What are your first memories of great food?

Saranak

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Ciao a tutti!
My first memories are when I was maybe five or six, we had a fish seller that came around on a Wednesday with his barrow. It was always exciting when he rang his bell to let the women know he was there; I used to rush out of the house with my nonna and mama to see. I was always fascinated with the different fish and crustaceans, I always found the Polpi and Calamari most bizarre. The way the Polpi moved was quite alien.
I remember the smells from the kitchen, always rich and inviting. We always sat as the whole family to eat, papa would always be at the head of the table mama at the other end with the seven of us children on either side with nonna in the middle.
As soon as I was able to hold a knife safely nonna taught me (Her words still ring in my ears, "If you want a good husband Sarana you have to cook") I was the only girl of the seven. We made pasta, Gnocchi, pizza dough and the most wonderful bread.
We wasted nothing (There is a saying, if a Napulitano woman could use the moo of a cow she would), we had a small garden terrace where mama grew all the herbs that we used. Everyday we would go to the Mercato at La Pignasecca every morning before school. The smells were incredible.
Christmas and Easter were my favourites, we cooked from early morning awake at six am. The whole house smelled wonderful.
I remember Salumi hanging and the cheeses. We were not rich, Papa and his brothers worked at the docks, long hours and the pay was poor (This is 1965) sometimes a sack of this or that broke and the spilled contents was given as a kind of bonus. One of my uncles had chickens so there was always fresh eggs.
We had a huge Cantina of red wine in the kitchen, it was cheap wine but nice, papa would go with his brothers once a week to have it filled. All the time the women were in the kitchen the men would relax, drinking and playing cards; this was the way of things. I remember making Tortellini with mama for hours to make enough for the whole family, We made the food from our hearts and with love.
I carried this way of life with me all through my married life, over forty years now! My philosophy is this, if my man works hard to put the food on the table then it my duty to give him and my children the best food I can.
I have brought up my daughter in the same way and Maria is teaching her daughter the same.
In so many ways my kitchen is a typical Napulitano kitchen, I have salumi, cheeses, garlic and fresh bunches of herbs hanging form a rack that comes from the ceiling. I make everything from the raw, pasta, bread and passata. I have a marble slab that I use to make lasagne sheets, ravioli and Tortellini, that belonged to my nonna I do not use a machine for pasta I use an oak rolling pin that is over a metre long.
In short my early memories have made me the woman I am. My home always smells of food, there is always something cooking, and there is always my wooden rack hanging with fresh Pappardelle, linguine or spaghetti to dry a little.
One day I will not be able to do what I do, and that will be the saddest day of my life; from that moment I will see myself a failure as a wife and mother. However, until that day I will continue to honour the traditions of my family and home.

Grazie

Sarana x
 
Great food? I don't think I had any as a kid. It was terribly plain. My Dad grew vegetables so at least we had fresh vegetables but they were served plain boiled (apart from chips & roast potatoes).

The first time I had a curry in an Indian restaurant (I was probably about 18) was probably the first time I had anything resembling 'great'.
 
I can't remember not being close to food, mainly because I grew up on a farm and we grew our own fruit and veg, and we raised, slaughtered, butchered, and cured our own meats. About the only things my mom would buy with regularity from the shops would be staples like flour and sugar.

I said it before when I first joined here, if you're familiar with the 1970's TV show "The Waltons," then you'll know how I was raised, right down to the family sawmill.

Pork, pork, pork. We ate lots of pork. I've eaten every bit of a pig a one point, from pan-fried snouts, ears, testicles...everything. Lots and lots of ground pork bulk (meaning loose, not cased) sausage, lots of dry-cures ham, bacon, etc. We had pork every day and usually more than once a day.

Beef and chicken were also plentiful, but beef was nearly always ground and used for hamburgers or in soups, meatloaf, that sort of thing, the occasional chuck roast. No steaks.

Chicken was mainly breaded and pan-fried, though we also had roast chicken and chicken soup and (probably the best thing my mom made) chicken and dumplings.

We ate no fish or seafood, since my dad didn't like it, also nothing that he deemed "foreign," so I never had salami until I was in my 20's and out on my own, same thing with pizza...Mexican food...Chinese food, etc.

Fruit and veg were standard Midwestern US fare: potatoes and onions by far the most popular. Radishes, turnips, lettuce, cabbage, corn, a few varieties of beans, we grew a few varieties of berries, grapes (Concord), plums, pears, apples, and Mom canned, dried, and preserved a much as possible, and we had a large root cellar outside, cut into a hillside (with the smokehouse for the meats on top of that).

For us, "healthy" just meant good, heavy country cooking. The idea of a boneless, skinless chicken breast was completely unknown to us. :)

My mom's mom was Mennonite, so nothing fancy, just solid. Lots of gravy. Gravy on everything. Lots of bread. Everything fried in bacon fat or butter. Desserts were almost always fruit pies and the occasional cake.

