in the sauce and heat it up. Served on fresh kaiser rolls with potato salad on the side. If you were having a lot of people, you’d make the sauce in the crockpot and drop in the Isaly’s chipped ham and keep it warm in that for your party. Everyone loved that stuff. The Isaly’s stores are all gone, but you can still get Isaly’s chipped ham at local grocery stores.
RandomMonster
@TheOtherHank: I had to move away from the Peninsula, and the food I miss the most is a steak and prawn burrito from Pancho Villa’s in San Mateo. And their salsa bar!
WaterGirl
@geg6: But you are an amazing cook! Cooking and baking are two entirely different skills. And interests.
If you made me choose between them, I’m not sure which I would choose.
Ruckus
I wrote about some restaurants that we used to eat at when I was a kid just the other day. Strangely enough others here had eaten at the same places. Ponchitio’s, La Villa Basque, Pecos Bill’s BBQ, and one place I didn’t mention, home. Mom was a very good cook and had a wide range of foods, enchiladas, stuffed artichokes, yes macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff, tacos and baked goods, were some of them.
@Glory b:
In boot camp no one had enough time to enjoy food, you had to eat and get out and if you were done chewing on the way out the door, you had taken too much time. Taste or enjoy? Nope. Now once you went to a duty station that changed somewhat. On board ship there is never enough room to feed everyone so you eat and leave as fast as reasonable. There were enough tables for about 30 to sit and eat at one time, with 300 people to feed. Sometimes the food was actually good, often you ate only to fend off starvation. But there was always someone who’s home cooking experiences were horrible and they liked pretty much everything. With one exception. The lunch mess at Great Lakes when I attended tech school. They marched us there and wouldn’t allow us to go to the club to pay to eat actual food. The worst was every Thursday, fillet of brontosaurus butt. The sharpest knife couldn’t cut it, eating it was impossible no matter how hungry you were and they had a separate can to throw them into, I’m sure to keep for the next week when they boiled them again, just to make them more disgusting. That was the highlight, but starvation was the preferred remembrance from Great Lakes lunch..
E.
About once a month my mother would drive me in our 1968 Toyota Corolla way out into the boonies somewhere on the Applegate River to Mr. Schultzky’s place. Mr. Schultzky was Polish, I think, and looked the part (or did to me — I didn’t get to meet too many people with an accent and a giant apron). He had a barn where he made sausages, with hundreds of them hanging from the rafters. No way that would be tolerated now! But mom would negotiate the deal and we would drive home with a car full of salami. I can still smell it, and think back to those very different days.
NotMax
Egg creams. Must be made using Fox’s U-bet syrup, otherwise it’s an also ran.
Ebinger’s blackout cake. (The original never had the fancy schmancy piped frosting shown at the link on the top, flat top with a thick coating of crumbled cake adhering to the frosting was de rigueur.
Unlaid eggs in homemade chicken soup.
Shana
As for food specific to the community I grew up in, Rock Island, IL has Jim’s Rib Haven. When I was a kid there was only the tiny carry out only location, but they’ve since moved into a new (20 years ago or so) location that has seating. Jim’s were the first ribs I remember eating so the sauce is still my favorite. Northwestern Illinois is not known for any specific style of barbeque so I don’t really know the origins. It’s a somewhat thin sauce with a tomato base but a lot of acidity to it. I suspect it’s mostly a Carolina style sauce with Jim’s own tinkering. I’ve had it a few times on visits and it’s still great.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: We had a Dog ‘n Suds, too, though I obviously think that dog was singular. Being that you’re Another Scott, you may be right.
Minstrel Michael
Neither my mother’s cooking nor the takeout in my boring Boston suburb were anything to write home about– indeed, they were prominent reasons to *leave* home. What was good was an early ice cream farm stand, almost as many flavors as Baskin & Robbins, and made in house with what I was led to believe was cream from their own cows. I think it was called Buttrick’s. It was on the road to the Concord Minute Man statue, and just past it was a plaque marking the spot where Paul Revere was detained by the Redcoats.
The really good food came from the relatives. My father’s siblings lived on Long Island, and when we visited, they would feed us New York deli foods. Even more impressive, my mother’s big sister was an accomplished chef, to the point where the local newspaper used to pay her to roast the turkey to be photographed for the Thanksgiving supplement. That wouldn’t be the one we would eat, of course! But her Thanksgiving feasts were legendary– the turkey was perfectly baked (overnight), the apple pie melted in your mouth, even the Jello salads were awesome! The event ultimately ceased to be just family– one year I found myself sitting next to an older woman who told impressively rude stories about working in the Johnson White House.
DesertFriar
Growing up in Riverside RI, I miss clam cakes (used to get them at Crescent Park – an amusement park). Even though we didn’t usually go on the rides… the clam cakes were great.
Hot wieners at the New York system with maybe a stop at Dell’s Frozen Lemonade for a drink.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: My memory often adds extra letters – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_n_Suds
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
JoyceCB
Coffee cakes from the Horn and Hardart bakery – this one was in suburban Philadelphia, between Jenkintown and Willow Grove, can’t remember if it was on Easton or Morland… close to my grandfather’s, at any rate. We used to love their Crumb Buns, a nice white cake on the bottom, a streusel-like crumb topping to die for. No idea of they were actually called Crumb Buns or if that was just our family name.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Don’t forget how the homeless veterans get pulled out so that whenever anyone proposes spending money to help somebody, they can say “what about the homeless veterans?” This is the only purpose of homeless veterans.
Zelma
I moved back to South Jersey just so I could get a good Italian hoagie and a real cheesesteak. Also Mack’s pizza. There was this great bakery in Haddon Twp – McMillan’s. I’ve never had such good eclairs. The bakery is still there but I don’t live nearby. I wonder if the eclairs are still as good.
I have no nostalgia for my mother’s or grandmother’s cooking. They were Scots. No more need be said.
Matt McIrvin
@Minstrel Michael: Massachusetts is ice-cream paradise. We have local stands here where you can get ice cream that is better than any widely recognized brand. It’s an underappreciated perk. I’m pretty sure the best ice cream I’ve ever had is offered at Mad Maggie’s in North Andover.
E.
Maybe this is out of place here but I think not. I read recently that when people emigrate to another country the first thing they give up is their native dress, which usually happens very quickly. Then their language, which usually takes a generation or so. But the native food is the last thing to go, and can easily hang on in a family for centuries after they’ve left the old country.
And here I am today, 120 years after my great-grandparents left Sweden, eating eggs on knackebrod.
Zelma
@billcoop4:
Wow! What a great story.
Zelma
@billcoop4:
Wow! What a great story.
JMG
Here’s a home cooking childhood memory, my paternal grandmother’s chicken pie. Made with potatoes, onions, celery, drumsticks, thighs, split breasts and two secret ingredients, pork chops and crust made with Bisquik. Made in an enormous baking pan, served with gherkin pickles on the side. Pretty great, but that wasn’t the highlight. That came the next morning, when leftovers were warmed in a cast iron frying pan and served. As it heated the potatoes and crust broke down into a gooey, sort of solid substance. It looked terrible, but it was ambrosia. Grandma died almost 40 years ago, and the recipe sort of died with her. My Mom knew it, but wouldn’t make it (they had issues). I have toyed with the idea of remaking it from my memory alone, but haven’t had the guts. It’d be such a letdown if I failed to recreate it, and the odds of failure are pretty good.
E.
@hitchhiker: Good story, and well told. Thank you.
Dan B
My mother from Fort Smith, Arkansas and Clarksville had degrees in music from Oberlin and the University of Michigan. She did not cook by choice. The spice rack she received as a wedding present had every jar full when they moved from Ohio to Seattle, except cinnamon. Her baked goods were amazing, a reward for slogging through boiled meats, boiled vegetables, and boiled starches. Her apple pie was made with early green pie apples that were fragrant. The cherry pie was from sour cherries we picked while hanging onto twenty foot ladders. I’ve only duplicated her flakey pie crust once. There was a touch of almond extract in the cherry pie and it was never too sweet.
Otherwise there were no restaurants worth discussing in Wadsworth, Ohio or Arkansas with the exception of the Rubber Group Banquet at the Brown Derby in Akron. My eight year old brother asked, during a lull in the room, “Is the chicken made of rubber?”. Laughter was suppressed unsuccessfully.
geg6
@E.:
I made Swedish (Turkish?) meatballs last night. Couldn’t find lingonberry jam, but cranberry relish was delicious with them.
Gvg
I don’t miss childhood foods. My mother was not a good cook then. She is now decades later, but in my childhood she was just learning and some of the things she trialed were not…worth it. Late 60’s early 70’s with an interest in vegetarian recipe meant eggplant and other things not good IMO.
Eventually she learned. From what I know I would guess not having learned to be a good cook was a strategy to avoid being trapped as a farm wife. She managed to go to college and taught us farms were hard work and boring. After she escaped, she learned from friends. It’s also possible her mother wasn’t a good cook, although good at quantity.
I still remember a visit by myself to her parents farm a few years before they died. I cooked lasagna for them because it is a big dish that keeps well and rewarms excellently. They loved it, but had never had it before and were fascinated. I also recall my uncle and aunt visiting us in Oklahoma when I was young, marveling at cantaloupe which they had never had.
Dad’s mom wasn’t that good a cook either.
So these days mom is a good cook and I am trying to learn because she wasn’t when I was living at home. I’m in my 50’s and she is in her 70’s. Life is funny sometimes.
schrodingers_cat
Another thing I miss is the Irani cafes/tea shops of Mumbai. Marble table tops, endless cups of tea, delectable pastries and cakes, plus savory delicacies and a Parsi bawa at the cash counter.
Most of you already know the most famous Parsi in the world.
Also too Irani/Parsi bakeries, their breads, cakes were so delectable. Most are gone now but a few still remain.
Ruckus
I left out one of the most memorable foods I ever ate. My great aunt and uncle, retired to Santa Barbara where her family owned a small chain of supermarkets and raised the beef they sold there on their farms. She cooked me zucchini flower for lunch one day, out of her garden. Normally you don’t cook this because the flower is the precursor for the squash, cook the flower, no zucchini. But this is one of the most amazing meals I’ve ever had, I still remember it and it was over 60 yrs ago. Light, delicate, literally melt in your mouth and tastes like nothing else I’ve ever eaten.
Look at the foods we’ve all experienced, some good, some amazing, some remembered only for how bad they were, but the one thing is that we have lost so many great home cooks, who learned because they liked food and had to make it themselves. How many of us have lost that connection?
raven
@Another Scott: Aunt Fanny’s Cabin?
Dan B
@Zelma: My mother’s family was purebred Scots Irish, or as they claimed, Scottish Irish. The only things not boiled were meatloaf, pies, and cakes. Boiled turnips, boiled green beans, boiled okra – my brother’s nightmare, etc.
prostratedragon
Just before seeing this post a few minutes ago I was musing on Guy’s barbecue on the South Side. You can’t get it any more. Guy was a relative, and his pits were quite popular back in the 50s through 70s. Ribs were lean but tender and juicy, and the sauce had just the right touches of sweetness and tang. The smoke was legitimate.
Also Aunt Rose’s pound cake, apple pie, and peach ice cream. The first pizza I ever had, at Enrico’s, a place which is long gone. Family cooking that was nice because it was family cooking.
Ruckus
@JMG:
I used to be afraid to cook because I never learned how. I do know how to eat and how to enjoy food. My sister, a wonderful cook who one would never have thought would have learned anything from mom, learned the one trick, try it. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Almost no one learns from cooking school, we learn from trying stuff that someone else made and we liked. My sister was my goad to try. And I found out that I’d learned a lot from mom, I’ve made dishes she made and done OK but I’ve also learned how to combine stuff that’s compatible or contradicts in great ways. I don’t do much of that kind of stuff any more, my meals are simpler. And healthier. (most of the time) But that’s how we end up with memorable dishes and family stories, be they good or bad.
