Food memories Q&A

When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been?
Probably pasta and noodle dishes. Nothing has changed.

What did you buy with your pocket money?
I remember this kind of beef jerky with a sticky sauce that you'd get from convenience stores. I can't even remember what it was called but don't think I've seen it since.

Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays?
Christmas Eve we always have scungilli with linguine along with various seafood appetizers. We may not get up to exactly seven fishes, but the spirit is there. On my birthday we almost always go out for seafood. Hmm perhaps there is a pattern here.

What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated?
Chicken, for the longest time I thought I hated chicken. Turns out I just didn't like dry chicken, its now one of my favorite things to eat.

What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores?
I guess that would be the same answer as the pocket money question.

What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home?
Beef Stroganoff and Baked Mac and Cheese. Carbs and sauce always wins.
 
Nice idea, Windigo !

  1. When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been? Lukshen kugel, an Eastern European Jewish dish, pretty much universally disliked by anyone not of the tribe. Noodles and eggs, with various additions and flavorings, savory or sweet. I preferred savory.
  2. What did you buy with your pocket money? Not food so much. I was a science nerd as a kid, so bought chemicals, glassware, electronic components with my saved pocket money.
  3. Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays? Chanukah meant potato latkes with applesauce. Birthday meant pizza. On some special occasions, cheese blintzes.
  4. What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated? Any meat products, but especially tuna. The appearance and smell nauseated me to the point of having to leave the area.
  5. What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores? So many, sigh. Turkish Taffy is one I particularly miss.
  6. What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home? Not many- I really went my own way with cooking, though the basic how-to was something my mother drilled into me at an early age when I decided to stop eating meat ("If you're going to eat differently, you're cooking it yourself.").
 
When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been?
My Grannie used to cook a fantastic vegetable lasagne. (Recipe - Vegetable Lasagne) and also a great leek and mushroom gratin.
She also made great pancakes and Yorkshire pudding. My brother would have it as toad in the hole, but I'd have it as straight Yorkshire pudding.

What did you buy with your pocket money?
I really don't recall getting any pocket money. It would be an iou instead, so you didn't really get to buy anything until we went on holiday

Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays? No. Birthdays and holidays were everyone at one home or the other and each adult brought several dishes with them. It was all you could do to get a sponge birthday cake that you liked rather than a fruit cake the adults preferred.

I do remember one restaurant my patents used to take my brother and I to, so this was before my sister was born (in '86). It was a dedicated Balti restaurant and they had the most wonderful vegetable Balti with massive naan bread. It was one of the few places we could all eat at. I guess that started my love affair with Indian and Pakistani food.

What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated? Pretty much all of my mother's and ex-step father's cooking was awful, so all if it. From the age of 9 or 10, I cooked for myself.

What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores? I've no idea really. I didn't really have any dedicated foods as a young child. If there was a meal on the table and our mother sat down with us to eat, it was pretty unusual. She was a single mum with 2 young kids and financially ends didn't meet.

What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home? I had several/ many recipes from my Grannie including a vegetarian recipe book. Grannie always typed or hand wrote them out for me and I still have them. I've had to change them since the dairy allergy though.
 
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When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been?

That never happened, ever, but if I had been allowed to, it would have been something like pizza from a pizzeria or one of the fast food meals I saw on TV, because we rarely ever ate out until I was in my teens.

What did you buy with your pocket money?

One thing that may seem unusual - I had a little bit of money from a young age because my dad always stressed knowing how to handle money and the value of work, so I got my first real job when I was nine, working at a Christmas tree farm, and worked there year-round until I was 19, and I also baled hay in the summer, cut firewood for an older couple up the road, and worked as a general helper for an ancient nearby woman as well.

Foodwise - I used to love buying these little round refrigerated pizzas, they came six to a pack, each one about three inches across. I loved those. I wasn’t allowed to stay up late, but after my parents went to bed, I’d sneak back up on Saturday nights and watch Saturday Night Live, followed by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, if I could stay awake. I’d grab three of those little pizzas and bake them in the wood stove, because that was always burning.

I also liked to buy these little chocolate doughnuts that came six to a pack - those were snack-sized, and the chocolate coating was mostly wax and hard as a rock. I couldn’t eat enough of those.