My favorite meal was breakfast. Still is. I had almost the same thing for breakfast every day for 19 years: two fried eggs, biscuits (in the American sense, so not cookies) and gravy, fried potatoes, bacon and sausage, a sliced tomato, and maybe a piece of fried chicken or pork chop if something was left over from the night before. Sometimes there'd be pancakes and syrup, or oatmeal as well. Rarely cold cereal, as that wasn't a proper breakfast as far as my mom went.

One thing I always take great pains to point out - we moved from our in-town house to a house my dad built in 1971. I was five. From that time until the mid-1990's, my mom cooked exclusively on a wood cook stove. We had a modern cooker, but my mom never liked it, and when they built the house, she insisted on a wood cook stove, and that's what we had. It was "on" (meaning a fire was burning) 24/7. She fed 10 people three meals a day every day on that stove. I'm still impressed by that, and now at 81 years old, my mom still says that's the thing she misses the most about "the old days," when we were kids, her sweating over that stove.

As to drinks, my folks were (and are) teetotalers, but my dad's day job was for a soft drinks bottling company, so one thing we had that seemed a luxury was a restaurant-style soft drinks dispenser on the back porch, and between that and the dented cans and messed up bottles he brought home, we had pop to drink morning, noon, and night. I don't think I ever drank a glass of water for my first 19 years.

Nowadays, I cook some of the things I grew up with, but I also like things I didn't have, like Tex-Mex foods, and Italian(-American) foods. I love salami, and am eternally grateful for my East Coast father-in-law for introducing me to it when I was 21.

I do also still carry some of my learned prejudices as well. I still won't eat seafood. I'll have fish and chips and that's about it, and I really just like the batter. The fish is there to hold it up. :) I'm not that crazy about Chinese food, and that means the dumbed-down generic American stuff, so the more authentic things, those are right out.

I hate mushrooms and avocados. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I do like Indian foods, and Middle-Eastern stuff, but my wife doesn't, so we don't really have that.

Unlike my parents, both my wife and I enjoy a drink every now and again.
 
Great food? I don't think I had any as a kid. It was terribly plain. My Dad grew vegetables so at least we had fresh vegetables but they were served plain boiled (apart from chips & roast potatoes).

The first time I had a curry in an Indian restaurant (I was probably about 18) was probably the first time I had anything resembling 'great'.
Mi dispiace.
I forget that poor as we were we ate well. Maybe simple but good. However, I imagine that when I was a young girl many things we had to use were not here? Now I hope that you have great, explore, taste, experience.
The things I post I grew up with, a door opens again to a world I could not imagine. However, my husband said after we married that he had never had food like it, the first time I gave him Linguine Marinara he had now idea what to do with it bless him. First time his mother came to our new home she said "It stinks" My Ray was straight there, and said to his mother, "this is my wife and she gives me things I could never hoped for" I could not speak English well so I did not understand her, I put everything I had into the meal and she turned her nose. I was upset and offended and I cried. For the first time I asked why I married him and came to England, but my man stood by me, she hated Napulitano food until the day she died. Sad. Once she made a typical English Sunday lunch, I had only been here a month or so, I had no idea what it was! I pushed it around the plate. A clash of cultures yes?
In may ways I am very lucky, I have a husband that loves me and trusted me and now he eats very little but Napulitano food, indeed if we go to an Italian ristorante he picks holes in the food! And he has the waist to prove it!!

Sarana x
 
First time his mother came to our new home she said "It stinks"

One thing I didn't mention from my earlier post was that our food growing up was seasoned only in the most basic way; salt, pepper, maybe some red pepper flakes. One thing we didn't grow was herbs. Didn't use them.

To this day, the smell of garlic will absolutely send both my parents into retching fits. They've left restaurants that others have taken them to because of the smell of garlic, let alone the taste. It's so bad that anything my parents taste that they don't like, they'll put it down to garlic, as in, "That tastes awful! It must have that nasty ol' garlic in it somewhere!" I can show them on the ingredients that there's no garlic in it, but you won't convince them - "Well, they probably made that in a kitchen where they do use garlic, and it got that taste all over it!"

My dad's opinion of Parmesan cheese, like if it's in a dish that's baked, like a pizza: "Oh Lord, get me out of here! It smells like someone crapped in the oven!"

I, OTOH, love garlic, and any recipe that calls for it, I usually double it.

And he has the waist to prove it!!
That reminds me of an old saying: "A tubby hubby is a happy pappy!"
 
I can't remember not being close to food, mainly because I grew up on a farm and we grew our own fruit and veg, and we raised, slaughtered, butchered, and cured our own meats. About the only things my mom would buy with regularity from the shops would be staples like flour and sugar.