Spanky
@geg6: I wondered when someone was going to bring up chipped ham.
It was a thing all around Pgh, not just Isaly’s. I used to go with my dad to the butcher shop on Brownsville Rd. in Brentwood, across from the fire station, and watch Augie chip the ham on the big slicer.
debbie
@raven:
John Brennan?
West of the Rockies
Any SoCal people here who remember Giovanni’s Pizza or the La Palma Pie Shop? I loved the latter’s chicken sandwiches.
Barbara
@RandomMonster: My mother too made a lot of pies, and she could roll out a crust in under 30 seconds. Minimal handling is what keeps it from becoming tough. There are not a lot of foods I miss from my childhood, but those include what we called poppyseed roll (what someone above might be calling kolacky). Basically, it’s an enriched dough rolled up with fruit or poppyseed filling. My grandmother made the best I have ever tasted. Store bought didn’t come close. I went to a farmer’s market in West Seattle and found that there are some Czech bakeries that specialize in it. And there I found a near copy of what I had looked forward to all year when we visited my grandmother for holidays.
The only other thing that I miss is Tambellini’s hot Italian sausage, which I just loved.
randy khan
I miss Poor Man’s Stroganoff (the recipe card actually says “Poverty-Stricken Stroganoff”), which my mother made periodically – ground beef, shell-shaped pasta, tomato paste or something like that, and sour cream. I think there may have been onion in it, too, sautéed while the beef was browning. I have the recipe, but don’t make it now because my wife can’t have dairy.
It always seemed like a great treat, but I think it actually was one of those “I don’t have any time; what can I cook fast?” meals. I still can taste it.
A lot of my other childhood favorites I can and do make for myself now – pot roast (adding potatoes to the 1950s Joy of Cooking recipe), cream cheese cookies (I make non-dairy cookies for my wife at the same time), popovers (which work pretty much just the same with rice milk as with regular milk). All of my favorite restaurant foods are from my adulthood, although I do occasionally have a hankering for diner rice pudding, which was a high school staple.
TheOtherHank
An anti-favorite from my childhood: lutefisk. I have this theory about what Americans think of as being food from the old country: it’s poor people food. If you’re some Swedish person who’s doing well in Sweden, why would you sell it all and move across the ocean? But if you’re some poor dirt farmer, maybe life over the sea might be better than crap you’re living now. When you get to the new world and feed your kids the stuff you ate back home, it’s stuff poor people ate because that’s what you were. Which brings us to lutefisk. Salt cod that’s rehydrated and then “cooked” in lye, rinsed off and served cold. Fish jello, yum.
West of the Rockies
@hitchhiker:
I second what was mentioned above: a compelling story told with detail and wistfulness.
jonas
My family often spent a long weekends in the Palm Springs area and our favorite treat was to drive down Hwy 111 towards Indio for a Shields date shake — basically fresh midjool dates blended into vanilla ice cream — a local specialty. They were awesome. Was last there about 10 years ago and the place was still going, but what was once a lonely store on a two-lane highway in the middle of a date palm plantation was now surrounded by southwestern suburbia, golf courses, and strip malls as far as the eye could see.
Ruckus
@jeffreyw:
We had an A&W a couple blocks from the house, a drive in with food. Good stuff, great root beer. It’s been gone for a long time now.
Barbara
@randy khan: My mom made a version of beef stroganoff that had stew meat, but with a sauce made from Lipton’s onion soup mix. You browned the floured beef, added water and soup mix and Worcestershire sauce and finished with sour cream if you had it. I of course can’t bring myself to make things out of dried soup mix, but honestly, it tasted better than any other recipe for beef stroganoff I have tried. I think some of these things become imprinted on your taste buds as a child as how a thing should taste.
debbie
@randy khan:
I made rice pudding yesterday as the last time I would use my oven until the weather cools down in October.
Barbara
@Ruckus: Driving back from Duluth Minnesota to Minneapolis around five years ago, we came across an A&W and my husband insisted that we stop. I am not a fan of these sorts of floats and shakes, but I was tickled by a car that was parked out front — a classic pink Corvair. “It will always be 1965 somewhere in America . . .”
Ruckus
@MattF:
When I lived on the west side of LA there was a bagel place that claimed to be actual NY bagels. They were far better than any other bagels that I’ve ever had. I always wondered how they could be NY bagels if they were made in LA…..
jonas
@TheOtherHank:
Lutefisk prepared right over hot boiled potatoes and topped with lots of fatty bacon lardons is really damn good. Scandinavian immigrants brought it with them when they settled the upper Midwest, but then forgot how to actually cook it right, leaving later generations with only stories about how awful it was.
That seems to be generally the story of mainstream American cuisine — a vibrant immigrant culinary tradition that gradually goes to seed over several generations as people become more interested in taking care of the lawn and watching football than caring about how mormor used to prepare the lutefisk right. But you still have to haul it out at Christmas and stink up the kitchen, or it just isn’t the holidays.
James E Powell
@Another Scott:
We had Dog n Suds somewhere near Cleveland because I have a vague memory of going there more than once. Google reveals there is still one operating in Elyria OH, though it’s not clear whether they have re-opened post-pandemic.
Another memory from childhood is birch beer at Royal Castle.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev: Now you’re stuck with Taco Trucks on every corner.
CarolPW
@Comrade Colette: Yes, Blum’s was great! Also miss Foghorn Fish and Chips.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Stuffed cabbage?
Food of the — well, of a god.
;)
KrusherKing
Half smokes. Only place I could ever get them was in the DC area, but I don’t live there anymore, so no more half smokes.
RandomMonster
@Barbara: Homemade poppy seed rolls — I can see how those would be memorable!
MattF
@Ruckus: My current neighborhood has a bagel store… They’re good and (relatively) authentic. Too big, though.
jonas
@Barbara:
Sort of reminds me of the famous recipe for Mississippi pot roast: you just toss a beef chuck roast in the crock pot with a packet of brown gravy mix, a packet of ranch dressing mix, a cube of butter and a bunch of peperonchini peppers. Set it and forget it for 6-8 hours. Sounds crazy, but it’s really quite delicious.
Capri
My grandmother was widely acknowledged to be the best cook in a large extended family of great cooks. She’s long passed, but I still miss her kugel, blueberry blintzes, and gefilte fish. I can re-create her kugel, but have never been able to make the blintzes as light as she did and have never had the nerve to try to make gefilte fish from scratch. She once told me her secret for making gefilte fish look appetizing was to put onion skins in the broth – turned them from pasty white to a more appetizing brown. That trick works for stock and chicken gravy, do it all the time.
Barbara
@geg6: This leads me to one of my “anti-childhood” food stories, which was my dad’s determination NEVER to eat sauerkraut once he crossed the threshold of being an adult, which became a generalized “no cabbage served in this house” kind of rule. My mom loved sauerkraut, so we had it on New Year’s Eve, the traditional German end of year fare. The story was that my dad’s dad grew much of their own food and by the end of the year, they were eating sauerkraut every day. God only knows what kinds of torment he might have gone through if he refused to eat it.
Sure Lurkalot
Great thread. I grew up (1st-8th grade) on Long Island and my memories from that time are strong.
Nanny Flo: Broke her hip and came to live with us. She made “bullets”, left over mashed potatoes wrapped in dough and fried (butter? chicken fat?). Sounds like gnocchi but not like it at all. She also made terrific coffee cakes with swirls of cinnamon sugar that stood so tall…
Mom: Unfortunately, my dad liked meat well done (and complained about it being tough) so mom pretty much overcooked everything. That said, she made good matzoh ball soup and brisket, cabbage rolls, you know, things that cook for a while. I do remember many Saturday evening dinners were modified take-out, great deli corned beef and tongue, real rye bread, macaroni salad, sometimes Italian sausages grilled with crusty Italian bread with my mom’s decent if not too mustardy homemade potato salad.
Out: Two Italian…Tony’s, traditional round thin crust ($.15/slice) also great eggplant parm sandwiches. Pizza D’Amore, Sicilian style, rectangular. Not like Chicago deep dish at all, still crispy and very cheesy ($.20/slice). We used to ride bikes to these joints, both about a mile or so from home. It wasn’t child abuse then.
Best Friend: In those days, no eating before Communion and my best friend’s mom, Chickie, would prepare a veritable feast every Sunday to be had at around 2. Roasts, lasagna, manicotti, raviolis, it was a sight to behold.
I think the Italian food memories are strong because I can’t really eat it a lot of it now. My lactose issues are not severe enough to never have cheesy dishes, but once or twice a year for pizza is enough. Sad.
WaterGirl
@hitchhiker: What a lovely story, well-told. You are an excellent storyteller.
WaterGirl
@Lacuna Synecdoche: You make it sound so appealing. :-)
Anotherlurker
In my home town of Oyster Bay, LI, there was (and still is) a great hotdog stand. It is named Bonanza’s Stand, after the founder. It offers wonderful hotdogs steamed with the Sauerkraut. The hotdog buns are also steamed, in a compartment above the ‘dogs and the ‘kraut. Add a dash of mustard and and a large Lemmon Ice and this combination is warm and fragrant and very tasty. It brings back memories of little league baseball, swimming lessons and weed induced munchies.
Also, if you were going fishing, you could buy a dozen Sandworms, that the old man sold out of the back of the walk-in cooler.
The locals referred to it with a name that refers to Grandpa Bonanza’s nickname, given to him by members of his Italian immigrant peer group. I will not mention that name here, but if you are from Oyster Bay or Syosset or the surrounding area, you might recall it.
Good food and great memories.
Barbara
@MattF: The best bagels in my neck of the woods are found at a coffee shop/cafe. They are made by the wife of the Korean couple that owns the place. They also roast their own coffee. It is going to be gone after they retire because it is in a prime development spot. It’s just luck that it is still there because the county and developer keep putting off final approvals. Not coming up again for another two years. And the bagels are not too big, unlike most bagels you now find.
RandomMonster
@jonas: My grandmother (who came from “old country”, as she put it) would bring us lutefisk from Duluth and served it warm with cream and butter. It never appealed to us kids, who just saw a quivering mass of translucent protein. But we got Swedish meatballs and cardamom bread out of the visits, so no complaints.
Ruckus
OK you guys are talking about foods you like that sound, not so much.
I’ve got one, a hockey burger. There used to be a place in Vernon CA called Mike’s Hockey Burger. This is a normal cheeseburger with 2 sliced lengthways and grilled hot dogs on it. It was a lot better than it sounds and we used to eat lunch there, especially on overtime Saturdays. They also made a pastrami/roast beef on rye that was really good. All the food was cooked on site, they opened around 6am, served breakfast and closed at 3pm after lunch. Vernon, as I written about here before is an industrial town, 5000 inhabitants and 50,000 workers during the weekdays about 5 miles south east from downtown LA.
debbie
I remember getting a recipe from my grandmother and making it a few times: Uncooked rice, boneless chicken breasts, one can each of Campbell’s cream of chicken, cream of celery, and cream of mushroom. Cover and cook at 350 degrees (I don’t remember how long).
Then there was Johnny Marzetti, a.k.a American chop suey: hamburger, macaroni, celery, tomatoes, onions. Sometimes sour cream.
Roger Moore
@Dan B:
This is not correct. There are several varieties of cheese developed originally in the US; Jack and Brick are two standout examples. And Velveeta is a pasteurized process cheese, not a regular cheese.
FWIW, process cheese isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Most process cheese made in the USA is terrible because it starts with cheap, lousy cheese, but you can make process cheese starting with any cheese that melts decently and it will taste like the cheese it’s made from. If you love really gooey mac and cheese, I strongly recommend the recipe from Modernist Cuisine. You need one not-so-common ingredient (sodium citrate), but apart from that it’s probably easier to make than recipes that start from béchamel. You can also reduce the liquid to make something with the texture- but not the flavor- of American cheese for ultra-melty grilled cheese sandwiches.