Barq’s pop, back when it came in about 12 different flavors, and my dad, who worked for Pepsi, would have beaten my butt red if he ever knew.

Other than than, I always liked junk food, because we never had it at home, so anything salty, anything sweet. Didn’t matter.

Non-food - I liked comic books, and when I got into music, I liked buying musical supplies. For example, I couldn’t afford a quality banjo (back when I thought everyone wanted a banjo :laugh: ), so my dad, who could build anything, said he’d take care of making the neck and the rim if I bought all the metal hardware (tone ring, tailpiece, tension rod, etc…there’s a lot of metal on a banjo), and that cost several hundred dollars just for the parts, so that wiped me out one year.

Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays?

We weren’t allowed to celebrate birthdays, against our religion (against my dad’s, to be specific). Once, when I turned 9yo, Mom took me to a local place that was a McD’s knockoff (Mac’s) and bought me a kid’s meal and took me to the park in town to eat it. Dad found out later that night and really let her have it, and I got a whipping as well.

Holidays - the only one that we “celebrated” was Thanksgiving, and we had the standard stuff. My grandad raised turkeys for a long time, so that’s where we got the turkey.

What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated?

Not a whole lot, but my grandad did like rabbit and squirrel, and he liked all the organ meats, I didn’t care for that, but I was never forced to eat it.

My dad liked greens, like turnip greens, I never cared for that, and I still don’t, but there was so much other food to choose from, it was never an issue.

What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores?

I’m sure there’s plenty, but I can’t remember much, because we didn’t buy much processed foods. I do remember two cereals from my youth that I think are gone, King Vitamin and Concentrate. Concentrate was really high in fiber, which I didn’t know anything about when I was a kid, and was used like a mild laxative, and when I figured that out, I used to wonder if the name came from the idea that you should eat a bowl, then go sit on the toilet and really concentrate. I actually thought that.

What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home?

I don’t think I took any recipes, as nothing was ever written down, and my mom and my grandmom (her mom) were the two cooks in my life, and they weren’t the type to show you how to cook something. You were just expected to watch and learn.
 
Yorky said:
Bryan's chippy was a famous favourite in Headingley back in my day - adjacent to the bus depot just off Headingley Lane. I've not eaten in the restaurant but I've had carry oot on many occasions back in the 70s.

I remember we drove past Harry Ramsden's in Guisely in the late 60s at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon and the queue outside for the restaurant must have been 20 metres long.

It baffles me that I can remember insignificant occurrences from 60 years ago but still cannot remember what I had to eat yesterday without looking it up on the internet.
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Right, I think I've found it. 302 Harrogate Road. It's now a pizza place, but the building is very distinctive and I remember the bay windows in the upstairs restaurant, and the parking outside.
 
The Velvet Curtain said:
Right, I think I've found it. 302 Harrogate Road. It's now a pizza place, but the building is very distinctive and I remember the bay windows in the upstairs restaurant, and the parking outside.
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Different place then. Harrogate Road is almost the other side of town from Headingley.
 
  1. When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been? No choosing, because we barely had two pennies to rub together. My dad worked 12 hour shifts and my mum brought up 3 kids. She was a full-time housewife. Everything that was cooked was eaten, although most of it was vegetarian because mum wouldn´t eat fish and chicken was only for Sundays and Xmas.
  2. What did you buy with your pocket money? I can´t remember having very much, for the same reasons as above. It was only when I was 13 and got my first job at the local laundry (9 shillings a week, I seem to remember!) that I had any money of my own. Probably the first pay packet went towards a cricket bat.
  3. Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays? Nope. We had Sunday Lunch every Sunday, with chicken. Christmas lunch was also chicken, at least until I was about 15 years old. Special treats for Xmas would include Xmas pudding, with homemade brandy butter, Stones ginger wine, Turkish Delight and a packet of cocktail biscuits (we never drank cocktails, but loved the biscuits!) .
  4. What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated? Nothing, because everything was eaten up. Hateful disgusting foul horrible inedible vomitous food was only prepared at school :hyper: :hyper: :hyper: :hyper: I can remember grey slabs of slimy beef full of gristle, lumps of overcooked fish with tasteless white sauce, liver and onions (I actually used to eat that, although the liver was always waaaaay overcooked) and a whole array of heartbreaking stodgy puddings made with an abundance of suet and a total lack finesse: Roly-Poly pudding, Jam Tart, Queen of Puddings, Spotted Dick, Bread and butter pudding, treacle tart, apple pie - all served with lumpy, tasteless custard.
  5. What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores? Birds Eye Rissoles
  6. What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home? My mums pastry - always made with 200 gms flour, 90 gms butter, 10 gms lard - and something she called "cheese pie" which was , in fact, just mashed potato with piles of cheddar cheese in it, baked in the oven until browned.
 
