Childhood Foods

When I was home sick as a kid, my mom would feed me Franco-American spaghetti from a can, 4 buttered saltines, sliced and sugared bananas in milk, and Hawaiian Punch. All these years later, I still eat this meal if I feel like I am coming down with something.

I recently chopped up a lemon for my niece. She’d asked for one, and that’s when I remembered that her father and I used to eat whole lemons as kids.

My mom just poured maple syrup on the snow, and served it. Yum.

My favorite sandwich was Velveeta and yellow mustard on Italian bread. Washed down with hot black tea, with sugar and evaporated milk.

Hot chocolate isn’t a kid’s thing, it’s a national dish! Oh, you mean the liquid-liquid kind, not the churros kind… well, it wouldn’t be an offer in every “coffee” vending machine if it was a kid’s thing :slight_smile:

I also loved Dennison’s chili chased with a can of Coke. Haven’t had either of those in many years.

This is a wish I could have it again post.

Of course I still eat pizza, but I long for Woolworth’s pizza from the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve never had real New York brick oven pizza, but I suspect it would close to what Woolworth’s had. Super thin crust, slightly burnt, with just tomato sauce, oregano and mozzarella cheese. I’d always fold it in half lengthwise and if it was just out of the oven, the cheese would immediately slide off the crust. If it had been sitting a while, it would stick just a little bit. I don’t know if they had anything but cheese pizza, because that’s all I ever got. I didn’t discover that the secret ingredient was oregano until years later. I don’t know how my Mom made spaghetti without it, but we never had it in house. As soon as we got a bottle and I smelled it, memories of Woolworth’s pizza flooded my brain!

Bran flakes, made with part milk and part half-and-half, with a bunch of sugar dumped on top. I used to have it at my grandparents’ house when I was a kid, and I still make it.

Kraft singles folded in fourths and put on saltines.

Packs of hot chocolate mix, without water. Just dumped a little at a time into the mouth.

I’m weird.

Every time I went downtown as a kid in Minneapolis, I had Woolworth’s pizza at the store on Nicolette Avenue, which they tore down in the early '70s to put up the IDS Building. (In fact, the downtown I knew was basically gutted to form the stupid Nicolette Mall; the same thing happened when I lived in Milwaukee in the '80s. But I digress…)

I distinctly remember Woolworth’s having at least two kinds of pizza, plain cheese and Italian sausage. I always had the sausage kind, which had little green seeds mixed in. It was many years later that I learned they were fennel seeds used to season the Italian sausage. When I make my own Italian sausage now, I always use a blend of fennel and anise seeds. That’s the taste I remember from when I was a kid.

For me, Woolworth’s was a kind of magical place. I spent a lot of time in the basement, where all the comic books and GI Joe sets were. (The original GI Joe, not the pale imitation they hawk today.)

Try this with hot maple sap while it’s being boiled down to produce syrup. You end up with delicious maple candy if it’s really cold outside.

At summer camp when I was 15 or 16, some friends and I were planning on spending the night near the cesspool observing with my telescope (a Tasco 60mm refractor with an equatorial mount), so we packed some rations that included a gallon jug of cold instant cocoa. The counselors got wind of what we were up to and confined us to barracks. I was so pissed off, I drank the entire jug of cocoa before going to bed as an act of defiance.

At breakfast the next morning, I was asked if I got up at 4:00 am to watch Saturn rise. “Are you kidding?” I said. “I drank twelve cups of cocoa. I HAD TO get up at 4:00 in the morning to watch Saturn rise!” :mad:

My ex, who is Russian, caught me eating sliced bananas with milk and sugar one day. When I told her what it was, she looked at me like I was out of my mind.

Which is one reason she’s now my ex. :smiley:

I never had tea with milk until I lived in the UK in my early 20s. Now I almost always drink it with evaporated milk and crystallized cane juice.

My host family and friends there used to watch me drinking black tea with sugar only and asked how I could stand it. It didn’t help that back then I was in the habit of boiling the leaves to make very strong tea, which I later found out was (is) the traditional Russian way of brewing the stuff. To make it more palatable, you just add hot water from a samovar.

My dad introduced us to peanut butter and syrup mixed together on a plate sopped up with bread.

I sometimes ate mayo on my beans.

Completely. I remember my Mom would always give me a small plate of plain spaghetti & butter when she was making spaghetti & meatballs for the whole family. I’d hang out in the kitchen and claim hunger right when the spaghetti was done, so I got a little bit to tide me over. Delicious.

Cookies dipped in Cool-Whip. Any flavor cookie works fine.

I still on occasion make myself a cheese and jelly sandwich

Oh, I almost forgot. An aunt would make a Bisquik crumb cake now and then for my cousins and myself when we played at her house. (she had a big screened in porch with furniture and a tv! - great place to color or read or watch cartoons, especially when it rained). The Bisquik recipe has been on the box forever and isn’t really that good, a sweetish cake with a streusel topping, but I think of it nostalgically now and then. When it’s too rainy and cold to go out and play.

Bananas with milk and sugar? Check
Sugar sandwich? Check
Spaghetti with butter and parm cheese? Check
Saltines with butter? Check

Cheese dipped in honey, or with a fruit compote is quite the charcuterie item even now.

My mom used to make a simple “goulash”, which was a pound of ground beef, onion, a can of tomatoes, and a cup of macaroni. We had that just last week at home, yum.