Barbara
@RandomMonster: I used to think that a lot of indigenous cuisine was a highly refined effort to make a virtue of want. Vichyssoise? Seaweed rolls? Pickled cabbage? One imagines what it must have been like in the dead of winter in Sweden or Norway prior to the agricultural revolution and the introduction of potatoes.
NotMax
Ooh, long buried taste memory: Howard Johnson’s burgundy cherry ice cream
Also too, HoJo’s fried clams.
WaterGirl
@Dan B: I haven’t eaten American cheese since grade school. Ugh.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
When I was a kid, I genuinely enjoyed a Stromboli sandwich (not to be confused with the Calzone-like Stromboli). The damned things were messy, but pretty tasty. Tried one recently though, and found it a bit much for me. Too rich and sloppy.
My Leb grandmother (the one who taught me all the family Leb recipes) made the best fried chicken, too. No egg wash with hers – just well-seasoned flour with no oil absorption. I think her trick was higher heat and less oil, but that’s a guess.
E.
@Barbara:
It involved a whole lot of gruel. Usually made from boiled rye and, if you were extremely lucky, some cream and, for the royalty, honey.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: I wonder if cuban bread takes a certain kind of oven? There was an italian restaurant here that had such amazing french bread that I would also pick some up when I was having anyone over for dinner. They moved across town and got new ovens, and it was never the same.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Are we allowed to put 3 am beer-fueled White Castle runs from ages 15-22 into this list?
Barbara
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Edna Lewis does not use eggs. The chicken brines overnight, and then is soaked in buttermilk, and finally coated in flour. Some people add a bit of baking powder to the flour, but her recipe does not call for that. It’s kind of a production but it really is very good. Worth the calories, as I say.
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
You jest but at our shop in LA we had over the almost 30 yrs in that location, food trucks. Early on we had one at morning break that was good but was considered a cold truck, all the hot food in the back was pre-made sandwiches. Later we had a lunch truck that stopped a the diesel truck engine manufacture’s shop next door and that was a hot truck, owned by a Russian couple, she cooked and he handled the sales/money. Actually pretty good food, especially for a mobile restaurant without tables or chairs. But my first food truck memory was when I was an early teen, the food truck was an old school bus with an older couple running it and the woman made the absolute best pastrami I have ever eaten.
PST
The foods of WaterGirl’s childhood are the foods of my, uh, maturity. Now I want to walk three blocks to Salerno’s and then cross the street to D’Amato’s for some kolaczki. I can’t remember any good food from my small town boyhood, but I’ve been making up for it.
prostratedragon
Calumet Fisheries is still there, pandemic and all. I’d been wanting to go back there for the first time in many decades when it broke out, and will plan to do so this summer. According to their site, they’ve been around for over 60 years, which fits with my memory of them being a newish place that my aunt found back then. She was the one who introduced me to caviar and goat cheese, but every now and then Mississippi would call in the form of a frogs’ legs craving. As Calumet Fisheries was near our house, she’d swing by and collect my mother and me for the company. In those days I preferred legs to roe. Not sure about now, but I guess I’ll find out.
[Forgot url]
NotMax
@Barbara
And donut holes have gotten smaller.
;)
Roger Moore
@RandomMonster:
Gravensteins are wonderful. My grandfather actually owned an orchard near Sebastopol. It was sold sometime in the 1980s, and I assume it’s all been converted to vineyards. A local pie and ice cream place gets a few boxes of Gravensteins every year for apply pie, and it’s wonderful. IIRC, Gravenstein juice was also what Martinelli’s traditionally used for their sparkling cider; I don’t know if they still use it today.
Pharniel
I grew up eating at a wonderful little Chinese place called Hung Wang Restaurant and they’d cycle the menu constantly. Little did I know they were what we called at the the time “Peking” instead of the standard Sichuan or Hunan common in the area today. Had the best white tea as well.
Then they moved locations and changed ownership. Never been able to get Sweat & Sour pork or Black Bean Pork like they made ever again.
Gotten close at a place in Grass Market, Edinbugh but lord do I miss it.
Next is Bill Knapp’s. You can get the Cakes, but the rest of the things I loved are impossible to find. Orange nut bread, the vegetable beef soup made with the roast beef from lunch. I can still smell the soup.
Then DP Dough from collage. Just the perfect calzone, delivered and open until 4AM.
patrick II
A&W root beer floats. I came from a working-class family of five children. It was the 50’s and we had no air conditioning in the house, so when it was in the 90’s in the summer there was little relief. But every once in a while in the evening, Dad would pile us into the car and we would go for a drive — with the windows open so we could cool off. We would end up at the A&W root beer drive-in — and nothing ever tasted better. The way to make root beer floats is with very cold root beer and even colder ice cream so they don’t turn into a cream soda. Take small bites of the ice cream and wash it down with ice-cold root beer. A small pleasure for hot days in the 50’s.
Another Scott
@raven: I remember the sign, but we never ate there. Probably too spendy.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That sounds like how my mom (and her mom) made fried chicken.
Grandma would go out in the back yard of her home in south central LA, grab a chicken by the neck, wring, wait a few minutes, pluck, carve and cook. Talk about fresh.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I thought they picked some of the flowers deliberately to keep the plant from overproducing.
satby
@WaterGirl: Pilsen.
mrmoshpotato
And now we’ll be taking about Chicago Italian Beef (it totally should be a compound proper noun!) in this thread! Hooray!
espierce
@debbie: My mother called and told me Tommy passed away last year…spent many Friday and Saturday nights around Rubinos in the late 60s and early 70s.
Bexley, class of ‘71.
MagdaInBlack
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I certainly hope so ?
Another Scott
@randy khan: My mother made something like that that she called Hungarian goulash. Seashell macaroni, hamburger, stewed tomatoes, onions, etc. Nothing at all like the goulash J and I got decades later in Budapest, but quite yummy.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@debbie:
I used to make that when I was in college. You could do it with pork chops, too.
mrmoshpotato
@Josie:
All hail the amount of recipe sites and YouTube cooking channels!
Also, food review channels – especially the Aussie ones.
jeffreyw
@Roger Moore: Yep!
ciotogist
I grew up on Long Island and had no idea I was living in a foodie paradise (especially for Italian and Jewish food) until I went to college in Iowa. Great pizza, bagels from the Bagelry, almost everyone in town would go to Mass on Sundays and then stop at the delis for cold cut plates and salads and at the Malverne Pastry Shop for every possible kind of bread and roll as well as Italian and French baked goods. They had the most amazing eclairs and florentines and petits-four.
espierce
@raven: Me too, met them in Mayor’s Court, Bexley’s substitute for Juvenile Court. Washed a shitton of police cars on many weekends for my transgressions. Lol
TheQuietOne
My 1st car, a beautiful 67 LeMans, 1st date, beautiful girl who’s name escapes me. I took her to Whimpy’s burgers in KC for an Italian steak sandwich. She confirmed it was the best sandwich ever. I still think about that sandwich!!!
pamelabrown53
@TaMara (HFG):
Speaking of fish: I miss the little lake (Erie) perch-fried of course. So light and delicate!
WaterGirl
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Yes!
I learned my multiples of 12 by way of White Castle hamburgers, which were 12 cents each at the time.
WaterGirl
@PST: You live near a Salerno’s in Chicago or in the suburbs???
JEALOUS
xjmuellerlurks
Chicago native… My childhood memory is sweet rolls and coffee cakes from Hoeffner’s Bakery on 59th St after mass on Sunday. They had a chocolate chip roll – heaven for a kid. Another Sunday memory is Dad stopping at Tastee Freeze on 79th St on the way home from Rainbow Beach. Sundays were pretty good when I was a kid. After mass and breakfast there were Flash Gordon and Commander Cody episodes on TV. Dinner around 1:00 pm and sandwiches for supper in the evening. Damn, I had it good!
Ruckus
@prostratedragon:
I’ve had frogs legs exactly once. The first couple of months on the destroyer I was stationed on had a Chief (an E7) cook and everything made while he was there was amazing. Best food in the Navy, by unmeasurable levels. He retired after 30 yrs in and the food got very, very crappy in not a very long time. About 4 months after he retired we almost had a mutiny over dinner, lifers were actually talking about breaking into the gun locker and taking over the ship. Anyway…. this chief worked hard at making sure the food was good and I think he purchased food outside the military supply chain, so one day for lunch we had frogs legs. They were amazing.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Barbara:
I learned from a restaurant I worked at – the chicken was dredged in seasoned flour, dunked in an egg/milk wash and dredged again. I haven’t made it in years because I’m just not so much of a fan of bready fried chicken anymore.
debbie
@espierce:
Tommy and Frank’s sons run it. I swear, they are both doppelgangers of their fathers. The only tradition not passed on is the younger Frank doesn’t chop the phone receiver into his hand every time he answers the phone. Everything else is exactly the same.
Mike in NC
Continuing on our trip home, we landed in Charlotte a short time ago and I stopped at a news stand where there were dozens of newspapers and magazines on display. Not a single one featured the smirking Orange Clown’s ugly face. Winning!
Immanentize
@dmsilev:
Who Likes Pierogi?
My young life was stuffed with every Czech, Polish, Slovak, Hunky food imaginable. All seasonal, it seemed. Pierogi were especially for meatless lent. And Fridays.
And Polka Weddings. Like the one that takes up the first 1/3 of The Deer Hunter (bringing it back to today’s theme). I went to that wedding at least three times every summer of my childhood.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
I’m not sure if I would put it that way, but there are certainly a lot of foods that were invented as a way of preserving something that was only available fresh for a limited time. Things like fermenting, pickling, salting, drying, smoking, etc. were all invented as ways of preserving food for when it was out of season. Eventually, people got used to the taste and decided it was good enough to want it even when the food was available fresh, and we keep doing it even now that refrigeration, freezing, and food imports mean we can get the same stuff fresh if we want it.
In a lot of cases, though, the flavor is toned down in the modern version that’s expected to be preserved mostly through refrigeration and modern packaging. It’s interesting to compare a traditional version of these foods to a more modern version that’s expected to be preserved mostly by refrigeration. My favorite country bacon, for instance, can be stored at room temperature (at least until the package is opened) and has about twice the salt and five times the smoke of standard supermarket bacon.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Yes, we had hungarian goulash, too! But it had pies of stewing meat rather than hamburger.
We also had something called “green beans and sea shells”, that had the same stewing meat, with tomatoes and pasta in the shape of sea shells, and green beans”. I’m not sure that one even had any spices, other than salt & pepper. That’s my sister’s “mom” food that she thinks of, but it never had much appeal for me.
mrmoshpotato
My dad and I were reminiscing about Carmen’s stuffed spinach pizza last night. Giordano’s doesn’t even come close. Whatever spice blend Carmen’s used in their crust and tomato sauce….mmmmmmmm
geg6
@Barbara:
Oh god, Tambellini’s sausage! Loved that!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
There was this other thing we made at the restaurant which was just kind of OK there (it was the 70s so I didn’t know better) but that I reimagined in a much more inventive way about 10 years ago.
Brown lightly seasoned boneless chicken breasts, then put on a roasting tray with slices of country ham covering them. Cook at 375 for 20 minutes. Make a basic mushroom cream sauce with plenty of extra mushrooms and red wine. Ladle sauce over chicken/ham. Serve with rice and kale.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Oh my god, I had forgotten all about the polka at weddings!