I said it before when I first joined here, if you're familiar with the 1970's TV show "The Waltons," then you'll know how I was raised, right down to the family sawmill.

Pork, pork, pork. We ate lots of pork. I've eaten every bit of a pig a one point, from pan-fried snouts, ears, testicles...everything. Lots and lots of ground pork bulk (meaning loose, not cased) sausage, lots of dry-cures ham, bacon, etc. We had pork every day and usually more than once a day.

Beef and chicken were also plentiful, but beef was nearly always ground and used for hamburgers or in soups, meatloaf, that sort of thing, the occasional chuck roast. No steaks.

Chicken was mainly breaded and pan-fried, though we also had roast chicken and chicken soup and (probably the best thing my mom made) chicken and dumplings.

We ate no fish or seafood, since my dad didn't like it, also nothing that he deemed "foreign," so I never had salami until I was in my 20's and out on my own, same thing with pizza...Mexican food...Chinese food, etc.

Fruit and veg were standard Midwestern US fare: potatoes and onions by far the most popular. Radishes, turnips, lettuce, cabbage, corn, a few varieties of beans, we grew a few varieties of berries, grapes (Concord), plums, pears, apples, and Mom canned, dried, and preserved a much as possible, and we had a large root cellar outside, cut into a hillside (with the smokehouse for the meats on top of that).

For us, "healthy" just meant good, heavy country cooking. The idea of a boneless, skinless chicken breast was completely unknown to us. :)

My mom's mom was Mennonite, so nothing fancy, just solid. Lots of gravy. Gravy on everything. Lots of bread. Everything fried in bacon fat or butter. Desserts were almost always fruit pies and the occasional cake.

My favorite meal was breakfast. Still is. I had almost the same thing for breakfast every day for 19 years: two fried eggs, biscuits (in the American sense, so not cookies) and gravy, fried potatoes, bacon and sausage, a sliced tomato, and maybe a piece of fried chicken or pork chop if something was left over from the night before. Sometimes there'd be pancakes and syrup, or oatmeal as well. Rarely cold cereal, as that wasn't a proper breakfast as far as my mom went.

One thing I always take great pains to point out - we moved from our in-town house to a house my dad built in 1971. I was five. From that time until the mid-1990's, my mom cooked exclusively on a wood cook stove. We had a modern cooker, but my mom never liked it, and when they built the house, she insisted on a wood cook stove, and that's what we had. It was "on" (meaning a fire was burning) 24/7. She fed 10 people three meals a day every day on that stove. I'm still impressed by that, and now at 81 years old, my mom still says that's the thing she misses the most about "the old days," when we were kids, her sweating over that stove.

As to drinks, my folks were (and are) teetotalers, but my dad's day job was for a soft drinks bottling company, so one thing we had that seemed a luxury was a restaurant-style soft drinks dispenser on the back porch, and between that and the dented cans and messed up bottles he brought home, we had pop to drink morning, noon, and night. I don't think I ever drank a glass of water for my first 19 years.

Nowadays, I cook some of the things I grew up with, but I also like things I didn't have, like Tex-Mex foods, and Italian(-American) foods. I love salami, and am eternally grateful for my East Coast father-in-law for introducing me to it when I was 21.

I do also still carry some of my learned prejudices as well. I still won't eat seafood. I'll have fish and chips and that's about it, and I really just like the batter. The fish is there to hold it up. :) I'm not that crazy about Chinese food, and that means the dumbed-down generic American stuff, so the more authentic things, those are right out.

I hate mushrooms and avocados. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I do like Indian foods, and Middle-Eastern stuff, but my wife doesn't, so we don't really have that.

Unlike my parents, both my wife and I enjoy a drink every now and again.
There is nothing wrong with simple but good food, sometimes I think people lose that and chase the new fad. The women of my family did the best with the things we had sometimes things were thin yet, we had vegetables as did you and made the best we could. Fish especially anchovy were very cheap as the came in by the thousands of kilo, we fried them, persevered them, made them into pate and at times at the fish market ate them raw in a little vingar.
Seafood is maybe not for everyone,
When I came to the UK I struggled and to be honest hated, I am very small and light, I had big problems with the shops. Not only was I cold but could not find anything to cook with. Also my English was non existent, because I am from Naples my skin tone is quite dark, so I had discrimination! It was hard, but I loved my husband. I have been called in the past Wapp an and filthy black bitch!!
My new mother in law came and stated that my home stank of garlic! My Ray soon put her right!
I have been here forty years now and I proud to be Napulitano English!

Sarana x
 
t our food growing up was seasoned only in the most basic way; salt, pepper, maybe some red pepper flakes. One thing we didn't grow was herbs. Didn't use them.

Well at least you had chilli flakes - they were unheard of in working class 1950's Britain.

Now I hope that you have great, explore, taste, experience.

