Green, with pimientos, and I let them drain a bit. This is a great way to use those cheap salad olives, though I find they have a bit too much pimiento with them. Put them in a salad shooter or similar chopper, or just chop them up by hand. It’s best to toast the bread, too. It’s a very satisfying light meal. I spread the mix onto one slice of toast, and eat it open faced.
I like both of those, especially sauerkraut. Heck, it was a treat. Not heated, just cold, right out of the jar.
My stepdad ate pancakes with peanut butter and dill pickles.
I was reading through this thread, and suddenly I realized this: long, long ago, when I was pregnant, damn near everything listed here would sound like something I’d love to eat.
I have to confess a deep and abiding love of dripping. Which can come from roast lamb, too. (And growing up in Australia, mostly did 
) Holy cow that stuff is good. It’s not just the fat, but the layer of gelatinous jus underneath. It goes all melty and delicious on toast, and if the meat was flavoured with good aromatics while roasting it’s fantastic. However, what with the whole getting old thing, and cholesterol thing, I only savour it in memory now.
I also love various offaly bits. The offensive stuff my parents ate was generally things in a tin because you couldn’t get them fresh. I thought I hated mushrooms for the longest time because of the slimy, rubbery objects that came out of tins. And honestly I’ve never got around to finding out if maybe I don’t hate sardines. It’s just not worth it. Maybe if I ever see them fresh on a menu. The tinned ones were so vile.
My Mom’s hot dog stew consisted of boiled potatoes, sliced hot dogs, garlic salt and tomato puree. She’d drain off only about half the water from the potatoes, chuck everything else in, and stir until it was hot throughout. We loved it. If I ate meat, I’d probably still eat it now.
Then again, there was a lot of stuff Mom would eat that I would never even consider: head cheese, raw clams and oysters, bone marrow (she would suck it out of a round steak bone and chew it like it was a piece of gum!), tripe, assorted offal, tongue, pickled pig’s feet, chopped-up jello in milk, canned peaches with sour cream on top, liver sausage and onion sandwiches, you name it. And snails. We’re not talkng escargot here, we’re talking dump a bag of live snails into a pot of boiling water, get your kid to stand over the pot with a wooden spoon to knock any potential escapees back into the water, and eat with a bent bobby pin from which you’d removed the protective plastic ends.
The only thing I’d ever seen my Mom pass up was the baby corn that comes in some Asian dishes. I’m with Mom on that one - to me, they’re the vegetable equivalent of veal.
(BTW - this is my 5000th post!)
Okay, I have to stop you there. Sardines in mustard sauce, mashed and spread on saltines, is heaven. Plus, they’re really good for you.
Myself? Anything with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup in it. This vile devil-pustulence was a staple of my mother’s cooking, and dishes which contained it were the only things I was forced to eat as a child.
Go to HELL, CCoMS!
I’m also mildy ticked off that someone beat me to linking to the Lileks website.
But as long as it’s done…
SOUSE
Head cheese, also called souse and brawn, is a jellied loaf or sausage. Originally it was made entirely from the meaty parts of the head of a pig or calf, but now can include edible parts of the feet, tongue, and heart. The head is cleaned and simmered until the meat falls from the bones, and the liquid is a concentrated gelatinous broth. Strained, the meat is removed from the head, chopped, seasoned and returned to the broth and the whole placed in a mold and chilled until set, so it can be sliced.
http://www.foodreference.com/html/fsouse.html
Tripe. Definitely tripe.
Nowadays … well, I don’t dislike tripe. Not per se. But I find that after I’ve tried it these days, I don’t need to try it again for another few years.
So many defending sardine consumption … won’t someone think of the little fishies sacrificing their lives in order to feed your deranged desires? Anybody?
Just the SMELL of those things is enough to set me heaving
And while on the subject of heaving - the coating left in a glass by buttermilk is disgusting. If mom drank/ate that concoction I’d always fill that glass with hot water and leave it “to soak” when it was my turn to wash dishes.