Mike in NC
Before we got aboard the Key West ferry last night, we stepped into a nearby restaurant for some A/C relief and cocktails. It turned out to be a gay bar where a drag queen was hosting bingo. Wasn’t exactly expecting that, but they served a great Bloody Mary and delicious Reuben sandwiches.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: Agree!
espierce
@debbie: Great to hear that about the sons. My 90 y/o mother still sends my youngest brother in San Diego Rubino’s for Christmas every year.
WaterGirl
You guys are making this such a great thread with all your stories. Thank you.
Roger Moore
@jeffreyw:
That’s even the same brand of sodium citrate I use! As far as cleanup, dishwashers are perfect for mac and cheese; the water is hot enough to melt it, so it comes right off.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
My guess is that she only planted what she and my uncle could eat. Both retired she also still used a hand wringer for her clothes and hung them on a line. Also, they have been gone for around 55 yrs or so. This was my great uncle and wife, he was my grandfathers older brother. My grandparents were born in 1890.
raven
@debbie: Yep, I was on the “Board of Regents of the North Carolina State University School of Sports Management” back when he and I were recreation people. I remember visiting him at “Brennan’s at Broad-Nell” in the 90’s.
JoyceH
I grew up in small town Illinois, back before such exotic cuisines as pizza and Chinese food had reached every corner of the nation. When we went out to eat, my choice tended to be open faced beef sandwich – sliced beef on white bread and a side of mashed potatoes, all smothered in gravy. Mom was an okay cook, nothing spectacular, though she’d make a real effort with Christmas cookies. Fried chicken and chicken and dumplings and swiss steak, that kind of thing. Dad was king of the grill, burgers and steaks. Vegetables were canned or frozen except in the summer when we ate fresh vegetables from our garden. One memory that is somewhat surprising looking back is that steaks must have been a lot less expensive (adjusted for inflation and in comparison with other entrees) back then. We were solidly middle class, Dad was a preacher and Mom a high school teacher, but we had steak about once a week. Five t-bone steaks. That seems so extravagant now.
When we went to college, that was in a larger town/small city, and there were a couple pizza places and a Chinese restaurant. That seemed so exotic and exciting! The Chinese place was one of those places that pulled out all the Gaudy stops, with the paper lanterns with red tassels, etc. I’d order a whiskey sour and feel just too cosmopolitan for words!
But to deviate a bit from the good food memories, Mom made one dish that she and Dad really nommed down on and I couldn’t stand – liver and onions! I couldn’t even stand the smell that permeated the house. And several times on Facebook there have been threads about ‘what was a dish you disliked as a child and still dislike?’ – and always the runaway winner is liver and onions. It seems baffling to me. How does it happen that there’s a dish that one generation enjoys and the next generation simply loathes?
Kathleen
@geg6: I miss everything my mother ever cooked or baked. She was raised in a small town in Nebraska so she mastered the basic comfort food recipes – potato salad, pot roast, roast beef, mashed potatoes, fried chicken, goulash, rotisserie roasts and chicken, turkey, stuffing, eggs, pies, cakes, cookies. She put a little orange juice in the pie crust (she used to use lard but switched when my dad’s cholesterol went up) and a splash of bourbon in the pumpkin pie filling. Her leftovers were to die for. The cooking gene skipped me and visited my daughter, but moved in with my two adult grandsons who are excellent cooks and bakers (due to their father’s influence). Not fancy but fantastic
ETA: She used Miracle Whip for her potato/egg/macaroni salads so I am a Miracle Whip Person.
raven
@JoyceH: Not the House of Chin in Champaign? This was crazy ass George Chin out front with a huge roll of firecrackers with a cop one 4th!
WaterGirl
@JoyceH: shudder. My dad used to order liver and onions when we went out to eat at a diner. He couldn’t get that at home, thank goodness!
JMG
@Ruckus: Oh, I cook a great deal. And in some areas, I know I’m damn good, fish cookery being foremost in that regard. In the case of chicken pie, I’m just afraid I’ll disappoint my own memories. Did Proust ever make madeleines?
PST
@WaterGirl: On the corner of Grand and Racine.
Comrade Colette
@randy khan: @Barbara: Thanks for reminding me! My mother made something called ground beef stroganoff, which years later I recognized as “Skid Road Stroganoff” from Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book – only with sour cream instead of yogurt. I still make something similar. Yum!
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: Have you ever been to Moreno Bakery in Brandon (Tampa)? My daughter has taken me there a couple of times. Their hot food entrees and Cuban sandwiches are out of this world as are their pastries.
JoyceH
@raven: No, not Champaign, Bloomington – home of Illinois Wesleyan University. Notice the ‘Wesleyan’? Methodist PKs got half off tuition, so all us kids went to IWU.
Kathleen
@hitchhiker: What a lovely memory! Thank you for sharing that. I felt the warmth and smelled the food!
Suzanne
I am missing Sonoran food SO BAD.
WaterGirl
My dad used to cook dinner for us (3 sisters) on Mondays because that was the day my mom worked during the day in the tavern we owned. We lived upstairs. Other than that, my dad worked days in the tavern and my mom worked at night.
It was such a treat to have my dad make dinner, and I still have a soft spot for “american” fried potations and onions. They were thin round slices of potatoes like we used to get around here at diners for breakfast.
Jon Marcus
Johnnie’s Beef in Elmwood Park. Best beef ever. I will fite anyone who says otherwise!
https://images.app.goo.gl/ucHHLACQZXXdRA7v9
WaterGirl
@PST: Order a pizza for me, but no mushrooms, please. I’m allergic. Pepperoni and onion would work!
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
The problem is that one zucchini plant can produce more than a family can eat. That’s certainly what I remember from my family’s garden growing up. We would plant one zucchini and one crooked-neck squash plant, and even with a big family and lots of recipes to preserve them, there were plenty to share with the neighbors.
JMG
@NotMax: In high school, we had a contest involving HoJo’s fried clams. It involved what other fried things one found in an order of clams. A younger brother of one of my friends retired the trophy when one evening his fried clams contained a perfectly breaded and deep fried rubber band.
RandomMonster
@Roger Moore: As a kid I had a job out on Gravenstein Hwy, not far from the Martinelli’s bottling plant. I think you’re right, all of those orchards are probably vineyards now.
MagdaInBlack
@Jon Marcus: I’ve never been because the lines are down the block, but a parts driver I am friends with had a brother working in the kitchen and somehow I ended up with a beef for lunch one day. Oh yeah good stuff ?
( It pays to be good to your delivery folk ? )
geg6
@JoyceH:
LOL! Really well made liver and onions is delicious! If it’s calf’s liver (not just beef liver) and cooked correctly, it melts in your mouth. My mom made great liver and onions but I was the only child of the six of us that looked forward to liver nights. There is a local restaurant that my parents would go to on a date night or take us kids to, Harold’s Inn, that made fantastic liver and onions and also great rumaki (bacon wrapped water chestnuts and chicken livers). Sometimes I would order the rumaki as my appetizer and liver and onions for my entree. Harold’s is still there and still has rumaki and liver and onions on the menu.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JoyceH: @WaterGirl: My dad liked liver and we used to have it quite a bit. My mom must have not liked it cause it got kind of quietly phased out of her repertoire over the years. But my dad would order it sometimes if we were in the kind of old school place that still offered it.
I remember liking it well enough but now I can’t imagine buying/ordering it, ever since I heard some comedian riff on “Oh yeah, let’s the internal poison filter of a cow!” I’ve never tried kidneys either. I’ve tried brains, didn’t like them. A few years back I had some beautifully prepared sweet breads in a fancy joint as part of an appetizer. Those are another thing I probably wouldn’t order if it had been by itself on a menu
Immanentize
@WaterGirl: “For de kids!” All polka bands played “Joy to the World.”
Hearing “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” in a thick Polish/Pennsylvania accent still makes me want to rush a dance floor.
Martin
Good lord, too much stuff. Simple things like when McDonalds Shamrock shakes were actually good to everything within subway distance in NYC (which is almost fucking everything that can be eaten).
But it’s the simple stuff – street vendor knishes, black and white cookies, eating Entenmanns coffee cake with my grandpa, Carvel ice cream cakes for my birthday. Literally everything from the greek neighborhood we lived in in Queens for a spell.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@geg6: now that you remind me, I do enjoy a good liver paté, chicken, duck or goose. And a few years ago I was at a sushi bar, got to chatting with the chef, and he insisted I try the monkfish liver
Roger Moore
@RandomMonster:
In fairness, a lot of the orchards had been vineyards before Prohibition. My grandfather’s orchard was on Vine Hill Road. When you think about it, that tells the story pretty well; it’s back to being vines instead of orchards now.
Dan B
@schrodingers_cat: Our friends say that the British elevated the status of Parsies to exacerbate divisions in Indian society. Has BJP used that history against them?
We went to Jew Town in Cochin, Kerala. There were very few Jews left since it was less hospitable but Jews had been in Southern India for millenia as traders.
My favorite meal in Mumbai / Bombay was at a Gujarati restaurant, Thackers(?). Another great meal was a buffet in the driveway of a family during the Craft Fair. 250 acres of nearly a thousand representatives of craft factories. There was a chef making Jalabi’s to order. Wonderful after the rest of the buffet, plus there were people there from Buenos Aires, South Africa, across Europe and the western hemisphere. It was as exciting as being at a star studded party in the Hollywood hills.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: I am laughing out loud. Yes, exactly.
Dan B
@Ruckus: Zucchini flowers come in male and female so the knowledgeable cook uses the male flowers. The wise cook uses both. Those with deep knowledge make sure their cars windows are up and the doors locked during zucchini season.
Kathleen
@Barbara: I went to high school in St. Paul and had to take two busses (which involved a transfer downtown) to get there. Sometimes I would treat myself to a frosty cold fountain coke and french fries at Bridgeman’s ice cream parlor downtown and paid the princely sum of 35 cents. Mumble Mumble years later I still remember how good those fries were. (Sometimes we stopped at White Castle on the hill close to the Cathedral).
NotMax
@Immanentize
Howdy. Have been lamenting your absence.
Kathleen
@debbie: A friend of mine gave me that chicken recipe and I lost it so thanks for reminding me! Do you remember how much rice? Was it a cup? Thanks!
Kathleen
@WaterGirl: When I was a girl dinosaurs charged me 8 cents for each White Castle burger!
Dan B
@Spanky: Little old Wadsworth, Ohio had an Isaly’s right downtown a half block from the Junior High and by the Florsheim Shoe store with the foot x-ray machine – do it yourself. My friend Ann thought she got large feet from using the machine every day after school.
laura
@Comrade Colette: Please ask your Monsieur if he remembers the Blum’s licorice hard candy in a can – it’s like tar, licorice and obsidian had a baby. Cesar’s was definitely old school and one of the last time I went there in 2001, it was with my Mother who came to the City because I was working on my LLM fellowship at the CPUC and Roadie Brother the Younger was working the Billy Idol tour and playing the Warfield. State legislative power broker John Burton spent the entire dinner flirting shamelessly with my mother, much to her delight.
MagdaInBlack
Paper thin breaded deep fried pork tenderloin sandwich at The Igloo in Peru Illinois. Served on a hamburger bun with onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard. Added bonus of the owner going from table to table taking side bets on the game/s. ?
satby
@geg6: Most liver is overcooked, and therefore horrible, but a perfectly done liver and onions is a treat. My mom used to saute chicken livers in butter as her own special treat when she made chicken; I make them now because scrumtious!
Growing up in Chicago meant we had a range of choices for ethnic food: Geman and later Mexican in Blue Island nearby, Little Italy on Taylor, Chinatown, Greek Town on Halsted, Lithuanian in Marquette Park (saurkraut soup was amazing), lots of hole-in-the-wall joints for bar-b-que or fried fish… and that was all just on the South Side!