Oh don't worry. I've more than made up for it since and eaten everything from Egyptian street food to the best Michelin starred restaurant food. I could barely boil an egg when I left home, but these days I can cook more or less anything. And I do!
 
Well at least you had chilli flakes - they were unheard of in working class 1950's Britain.



Oh don't worry. I've more than made up for it since and eaten everything from Egyptian street food to the best Michelin starred restaurant food. I could barely boil an egg when I left home, but these days I can cook more or less anything. And I do!
Bravo Bella or that be Bello I made this error earlier!

Sarana x
 
I was born and raised in Milan, with non-Milanese parents. Mom is Sardinian and dad is from Apulia.

My first memories of great food are lost in time, my family is a crossroads of cultures and flavors, ingredients, hands that create quite different from each other, and I was lucky enough to be among them.
I've eaten Sardinian and Apulian tradition since I was a child - seadas, piglet cooked with myrtle leaves in Sardinia, in Apulia Altamura bread, taralli, cime di rapa, and the oil...naturally slightly spicy without any trace of chili pepper.

But I also knew how to appreciate the food of the city where I was born and raised and recognize the wonders of Milan, home of risotto and ossobuco and Panettone.

The first time I ate the traditional Milanese risotto with ossobuco (practically a unique dish since they are served together), I was in a trattoria in Brianza to which I would give myself no hope of getting out alive from there, but right there I literally fell in love with that dish. And since then risotto has become a part of me and I have never stopped yet.
 
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One thing I didn't mention from my earlier post was that our food growing up was seasoned only in the most basic way; salt, pepper, maybe some red pepper flakes. One thing we didn't grow was herbs. Didn't use them.

To this day, the smell of garlic will absolutely send both my parents into retching fits. They've left restaurants that others have taken them to because of the smell of garlic, let alone the taste. It's so bad that anything my parents taste that they don't like, they'll put it down to garlic, as in, "That tastes awful! It must have that nasty ol' garlic in it somewhere!" I can show them on the ingredients that there's no garlic in it, but you won't convince them - "Well, they probably made that in a kitchen where they do use garlic, and it got that taste all over it!"

My dad's opinion of Parmesan cheese, like if it's in a dish that's baked, like a pizza: "Oh Lord, get me out of here! It smells like someone crapped in the oven!"

I, OTOH, love garlic, and any recipe that calls for it, I usually double it. That reminds me of an old saying: "A tubby hubby is a happy pappy!"

He is, he is 64 now, 22 when I met, I was 18, he was in the army and saw me sat on a Vespa, in carpi pants, little pumps and a white top. Black hair to my waist. His Italian was say bad, he was very handsome and still is to me. He sat watching me and eventually he gained the courage to come over, he stammered and shuffled his feet. Napulitano women are I say difficult! Asked me for a dance and if he could take me dinner. I said Si, and the rest is history, four bambini later and forty years. I still quiet think he loves my food more then me!!

Sarana x
 
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Well at least you had chilli flakes - they were unheard of in working class 1950's Britain.
You know, I honestly don't know what was for sale that way when I was a kid. We had dried pepper flakes because we grew a buttload of chili peppers and dried them. We had tons and tons of bundles of peppers hanging up to dry.
 
I was born and raised in Milan, with non-Milanese parents. Mom is Sardinian and dad is from Apulia.

My first memories of great food are lost in time, my family is a crossroads of cultures and flavors, ingredients, hands that create quite different from each other, and I was lucky enough to be among them.
I've eaten Sardinian and Apulian tradition since I was a child - seadas, piglet cooked with myrtle leaves in Sardinia, in Apulia Altamura bread, taralli, cime di rapa, and the oil...naturally slightly spicy without any trace of chili pepper.

But I also knew how to appreciate the food of the city where I was born and raised and recognize the wonders of Milan, home of risotto and ossobuco and Panettone.

The first time I ate the traditional Milanese risotto with ossobuco (practically a unique dish since they are served together), I was in a trattoria in Brianza to which I would give myself no hope of getting out alive from there, and right there I literally fell in love with that dish. And since then risotto has become a part of me and I have never stopped yet.
Unfortunately I have never tried either cuisine, I suppose in that respect I limited in Italian food even though I Napulitano! But every region has it own specials.
Sarana x
 
You know, I honestly don't know what was for sale that way when I was a kid. We had dried pepper flakes because we grew a buttload of chili peppers and dried them. We had tons and tons of bundles of peppers hanging u
Please excuse I am too serious pain to respond, Tomorrow I will.
Sarana X
 
You know, I honestly don't know what was for sale that way when I was a kid. We had dried pepper flakes because we grew a buttload of chili peppers and dried them. We had tons and tons of bundles of peppers hanging up to dry.

Did you ever eat the chillies in food? I mean cooked in food not raw.
 
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