Ayup. My mom fed us tofu nuggets and soy cheeses and always told her friends triumphantly that we preferred them to the real thing. Uh, no, mom, actually we preferred the real thing. But she never believed us.
The best, though, is something only my sister remembers. Keep in mind my mom was real earth-mother, grew her own veggies, made her own yogurt, that sort of thing. So the idea that my mom was growing some sort of edible mold in the pantry? It’s just barely plausible. My sister insists that my mom had an experiment with growing mold, and that the results were appallingly nasty. Our best guesses are:
- It was natto; or
- It was a nightmare my sister had and thought it was real.
Daniel
I used to hate sauerkraut, a staple of the folks’ dinner tables way back when, but now I love it.
I still will not eat scrapple, though.
My step father loved a couple of “local delicacies”. The first one was “souse”, otherwise known as head cheese, and the second was Shenk’s cup cheese. It is a grayish color, with the consistancy of snot. Tasty stuff though. Can’t say the same about head cheese. I could never bring myself to trying this.
My grandmother would make a dish for my father and his siblings that consisted of ground beef and frozen vegetables. That dodesn’t sound too bad, except they called it “gudge.” Would you want to eat something called gudge?
I grew up Sicilian-American, ate a lot of my immigrant grandma’s genuine old country cooking–but I never got near baccalà even once. Never knew anyone who would think of touching it.
Let me put it this way. When I was growing up, Italians called one another baccalà as an insult.
Oh gosh, just remembered another one.
Whenever there was a family gathering on my mom’s side, all of the realitives would bring a dish (her side of the family is HUGE, I swear they multiply like bunnies).
One dish that was always there (and I curse whoever keeps making it) was yummy kibalsa smothered in yellow, nasty, foul, sauerkraut.
Never ate it. I wanted the kibalsa ever so much, but I couldn’t stand the saurkraut taste that soaked into it. 
Not my parents, but my grandparents used to (still probably do) eat deviled ham. You know, the stuff that comes in the tin wrapped in paper with a little devil on it? shudder That stuff’s right up there with braunschweigert and egg salad for instant and pure olfactory hate.
My mom doesn’t eat anything nasty; she taught me to cook, after all.
I guess I’m a good little German because I have always loved sauerkraut, and I will eat it cold, too.
Love them olive and cream cheese sandwiches. Yes, the green olives with pimentos. The black olives are for putting on your fingertips and then eating one by one.
My parents were fond of Braunschweiger (spelling?). We actually liked it too on crackers or white bread … until we found out what it was. In case you don’t know, it’s pork liver. I suppose if I were a really good little German I’d still enjoy it, occasionally I do find myself getting nostalgic cravings for it but then I remind myself that it’s pork liver and the craving goes away.
I know what livers and kidneys do now, I have no desire to eat them … well, except the occasional chicken liver.
ETA: I read this whole thread and no one else had posted about Braunschweiger, then Queen Bruin posts about it just a few minutes before me.
Depends on how it’s…uhh…treated. I once worked with a Puerto Rican guy who would occasionally bring in bacalao (sp? slightly different word, but same basic ingredient) for lunch, and it was actually really good. The salted fish was soaked and drained, then shredded and mixed with flour, spices, etc. and turned into fritters. I’d happily eat it again.
The lutefisk that my dad made us eat, on the other hand…urgh.
That’s OK, I was talking about this thread with my husband and mentioned braunschweigert. He loves it, I hate it. He says since I hate it, I must be a bad German, weird coincidental turn of phrase, no? I guess the fridge full of Optimator doesn’t make up for my braunschweigert hate.
Lutefisk Lore
Take a cod, gut it, soak it in lye water and smoke it over a fire made from rotting driftwood. Every three days, sho away the flies.
After a period ranging from 3 weeks to 5 centuries, take off the smoking rack.
If its still wiggling, Name it Gunnar and give it Norwegian Citizenship.
If its not wiggling, store it in a linty woolen bag, until its time to eat it.
I love Lutefisk… It was a christmas treat - and Granpa’s name was Gunnar…
Regards
FML