Kathleen
@JoyceH: My mom would fix liver and onions for my dad because he loved them (he also loved the chicken gizzards and sardines ick). My son in law (who is a great cook) also loves liver and onions. The only time I liked liver was when I attended Xavier University in New Orleans as part of an exchange program. The ladies who cooked for the cafeteria made the best biscuits I’ve ever had in my life and fixed baked liver which, paired with black eyed peas, was fantastic. That was the last time I ever ate liver.
mrmoshpotato
Oops! LOL
@dmsilev: A couple (at least) of Chicago companies make pierogi filled with kraut. I’ve seen Kasia’s at the grocery store, and Alexandra’s makes them too.
Another Scott
@Kathleen: Campbell’s has a variation that you can probably scale easily.
https://www.campbells.com/recipes/one-dish-chicken-rice-bake/
Cheers,
Scott.
Anotherlurker
@Martin: Speaking of Enteman’s , They have long been a National brand. A limited number of their items are available at the Safeway in Walnut Creek.
However, the one item that I would kill for, Dark Fudge Chocolate Cake with To DIE For Marshmallow Icing is not available! IMHO, this qualifies as a major crime against humanity!
Kathleen
@Another Scott: Thank you so much! I appreciate that.
Mike in NC
@JMG: I am (sadly) old enough to remember HoJo’s frozen fried clams sold in some supermarkets. To me they always tasted like rubber bands. The only fried clams worthy of the name are Ipswich full-belly clams. I always order them when we go back to New England on holidays.
Sure Lurkalot
@WaterGirl: Yes, this was a good idea WG.
Thanks to NotMax who brought up the HoJo’s fried clams. I loved them and don’t remember eating anything else at the blue and orange.
And somehow liver and onions snuck in! My mom, dad and bro loved it, me and my 2 sisters, no no no. Mom paired it with boiled potatoes and canned spinach. Just an awful plate. I learned to like chicken livers though, traditional chopped (I still have my mom’s manual Rival meat grinder) and I used to make chicken liver stroganoff that was pretty good.
SaltWaterCleanse
Black licorice ice cream from Big Scoop in Redmond, WA.
Matt McIrvin
@satby: Liver was never a regular meal at home, but it was one of my favorite things to eat at the old Wursthaus in Harvard Square, one of the meatiest places I’ve ever been.
Yutsano
@SaltWaterCleanse: Ferdinand’s. Campus of Washington State University. Whatever kind is available.
Dan B
@Roger Moore: My urban myth has been done deflated! Good to know there were US developed cheeses. I can’t tolerate cows milk products any more so have only tried the sheep and goat milk types. The European cheeses still seem superior.
Yutsano
Since the thread be open…
The media got a scalp. I wish Naomi peace.
Juju
@Raven: I lived in Champaign from 1963-1970 and I have a vague memory of a place called Poodles in that I called it Poodle-oos and that changed the restaurant name for my family. I was a toddler so I don’t remember anything else about the restaurant. It must have been a good place to take children, as I was the fourth of five children. One of my favorite places to eat was Uncle John’s Pancake House where we always started family vacations and where I chose to have my birthday dinner when that was an option. They had the best chocolate chip pancakes, at least I thought so at the time.
debbie
@Kathleen:
I had to google because it’s been so long, but looking at the different recipes, it looks like it would be 1.5 cups of uncooked (not instant) rice. Make sure it’s covered so the chicken cooks through.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@satby:
As a child, I had a well tuned reflex – if I got with 20 feet of the back door and smelled liver, the gagging started. I think mom hit the superfecta one night – liver and onions, fried eggplant with the bitter intact, stewed okra for the slime and stewed rhubarb for more slime.
Spent a lot of time yakking in the yard.
Scamp Dog
I miss my grandmother’s cinnamon rolls, and over the the course of a few years, I’ve gotten fairly close to recreating it. One of the key advances was to use brown sugar for the filling, but a lot of it was just doing it enough to build up dough handling skills. When I visit my Mom and my brother this summer I’ll get another chance to see how close the latest version is.
debbie
@Yutsano:
Shame on the French Open.
Steve in the ATL
Late to the party, but my favorite place from my childhood in Chicago was the Winnetka Sweet Shop. Has anyone mentioned it yet? Beat the hell out of Italian beef!
Kathleen
@debbie: Aw, thanks, debbie!
lowtechcyclist
Since my childhood was largely spent in the sterile ‘burbs of DC in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and since my mom wasn’t much of a cook, the answer is no, I don’t miss any of that. The food that’s available is so much better now.
Even though I’m in one of the less interesting exurbs of DC (northern Calvert County), foodwise, there’s a great down-homey Southern/New Orleans takeout place less than ten minutes from my house. There are two good Thai restaurants in the area. Standards like Mexican, Italian, and Chinese (which was about all the ethnic food available when I was growing up, excepting upscale French restaurants) are all available within ten minutes of my door. And if the local stuff isn’t good enough, the dining mecca that is DC and the inner ‘burbs is an hour away.
Hell, even the fast-food places are better now. Five Guys beats the hell out of MickeyD’s, and I don’t remember anything like Popeye’s or ChickFilA or Bojangles around when I was a kid.
Foodwise, these are the ‘good old days.’
satby
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: That sounds like a nightmare meal. And I like everything but the rhubarb, assuming it’s all cooked properly, which none of that was ?.
Steve in the ATL
@RandomMonster:
[insert vomit emoji]
satby
@Steve in the ATL: Dude, none of us were rich enough to even drive to Winnetka, much less buy anything there.
jeffreyw
In one of the towns in our general area there was a BBQ joint named Jin’s, run by a man and his Asian wife. I think the sauce recipe was hers. They had a great rotisserie chicken but one of the standout entrees was batter-fried chicken livers doused with the sauce. Get that with fries and slaw and you had a winner! Sadly, the wife died and the place shut down.
Anotherlurker
@debbie: Agreed. If Naomi expressed “sincerely held xtian religious beliefs” against talking to the press, then the press would be praising her. Since she possibly has anxiety and depression issues, they rake her over the coals.
laura
@Roger Moore: I head to Sebastopol every mid August for a case or two of Gravensteins – always from Two Sisters roadside flatbed. One case goes to the food bank and one gets doled out in lunch sacks to friends and spouse gets one pie.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Betty Cracker: My dad — combat Marine, fought in Korea, fairly Archie Bunker-ish but still a lifelong Dem/union worker — called this dish we often ate in the 50s – 60s “shit on a shingle”. More demurely referred to by my mom (who made it) as “chipped beef on toast”. I mean, sure, childhood memories and all whatever it’s name, but I never liked it that much.
Grew up in an inner city Rust Belt neighborhood that was largely (though not entirely) “ethnic” Catholic WWC, many families that were first or second generation immigrants from a number of European countries — Lithuania to Italy to Ireland and everywhere between — others (like mine) who were a more-mixed heritage of a bit longer standing in America, though still mostly European Catholic background.
Like WaterGirl’s neighborhood, women in mine often wore babushkas (my mom wore one, but only to Mass — I enjoyed finding out later when I learned Russian in school that this head-cover name meant “grandmother”), while the off-the-boat German and Austrian older women (like a school friend’s Oma who lived across the street) would often wash their driveways and sidewalks and even the streets in front of their houses. There were a number of people whose last names were not only hard to pronounce but — especially Polish names like Krzyzewski — not even close to how they were spelled. My wife’s surname (she grew up in a bit nicer area/Catholic parish next to mine, literally on the “other side of the tracks”) was an anglicized version that bore only a passing resemblance to the original Slovakian spelling.
Much of the food most of us there grew up on was the typical mid-century Midwest fare, but there was still some “ethnic-y” stuff I remember fondly, often things either my mother or grandmother (Polish/Slovak, 2nd gen, she spoke and read both) made. Like kolaczki (pronounced “koh-LAH-chkee”) — little folded over “cookies” filled with fruit jam such as apricot — and nut or poppyseed rolls that my family called orechovnik but my wife’s family called potica (“poh-TEE-tsah”; don’t tell her but my family’s version was better). Also enjoyed stuffed cabbages and stuffed peppers (called halupki and gefullte paprika when I was a kid, though those names — and the dishes themselves — disappeared long ago). Kielbasa and pierogi, too — though you can get good kielbasa just about anywhere (I use it in my potato leek soup) I have never found pierogi as good as those I grew up eating in Cleveland (my family’s homemade and local store-bought). The one bakery and the one restaurant in my neighborhood were run by neighborhood Italian families, though the bakery made a lot of stuff (like kolaczki and, yes, Bohemian “salt horns” that were called “rohliky”) that wasn’t Italian. But also great cannoli, best I’ve ever had.
The foods we cook and eat now are typically quite different from those decades ago and a continent away — lot of Middle Eastern and Mexican (Phoenix, tons of great Mexican food here) and Thai and Peruvian dishes (my DiL — who lives with us — is Peruana and a great cook besides). But, yeah, some nostalgia for some food of my long-vanished youth.
SFBayAreaGal
My mom’s macaroni and cheese and her Fried Chicken. No one or no restaurant has come close to what my mom did.
debbie
@Anotherlurker:
If the price of a trophy is allowing a bunch of assholes to provoke tears, then fuck them. Tennis used to be better than this.
Betty
@billcoop4: So happy for you!
debbie
@Kathleen:
Of course! Let me know if it’s a winner. I may give it a go next winter.
Dan B
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Sounds like your mom was the Chef de Sade!
My brother loathed slimy. One dinner mom cooked Beef Tongue in the pressure cooker served with peeled boiled potatoes and okra boiled until slimy. I played with making okra slime strings when our parents weren’t looking. Tongue had the double advantage of being weirdly soft with lots of strange rubbery bits. I don’t know how my brother survived.
raven
@Juju: Huh, I got out of the Army and went there in 69. The Poddles I knew was in Villa Park, Italian Beefs, Italian Sausage and Hot Dogs wrapped in wax paper with fries. The joint like that in C-U was Abe’s Red Hots at 4th and Green. Uncle John’s was epic.
WaterGirl
@Dan B: That’s what they say, but zucchini is the only thing that doesn’t do well for me. ?♀️
SFBayAreaGal
When we lived in Oregon, my grandparents managed a cattle ranch outside of Ashland. That is where we got the best milk I have ever drank.
I can remember the big glass jugs the milk would come in. My mom would scrape off the cream from the top, and she would put that aside to be used at anothe time. The rest of milk would be refrigerated. The best ice cold milk that I have ever drank.
WaterGirl
@Kathleen: hahaha
MattF
@Dan B: Gene Weingarten, on the realization that ‘tung’ was ‘tongue’:
WaterGirl
@debbie: I don’t know what this is about. I’m guessing that it has nothing to do with her (in their minds) being an uppity black woman?
Xavier
@RandomMonster: yup, don’t overhandle pie crust dough. Not surprisingly, it turns into bread if it’s kneaded.
NoraLenderbee
@Comrade Colette:
Some of my favorite foods from childhood came out of Peg Bracken’s books. I still have my mother’s copies.
raven
@JoyceH: I live in “Normaltown” in Athens, GA!
debbie
@MattF:
When my Aunt Yetta grabbed a huge, long fork, stabbed inside a soup kettle a few times, and hoisted a very large cow tongue, I thought I would never stop gagging.
WaterGirl
@raven:
“Uncle John’s was epic.”
It was. Then they closed it, I think and opened elsewhere as Aunt Sonyas. (?) Never as good and I don’t know how long it lasted.
jackmac
Yum! Love this thread. I haven’t tried Carm’s, but will make a point to swing by the next time I’m in that neighborhood. Speaking of food, other cities can make arguments for their local specialties, but Chicago seems to be ground zero for many different comfort foods. Start with hot dogs and Polish from the variety of stands that still dot the city and suburbs. For pure simplicity, there’s 35th Street Red Hots, where fresh-made fries are wrapped around a dog in a paper wrapper that you peel and enjoy everything together. The stand is located a stone’s throw from whatever the White Sox are calling their ball park these days. Then there’s pizza, including thin crust tavern style (arguably best from a real southwest side tavern) to the thick buttercrust mega meals at Lou Malnati’s or variation at Gino’s or even the excellent Spinach pizza at Eduardo’s. Then there’s the quintessential Italian beef and variations: dipped, dry, with or without peppers, sprinkled with melted mozzarella, etc. My current favorite is Portillo’s beef and cheddar croissant, truly a candidate for a coronary. But it sure tastes great!