karadekoolaid said:
  1. When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been? No choosing, because we barely had two pennies to rub together. My dad worked 12 hour shifts and my mum brought up 3 kids. She was a full-time housewife. Everything that was cooked was eaten, although most of it was vegetarian because mum wouldn´t eat fish and chicken was only for Sundays and Xmas.
  2. What did you buy with your pocket money? I can´t remember having very much, for the same reasons as above. It was only when I was 13 and got my first job at the local laundry (9 shillings a week, I seem to remember!) that I had any money of my own. Probably the first pay packet went towards a cricket bat.
  3. Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays? Nope. We had Sunday Lunch every Sunday, with chicken. Christmas lunch was also chicken, at least until I was about 15 years old. Special treats for Xmas would include Xmas pudding, with homemade brandy butter, Stones ginger wine, Turkish Delight and a packet of cocktail biscuits (we never drank cocktails, but loved the biscuits!) .
  4. What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated? Nothing, because everything was eaten up. Hateful disgusting foul horrible inedible vomitous food was only prepared at school :hyper: :hyper: :hyper: :hyper: I can remember grey slabs of slimy beef full of gristle, lumps of overcooked fish with tasteless white sauce, liver and onions (I actually used to eat that, although the liver was always waaaaay overcooked) and a whole array of heartbreaking stodgy puddings made with an abundance of suet and a total lack finesse: Roly-Poly pudding, Jam Tart, Queen of Puddings, Spotted Dick, Bread and butter pudding, treacle tart, apple pie - all served with lumpy, tasteless custard.
  5. What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores? Birds Eye Rissoles
  6. What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home? My mums pastry - always made with 200 gms flour, 90 gms butter, 10 gms lard - and something she called "cheese pie" which was , in fact, just mashed potato with piles of cheddar cheese in it, baked in the oven until browned.
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You make me think we should start a school lunch memories thread!

My mom made the same 'cheese pie' which is really nice! Did your mom also ridge the top with a fork so there would be crunchy ridges?
 
  1. When you were a child, if you got to choose what was for dinner: what would it have been? We didn't get to choose in most cases. But I enjoyed the variety.
  2. What did you buy with your pocket money? What was pocket money? And where would I walk to in order to purchase stuff? When we stopped in convenience stores, I rather liked Pixie Sticks - essentially sugar with various fruit flavors added, into straws. Sometimes the parents would buy them for me.
  3. Would there be any special dishes with your birthday and the holidays? Yes, we could choose dinners on our birthdays. I picked something different each year. I remember my brother wanted lobster and hot dogs. His birthday was in July, and the parents could accommodate that. Thanksgiving was the only holiday with a largely-set menu. Turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, that string bean thing with mushroom sauce and crunchy fried onions. And, alas, that horrid Pecan Pie that everyone else loved but I learned to decline.
  4. What did your parents cook that you absolutely hated? Brussels sprouts (which I LOVE now), carrots, chicken breast and pecan pie.
  5. What food from your childhood has dissapeared from the stores? Smoked tongue. Stewing hens. I loved both.
  6. What dish or recipe did you take with you from your parental home? Probably several. Their way of making hamburgers, the Thanksgiving turkey stuffig/dressing and gravy. Butterfinger cookies. Avocado/grapefruit salad. There are a number of more, which I may add in later.
 
PabloLerntKochen said:
  1. Pizza, Pasta Bolognese, Lasagne or schnitzel
  2. Frozen Pizza, sweets, chips
  3. Birthday Chili con Carne
  4. Kale, Zucchini
  5. Some cereals
  6. wiener apfelstrudel
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"Pizza is always the answer." -Picky Eater (which is why our courtship is going so well)
 
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