Josie
My mother fixed liver on a regular basis and I hated it. She was a great believer in not leaving the table until you had cleaned your plate. Many was the time I sat at that table for a couple of hours due to my hatred of liver. I finally learned to choke it down by covering it with butter. Needless to say, I never made my sons eat anything that they decided not to like.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
They ask questions designed to belittle her into tears. It is what the French press has done since the time of Princess Diana.
MattF
@NoraLenderbee: When I was in college, we used to make the ‘Saturday Chicken’ (chicken pieces baked under a layer cream-of-mushroom soup) regularly.
cope
@Juju: One of the first dates with my wife was in the early ‘70s at Uncle John’s. She ordered blueberry pancakes. She proceeded to pour chocolate syrup (one of multiple options of syrup bottles on the table) on the stack. Her side order was hash browns which she doused in catsup. She washed it all down (and she ate every bite) with a Coke. I think she was trying to test me.
WaterGirl
@debbie: I put myself through college working as a cashier in a grocery story. The tongue made me shudder and I couldn’t bear to even touch it, so I worked out a technique where I would scoop it into a plastic bag without touching it.
I will also never forget the time the nice black fellow came through my line with the plastic tub that said “chitterlings” and I asked him what “chitt-er-lings” were? I had never seen that word written out before! We had a good laugh.
WaterGirl
@jackmac: The whole “cheese on italian beef” thing is wrong, just wrong. I don’t recall that being an option when I was growing up.
WaterGirl
@jackmac: I had forgotten about Lou Malnati’s!
laura
@RandomMonster: You’d be pleased/surprised to know that most of the orchards are still standing scraggly as hell, but there’s now grape growing on the hills around the turnoff to Occidental and the wee town of Bodega. I’ve been driving from Sacramento to Doran or Dillon beach of late for vaccinated soul restoring mental and physical health needs and it’s still so verdant and beautiful- just the hwy 50 to the 80 to the 12 and finally, the 1.
I’m loving this thread and everyone’s reminiscences including food from the crimes against humanity column. Immigration has improved life here so much and in so many ways, food has to be near the top of the list of reasons why
Hey Rodger B – don’t forget the hops!
Dan B
@MattF: I know how to cook tongue now with lots of bay leaf, black pepper, and some thyme – maybe a touch of fennel seed. I used to help my mother peel it. My little brother was never to be found when tongue was in the Presto Cooker (which I still have). I haven’t seen tongue for sale for decades or organ meats except liver. I loved eating them but would be dining alone these days. Instead tongue and brains end up in hamburger patties that are munched on by the blissfully unaware.
There’s an apocryphal urban legend that MickeyD’s food scientists estensive testing found that people preferred their hamburgers with brain because it made for a more tender and juicy patty. Their food gives me painful cramps so there’s some malarkey going on there. My guess is they incorporate some milk products for flavoring.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven:
And you read this blog? //
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
This is a great thread, because it’s about memories we all have, be they fresh or decades ago and they are about food and people, two things we all (mostly!) like.
MattF
@Dan B: I ate deli tongue sandwiches regularly as a growing boy in the old days, but you won’t find it on menus any more.
dnfree
@Nora: that was one of my college roommate’s specialties, almost 60 years ago! I didn’t know it had a name. Yes, I’m in the Midwest—Illinois.
Dan B
@jackmac: I remember eating stuffed squid in a fragrant light tomato sauce at a Greek place on the northwest side. It was outside of Grerk Town. We were packed so tight that we couldn’t all bring our forks to our mouths in unison. In the back up a few steps was the soccer scores for the week and a good number of the players. Amazing squid washed down with Retsina and Ouzo that worked perfectly with that tomato sauce.
cope
@raven: Abe’s motto: “No shirt, no shoes…come on on in!”. Two Garbage Trucks and four fried potato pancakes, please.
Steve in the ATL
@?BillinGlendaleCA: if you’d ever been to Normaltown, you’d know it was named that ironically—and that was even before raven moved there!
Suzanne
OMG YES.
Just One More Canuck
@Josie: my dog ate well on liver nights in our house. I’m told that liver can be quite good if prepared properly, but I have a 45 year long streak of never eating liver, and intend to keep it going
Ruckus
@JoyceH:
Liver and onions was served in the navy on occasion. It was never served as the only main course because while about 50% of the guys liked it, the other 50% hated it with much more passion. In my house liver and onions and brussel sprouts were the two foods that I would rather go hungry than eat. Mom took the time to cook them so I had to eat them. Once didn’t eat dinner for 3 days because all I’d be served was left over brussel sprouts that I had to eat first. I’ll give mom credit, after that she never served me brussel sprouts.
geg6
Another big Pittsburgh thing is putting fries on everything. The most famous, of course, is the Primanti’s sandwich, which is a grilled protein (I particularly love the pastrami and cheese or the capicola and cheese) with coleslaw, tomatoes and fresh cut fries on Mancini’s Italian bread. Just had one on Friday and it was to die for. Another is the steak salad, which can now be had everywhere here but was invented at a local drive-in restaurant (it still has car hops!) called Jerry’s Curb Service. It just your basic salad of lettuce, tomato and cucumbers with lots of shredded cheddar cheese, diced ham, grilled and diced ribeye or sirloin steak and fries on top. Now that the weather is nice, I should take a drive and get one.
raven
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Let’s go crash that party down
In Normaltown tonight
Then we’ll go skinny-dippin’
In the moonlight
We’re wild girls walkin’ down the street
Wild girls and boys going out for a big time
Anyway we can
We’re gonna find something
We’ll dance in the garden in torn sheets in the rain
Ruckus
@JMG:
I’m thinking …… no.
But then who would actually know?
raven
@Steve in the ATL: It was named that, like Normal Illinois, because that is where
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I like liver and onions occasionally but it needs gentle handling to keep it from overcooking. One thing that has truly changed is the generational rejection of non-muscle parts of an animal. I tried blood sausage in Quebec City and was okay with taste but not texture. We have a funny story about my MIL misreading a menu in France and getting lamb brains. She nearly fainted, but my FIL, raised during the Depression, partly on a farm, happily switched and ate the whole thing.
Shana
@randy khan: We keep kosher and so don’t mix meat and dairy in a meal. I b he ave my mother’s recipe for beef stroganoff and make it with Tofutti sour cream – non-dairy substitute.
raven
Feathers
Fried clams. My father grew up near Boston and moved to the DC area for work, so I grew up eating them out of his nostalgia. My first real memory is having them upon returning to the US after living in Ireland for dad’s work. We spent a few days in Boston and the first meal was fried clams from Greer’s in Belmont. A revelation. The nearest HoJo’s to out house was the one across the street from the Watergate, where the lookouts for the Watergate burglars had set up. Clam night was a big event on every trip up to Mass.
Greers is gone now, but Fresh Pond Seafood (moved to Arlington) is much the same, with fresh fish and takeaway fried seafood. Celebrity Pizza in Watertown has very good clams. Woodman’s in Ipswich is my preferred North Shore spot. The Clam Box may have a slight edge with their belly clams, but Woodman’s has a tent with picnic tables overlooking a marsh, so they win. I think my years of HoJos left me with a preference for the strips anyways. There was a place in East Arlington that used to serve half-belly’s half strips, which was perfect. I like the belly’s, but a whole plateful is a bit much.
Home foods? My mother’s strawberry shortcake, with a not too sweet biscuit cake, mountains of strawberries, with fresh whipped cream piled on top.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Immanentize: Very much the same for me, as I detailed in my overlong comment at #263.
Lotta polka weddings, too, growing up, including at the very church and hall (St. Theodosius and Lemko Hall, in Cleveland’s near-Westside Tremont neighborhood) where the wedding and reception in Deer Hunter was filmed. The receptions were never catered, either — the women in the family always cooked the massive amount of “ethnic” food served (the men pooled together and provided the booze, and served as bartenders). And always live bands, typically featuring accordions. Haven’t been to weddings quite like those in almost 50 years.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steve in the ATL: I’ve never been to your fine state, and probably never will.
James E Powell
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot:
The food is one of the few things I miss about Cleveland. Our families are probably similar mixed Euros. We ate everything you mentioned. My Bohemian grandmother made most of it, but we also bought it from local stores where the owner new our names.
Josie
@WaterGirl: We called those street tacos. As teenagers we went across (again to Reynosa) to dance and drink, since they would serve liquor to anyone with the money to pay for it. Before driving home, we would stop and buy the tacos from street vendors – small corn tortillas stuffed with chopped, cooked meat (origin unknown) and seasonings. They were drippy, just like you described, and delicious.
hitchhiker
@Barbara:
Thanks for that! Now that I am the grandmother, I keep finding myself baking and looking for new kinds of things to bake. My grandbabies aren’t quite 5 months old, so it will be awhile before I can slip goodies to them, but in the meantime I’m practicing. :)
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
My great aunt Delphine had a lot of sisters and brothers. They had no problem getting rid of zucchinis. Every summer they used to bring filet mignon from the ranch and BBQ on 55 gallon drums cut in half top to bottom and grills made. It took 2 of them to cook all the steaks for everyone. Best steaks ever, only Norm’s Green Lake that I wrote about here the other day came close.
Don K
@geg6:
Mmmm…I have a wonderful recipe for liver and onions with balsamic reduction, and a grocery near me that always has calves liver in stock. I detested liver as a kid, I suspect because my mom overcooked it and it had the texture of shoe leather, but now I’ve come to an appreciation of it, along with some other foods I hated as a kid, such as beets and carrots.
As far as things I miss, I’m from South Jersey, which is culinarily very similar to Philly and SEPA, so I dearly miss scrapple, Tastykake pies, and real hoagie rolls. My mom was Pennsylvania Dutch, so I would kill for some shoofly pie. Amazingly, there’s one grocery (the same one that always has calves liver) that usually has Lebanon bologna at the deli counter, so that’s one childhood favorite I can get in MI.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: The Los Angeles Normal School was where the Central Library now stands, they moved in 1910 to Hollywood on Vermont(and Normal). In 1919, that campus was given to the University of California for their Southern Branch which soon became the University of California at Los Angeles. They soon ran out of space and moved to Westwood in 1929. That campus became LA Community College and the Normal School in San Jose became San Jose State University(the Cal State Universities).
bk
Dino’s Pizza – West Hartford CT
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@raven: Massive Arizona State University (now one of the largest-by-population universities in the country) started out life as Tempe Normal School, became a state university in the 50s over the strenuous objection of the original state college here, University of Arizona in Tucson.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl:
Things do not change until people force change to happen. She’s brave to be the one to force the issue.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: When I was hangin there in the 70’s they had “instruction not construction” stenciled everywhere. My high school buddy was a gymnast there and somewhere I have the picture of the team doing handstands on the famous bridge.
Shana
@raven: I remember House of Chin! Went there a lot during my C-U years.
Pika
Union NJ Mr. Sub—still there (just moved a storefront down) since the early 70s. Even though I am veg now, I will never forget the miracle of marinated microsliced onions in North Jersey sub dressing and an inch of capicola and provolone
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@James E Powell: There are actually a lot of things I miss about Cleveland, including the wonderful Metroparks, having lived in the Phoenix area for over 40 years now. Sure, lots I don’t miss (mosquitoes and interminable grey, soggy weather, the “rusting” industrial wastelands, etc.) but for me it was mostly a great place to grow up, not least because we children roamed pretty freely back then. Not the same anymore.
Bex
@Steve in the ATL: Did you ever get to Anderson’s Candies in Richmond, IL? You could gain 10 pounds just breathing in that store. I think it’s still there. We always stopped there on the way back from Lake Geneva.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Mostly! :-)
Ruckus
@Martin:
I am extremely lucky that my time in the Navy we did 3 NATO cruises and one half a Med cruise. I can say I’ve been north of the Arctic Circle, in the North Atlantic in winter, walked on British soil, (I emptied the trash while we refueled so I could say that) have been to Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Italy, several times, Gitmo, The Virgin Islands. I’ve met numerous wonderful people that almost made my Navy tour worth while. And learned about the Ugly American first hand, although that was from traveling around the US. Some of the food vendors I visited were amazing, as were many of the simple meals, like the deli in I think was the Netherlands where you had to specify if you wanted your hamburger actually cooked.
raven
@Shana: Here’s some pics.
There was the Leather Shop-Bamboo nexus. I remember sitting with George’s dad watching the entire Nixon China trip. He died shortly thereafter and the funeral was something to behold! In the early days in the pictures the “lounge” was upstairs but Georgie redid it and the basement with in front became the bar. If you got there just when they opened you could put down the chairs and help set-up and get a “Deadbeat Special”, a bowl of rice and brown gravy. I used to sell grams of hash on Friday nights there! I was also part of the Record Service tribe.
jnfr
White bread, bologna, and canned peas?
Feathers
@Yutsano: Good for her. I can see why the tournaments require it, but this also creates a situation where the press feels free to be abusive, especially to female and black athletes. These rules were made when the press was far more deferential and protected athletes private lives. There needs to be a recalculation.
It also seems to be unclear whether the tournament actually had the right to default her, rather than simply fine her for not attending press conferences. It looks like the rules never considered the case of an athlete making a decision before a match to accept the fine rather than meet with the press after the match. I wonder if this will be litigated, because I’m hearing the French Open may be going after her for dropping out. As John Rogers says, “A fine is a price.”
WaterGirl
@geg6: Fries on top of salad! Now that’s a salad I can get behind. :-)
Do you put dressing on it? Not sure I would want any dressing with that salad.
Another Scott
@Barbara: A friend and I went to a fancy steak house in Chicago once when he visited. He decided to be adventurous and ordered Beef Wellington without knowing what it was. I didn’t either. I just ordered a plain-old steak.
Although there are apparently lots of variations, his was steak wrapped in liver (or a pate heavy on the liver). I don’t think I’ve seen a hunk of meat so rare in my entire life…
It didn’t go well. He hated liver (as do I, though my mother loved it).
But it made a good story!
Cheers,
Scott.
RandomMonster
@laura: That sounds so wonderful. I’m feeling homesick!
Kathleen
@debbie: Will do!
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
I miss the ice cream truck. Used to hit our block on 27th Avenue with every kind of cold treat you could imagine. Italian ices were the best. I don’t know that I’ve had one since we moved.
JoyceH
@raven:
There’s a tiny town near where I grew up called Oblong. Which led to that famous headline in a society page, “Normal Man Marries Oblong Woman”.
raven
@JoyceH: Nice!
JoyceH
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): We have an ice cream truck that drives through my development! I hear the music as it drives through.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: I read both of those – thank you for that – and I don’t understand why people are saying they won’t get to see her play. I thought from what I just read that she would be fined.
Are they keeping her from playing because of this?
Kathleen
@hitchhiker: I’m chuckling. I’m a terrible cook and snicker whenever I see commercials for xyz food item “just like Grandma used to make”. I’ve always joked my grandsons will be reminiscing about Grandma’s White Castle/Wendy’s carry out. And now that they’re adults and accomplished cooks and bakers I reminisce about their cookies and soufflés!
Ruckus
@Dan B:
No one would have explained that to me then, I was 8-10 yrs old. And I’m not sure she knew which was actually which by that standard, but she knew which ones to cook.
It seems to me that we, as humans, fall into 2 main categories, those who had a wide range of food growing up and those who didn’t starve. I fall into the first group and I’ve always been grateful for that. It doesn’t mean I like anything and everything, it means I’ve been exposed and have seen and eaten some amazing stuff – and some not so amazing stuff. I wish everyone would get that chance because food is obviously a huge part of living, beside that we just have to do it. One can survive on crap for a long time, one can enjoy good food and good preparation a lot more.
schrodingers_cat
@Dan B: They are too small a demographic for the BJP to bother with. They are a tiny minority they learned English to get ahead in British India as did many upper caste Indians. What’s the controversy in that
And even today, knowledge of English is a ticket to a better life in Indi
And the leaders of the Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha were British collaborators so they are hardly in any position to call anyone out.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: She dropped out of the tournament.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Scott: Thanks to a childhood spent watching too much TV, I always hear “Beef Wellington” in Tony Randall’s voice, and Jack Klugman telling him to just heat it up.
And it’s one of my favorite dishes.
Barbara
@Another Scott: Liver pate is also the “secret” ingredient in a traditional banh mi sandwich. More modern beef Wellington recipes use a “pate” of finely chopped sauteed mushrooms. I made duck Wellington last Christmas with Dufour brand puff pastry dough, which hails from Brooklyn. It is so good that I wasn’t even tempted to make my own.
HinTN
My best friend’s mother baked bread. Walking into that house with that smell throughout was heaven. When our came hot from the oven she would cut the heel off and cover it in butter. Wow!
Jacel
@laura: An excellent Blum’s cake is made by Kathy’s Kreative Kakes in San Mateo, south of San Francisco.
Growing up in San Francisco, I loved House Of Piroshki’s creations, especially a cabbage filled piroshki that was etherial with a hint of sweetness. So sad when they disappeared from 9th Avenue.
An earlier food loss was a place in Playland-At-The-Beach that served large triangular turnovers — the turkey and the apple were my favorite.
My mother was a wonderful cook. One of my favorites was a lamb stew she made. When I lived on my own I asked her how to make it. She explained that the meat was lamb cheeks from a local market that we called “Where Else?” because that was inevitably the source of unusual ingredients she served.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What percentage of athletes really have anything interesting to say to the media? maybe 15? She’s an athlete, she wants to play tennis. Real fans want to see her play tennis. I’m baffled that the people running the open let this blow up like this.
Hoodie
Late to the thread. Foods I remember from my early childhood in STL were Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies that my dad would bring home in paper bag from South St. Louis, St. Louis style ribs my mom would get from a coworker at Barnes Hospital, and Velvet Freeze on a hot summer evening. I think you can still get Dad’s oatmeal cookies and I saw a story from a local TV station about the last Velvet Freeze in Jennings, which happens to be the one right down the hill from where my grandparents lived and I remember visiting multiple times to get the makings for root beer floats or chocolate sundaes. I vividly remember going there on humid summer nights, ones where we sat on the screen porch listening to Jack Buck call a Cardinals game or out on the front stoop listening to the tornado sirens.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Me too. 100% unlikely to watch any of it now. The women’s game is so troubled and she’s one of the few bright spots.
Shana
@raven: last time I was visiting I saw the Record Service awning was still there but the store was long gone.
John Revolta
@WaterGirl: She dropped out because she felt that her refusal to talk to the press had become a distraction- basically they made it the big story of the whole tournament. I’m flabbergasted- I had no idea this was a thing and I see no relationship between athletic ability and PR but, I guess this is where we are now. Christ.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: (The second tweet above is 2 pages and may default to showing the 2nd page.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
@Another Scott:
My favorite restaurant of all time used to have an appetizer that was Chicken Liver Pate Brushetta with Chili Oil. It was amazing.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@raven: The first I visited the Phoenix area was in ’76, hitch-hiking around the country as a drop-out hippie. I subsequently “got my shit together” as it were, went back and finished college, got married and started a family, then moved to Phoenix (“temporarily” as I assured my wife; she still reminds me now and then) and have been here over 40 years now. My son and DiL (his wife; we all live together now in one household, together with their young daughters who I love more than life) are both ASU grads.
Per your comment at #2 — when my first girlfriend’s brother (a few years older than us) came home from Vietnam in ’69 he was quite angry and very bummed about the experience, grew his hair out and participated with the Vietnam Vets Against the War. That didn’t set well with many (as you well know), and though he never talked much about it with me, after Kent State he did tell me if the war and the draft were still going on when I hit 18 (not far away) that I needed to do whatever it took (including the Canada “option”) to avoid going. I just missed having to do that, though a school friend a year older was the last person I knew who got drafted (he wasn’t sent to Vietnam). Some years later when I briefly re-connected with that girlfriend for the first time since HS I found out her brother had committed suicide. Yeah, fuck LBJ.
Dan B
@schrodingers_cat: Thanks for the details. The Iranian sweets sound great.
The Indian sweets we saw looked fantastic but were not very interesting. Silver and gold foil decorations but sweet without much flavor, with the exception of Gulab Jaman and a couple others. The best Gulab Jaman were at the Bellevue Athletic Club in Seattle metro.
The relics of the caste system are painful to witness. It seems like an effective way to keep a country from realizing its full potential. Strife is pricey.
Spanky
@geg6:
‘Twas not so in the 60s. With everything maybe, but not really on. And I’m remembering back to the time when Eat ‘n Park had the intercoms and girls coming out to the cars. Though not on skates.
Juju
@raven: the Poodles I went to was a sit down restaurant, so not the same place. Who knew there was more than one Poodles? The only pancake house that could compete with Uncle John’s is the Original Pancake House, which I discovered much later in life and on the west coast. They used to have pretty decent chocolate chip pancakes, but I don’t think it’s on the menu anymore, and Dutch babies. I had to find a decent Dutch baby recipe once I had one because I knew I’d never find a restaurant that would make them where I live in eastern NC, and so far I haven’t.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: My understanding is that Naomi Osaka has voluntarily withdrawn from the tournament. She says she has had real problems with depression since her first big tournament win three years ago. Her passing on the press conference was a matter of self care.
Steeplejack (phone)
New thread upstairs! May not show up for you if you’re not on the front page.
Ruckus
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot:
Mom made shit on a shingle and it was good. Not something I’d request but still, filling and tasty. Now in the Navy we had shit on a shingle and let’s just say, it was.
Kolacki. I’ve heard of something like that and had it somewhere and it was great.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Ah. I see that was in the second tweet, and I missed it when I read/skimmed the first time.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack (phone): What leads you to you think it might not show up?
Ruckus
@Steve in the ATL:
OK that’s worth a good chuckle….
Dan B
@Citizen Alan: I made a Julia Child recipe which was finely pureed chicken livers with Madeira and black pepper on top of crustless bread sautéed golden in butter till crisp, slathered with the pate then grilled medium rare, on top was an artichoke heart laboriously peeled and cleaned before cooking in water with flour and lemon, filled with a duxelle of mushrooms with a pinch of nutmeg and cream, covered in hollandaise or bernaise. It took hours to make.
I love calves liver with bacon and Madeira plus some sautéed sweet onions with a touch of balsamic. Gently cooked.
Juju
@debbie: when I was a child I came across two giant tongues on a cardboard tray wrapped in clear plastic. It scared me when I saw it and even more when I discovered it was going to be dinner. My mother made me try some, which was a rule, and I haven’t had tongue since. The only other accidental refrigerator find that scared me more was the two live lobsters on the bottom shelf. It was my parents New Year’s eve dinner that year. I thought they were giant bugs.
Juju
@WaterGirl: I think there’s a Hilton where the Uncle John’s used to be.
grandmaBear
I grew up in small town central California in the 50s with a mother who was not a good cook and thought the new instant or package mixes were great. Her mac and cheese was terrible, but at least my stepdad, who hated organ meats or meatloaf, kept those off the menu. Spinach soufflé was a revelation to me after only knowing of boiled spinach with vinegar. We did have amazing fresh fruit, most of which I loved. I miss our giant white peach and fragrant apricots and plums every time I see those pretenders at the grocery nowadays. I learned to cook from cook books and lots of trial and error. Gourmet magazine helped, and a few male college friends who were happy to have anyone experiment on them.
Barbara
@raven: I finished the book you recommended about female journalists posted in Vietnam. It was a good read, also a good brief history of the war. Thanks.
WaterGirl
@Juju: And not a particularly nice one!
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
As a young kid we’d have the Helm’s bakery truck, I can’t remember how often, it seemed not often enough, great bakery, glazed donuts to die for. The truck would drive around the neighborhood and stop, all the kids and sometimes moms would come out and the driver would pull out the drawers as you see in the picture to sell you stuff. The smell was amazing.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: He might be referring to what I saw yesterday at #82 (and #83).
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Raven
@Shana: yes, they went out of business quite a while ago but many of us stay in touch.
Raven
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: Ugh, sorry the brother didn’t make it. My AZ family is split, half-sis a Wildcat and idiot fascist half-bro Sun Devil. One of the worst night of my life is when we were watching to football game between them and they started on each other and it was fucking ugly. My old man never got over the Devils fans chanting “PLO, PLO” at Steve Kerr. (Some may. Not know that the PLO killed his father
TomatoQueen
@Juju:
Somewhere I’ve got a can of Wondra Flour that has a giant pancake recipe on the side, works a treat, any fruit you like, or go savory with bacon and baby swiss cheese.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They make money from selling the athletes accomplishments. They can make a lot of money from this so they make monetary decisions rather than ones that concern humanity. And the athletes make money from them selling those accomplishments and exposure. And it’s not loose change from the couch cushions. Think the NFL. Players are replaceable, so what if they get lifelong injuries? I know a pro football player, has a superbowl ring. He also has medical issues that are far worse than the wounds he got in Vietnam. He understands because he has made a good living, doing something he likes. But professional sports is often about the money made, almost never about the longterm health of a participant, because those careers don’t last that long and there are always replacements. I worked in professional sports, we cared about the athletes, we worked to keep them safe but it is always a balancing act. And far too many sports are now balanced not in favor of the athletes, but of the promoters and sanctioning bodies.
J R in WV
@billcoop4:
My next-door neighbor, just a few years younger than I, moved into this hollow the same summer we did back in the ’70s.
Anyway, many years before that, she had a baby (at 16 or so) which she gave up for adoption.
Just 2 or 3 years ago that baby, now all grown up with her own kids, found her birth mother, who instantly became a mom and a grandmother. Has been so wonderful for her. They visit the family, and daughter brought her family out to the hollow the summer before the plague!
So I understand a little bit of how you feel right now. So glad for you!
jackmac
@WaterGirl: So is ketchup on a hot dog (but I do it anyway!)
geg6
@WaterGirl:
Definitely use dressing! An Italian vinaigrette is superb over some fresh cut fries and steak bits. They even sell just the fries and the steak with dressing. People love it. Me, I want the salad, too.
Raven
@Ruckus: He spoke at the 10th Anniversary of the Wall and he was great.
Juju
@WaterGirl: I stayed at that Hilton for a wedding I went to in 2007, the wedding reception took place there as well. It was an ok place to sleep, but the reception food was mediocre at best.
Steve in the ATL
@Bex: don’t remember that, but wish I did!
Juju
@TomatoQueen: is giant pancake another name for Dutch baby?
geg6
@Spanky:
Primanti’s has done fries in their sandwiches since the 1930s. Started as a way to sell lunches to the truck drivers who delivered to the old produce terminal in the Strip District because it was a whole meal they could eat with one hand and drive their trucks. The salad version began in the 1950s here in Beaver County at Jerry’s Curb Service. Their longest serving car hop was a woman named Tunie who started there when it first opened and who finally retired around 2000 or 2001. She just died a few years ago and just about every person in Beaver County stopped by the funeral home to pay respects. Lines were several blocks long for hours and hours. Everybody had been served by and loved Tunie. My next older sister worked with her there for several years after her first divorce.
Ruckus
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot:
I’ve said here before, actually above in this thread as well, that I was very, very lucky in the Navy. I met a man my age at a BJ meet up who joined the Navy and 2 weeks after boot camp was on a river patrol boat in Vietnam as forward machine gunner. That could have been me, one didn’t know where they were going or what you’d be doing. The other services weren’t any different. I had a HS friend who was 3 yrs older, got drafted and sent to CO, army language school, they liked him or how well he did so they kept him to teach. 2 yrs active duty, in CO. It was random, there was no way to know. You could come out without a scratch, without a concept of reality, without body parts, without life. It’s likely the most dangerous thing many people will ever do and sometimes the only scars are mental and extremely hard to fix, others it’s life long struggle.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@JoyceH: I can remember that tune even now! Every kid in the neighborhood with a quarter in their pocket would go bananas!
Ruckus
@Raven:
I wonder if it’s the same guy, likely is, he’s very personable.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Ruckus: Wow!! Would have LOVED that!
normal liberal
@JoyceH:When my family moved to Normal in the late 60’s, that “society “ headline was how my dad would explain central Illinois to our old neighbors in Chicago.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: As far as I’m concerned, one anomaly yesterday is no reason is no reason to think people can’t see the next thread today.
I checked with mistermix earlier on the thread in question to see if he had changed the publication time, which we sometimes end up doing for various reasons. The answer was no, but he had published it from his tablet, so if/when this happens again, i will check with the author on that, as well.
Yutsano
Oh and just for the holiday and because T-Bogg:
We’re grilling burgers with a special sauce of my grandfather’s creation. It’s a delicious, tangy, sweet sauce that really goes well with grilled meats. I need to steal the recipe from my brother when he comes next week.
Kayla Rudbek
My Italian great-grandma would make this fried dough that I remember was called jumbadeens. Not as sweet as beignets, not cut into any neat pieces before being fried, and no sugar on top. She was from Calabria so I suppose that she was calling it something translated from her dialect, and I really couldn’t understand her English that well. So I’ve never been able to find the recipe for them.
Other treats from my childhood: rushky cookies made by my first-generation Austrian-American grandma (and her pies), braunschweiger on saltines at my paternal grandparents’ house, and my Italian grandpa‘s zucchini bread (I think that I may have been the only family member who actually liked it, as it was dense and oily).
String cheese (best eaten during summer vacation while reading romance, fantasy, or SF, particularly with a dairy junkie of a cat around to demand his fair share and lick the back cover of the book).
Going up to the corner store to get a Kempswich in the summer. Large buckets/pails of Kemps’ ice cream which could last for weeks, it seemed like.
Hard salami sandwiches on white bread with ketchup
Mom’s meatloaf made with a can of condensed chicken noodle soup in the mix, and her tuna fish casserole (made with rice instead of noodles, condensed cream of mushroom soup, no peas in the mix, topped with a sprinkling of paprika instead of any such nonsense as potato chips, crackers, or chow mein noodles). And the pineapple chicken bake as well (which she called Fruited Chicken on the recipe cards she wrote for me). Virginia Apple Pudding (which I’ve never seen anywhere in Northern Virginia). Oatmeal spice cake.
But I was the only person in the house who could get the spritz cookie maker to actually work, so she gave that to me and it’s now a vintage device when I search for equivalents on eBay…
Hmm, looking at that list, no wonder why I have high fasting blood sugar and past problems with my HA1C…
Raven
@Ruckus: There is only one “Purple Heart” Super Bowl ring owner, Rocky.
texasdoc
@TaMara (HFG): I was an Air Force brat. We moved every couple of years, and were usually in the back of beyond–not only were there no good restaurants, you couldn’t find ingredients for anything interesting. Frustrated my mom no end, as she was always interested in international food, even before it was a thing. So every holiday when I was in grad school in Berkeley, I would come home with two suitcases. One was filled with cheeses, spices, roast coffee from Peet’s, and ingredients for Chinese recipes, which I would then make for them. (Having two Chinese roommates helped me learn a lot about good Chinese food.)
NotMax
@Dan B
Limburger cheese is also an American product. Oddly enough, developed in the same small town from which came Velveeta.
Limburger nearly became a lost cheese when the original company was shuttered, except someone spirited samples of the culture used and kept it alive until a new producer came knocking.
Steeplejack (phone)
@WaterGirl:
The blog “buffer” is often very slow to update the “next post” “wing.”
Steeplejack (phone)
@WaterGirl:
The “next thread notification not showing up” thing happens quite a lot. I am sure that, like the randomly updated “Recent Comments” list, it has to do with the buffer and not with anything that the poster does.
MoCaAce
My mom was a good cook but, like a lot of 70’s midwest families we ate a lot of meat and potatoes and various hot dishes. like others here, spices meant salt and pepper and a bulb of garlic might last two months. Foods that still bring back memories are creamed asparagus on toast… as a teen it was one of the few veggies my mom could get us to eat and I still make it all the time when its in season. I also had a thing for a corned beef casserole that she made. On special days she might make thin potato pancakes and we would smear them with strawberry jelly, roll them up and devour them as fast as mom could get them out of the pans… there were five of us kids and she would have one on every burner on the stove top. About seven years ago I was trying to make potato pancakes from memory but couldn’t quite remember so I called mom on the phone to ask her. When my dad picked up the phone It suddenly hit me that she had passed about a year earlier… I had barely cried through all the two years of poor health, hospice and death but at that moment it all hit me and I broke down and cried like a baby. Food brings out those memories.
WaterGirl
@MoCaAce: Your last few sentences left me in tears.
The Golux
Late as usual…
The thing I miss the most is the Seven Layer Cake from the long-gone Lorraine Pastry Shop in West Harford,. When I started dating the girl who would become my wife, we would sometimes buy one (for the ridiculous price of $5.00) and eat the whole thing ourselves. Fabulous.
Ryan
As a diplomat, I get to try different food around the world. Argentina had great steaks, wine, and ice cream and nothing else. Pakistan had great curry that made you sick. Vienna had food. Kuala Lumpur has incredible food. But I still try and find a good enough Italian Beef recipe for when I’m not in the US and have a Portillos map up on my phone when I’m traveling the US (I’m thrilled they’re expanding in Florida near my sister’s place).
Brachiator
@grandmaBear:
My mother is a woman of many talents, but cooking is not one of them. I grew up in Texas and California, and used to not have much of an appetite (not my mother’s fault). I my favorite foods were hamburgers and banana splits, and I have always been able to find the best burgers in any city.
But until I read your note here I forgot that my mother always made sure that fresh fruit was available, and I loved it all. There were also berries which grew on neighborhood bushes or trees in Texas, scrumptious in Spring and Summer.
I learned to love food more when I went off to college. And I have a special love for delis and street food.
indianbadger
Grew up in the culinary mecca that is Hyderabad. The combination of Hindu and Muslim foods that permeates the city is something special. Plus the Muslim food was a combination of North Indian/Mughlai with south Indian spices; which made it unique.
One of the problems is that the City of Chicago has terrible Indian food, especially regional vegetarian stuff. All the good regional Indian places are in the burbs, which is where most Indians live. Especially, South Indian food in the City sucks. And don’t even talk about the Biryani.
As I don’t have a car; I can’t get to these places in the suburbs. So, when I visit my family and friends in Jersey and we go to the places there; I come back to Chicago and get pissed off all over again.
But, what I miss the most is this simple Potato Curry my mom used to make. It had nothing but Salt, Chili powder, Turmeric and Asafetida. But she was able to get this texture that I have not been able to replicate in more than 30 years of trying. And of course; I have not been able to find a good Medhuvada or Bisibele Hulianna in the US.