Alessan, it could very well have been Netanya. Rings a bell.
That’s another example of what I love about Israeli culture. I mean, how cool is it that cats walk around downtown and have social lives in the city just like people? I love cats and it was just plain awesome that I got to meet all kinds of different cats just by hanging out in front of a restaurant. And sharing a meal with a cat is great–assuming you don’t end up eating cat food, of course.
My mother and grandmother love(d) Borscht - hot or cold… beet soup? yeech!
There used to be (and I presume still is) a quiet underground market for these sorts of things in Chicago. It helps to be friends with Polish butchers. 
At any rate, Chicago author Stuart Dybek has a rather good short story titled “Blood Soup” on this very topic (the semi-shady acquisition of duck’s blood for czernina) in his collection Childhood and Other Neighborhoods..
I don’t remember ever having eaten it, but I’ve only seen it served as a sweet soup, with prunes, sugar, that sort of thing.
As for borscht, my brother doesn’t like most Polish food, but he absolutely loves borscht. When we were up in Zakopane (a Polish ski town), you could get styrofoam cups of hot borscht just like you would get coffee or hot chocolate. (Polish borscht, barszcz, is a brothy rather than chunky concoction). Of course, it helps to love beets.
My mom’s meatloaf.
Here was her basic recipe: Fatty ground beef and salt. Bake it in a loaf pan until it was a hard, greasy yet dry lump. I grew up hating meat loaf with a passion, because I didn’t know it was supposed to be a completely different-tasting dish.
I think it was because she grew up in a time that adding a cereal product to meat smacked of the local butcher doctoring up the ground meat in order to cheat his customers, so she refused to add crumbs to the loaf. She was also from the midwest, and so eschewed any seasoning except salt.
When I got married, I found that my husband adored meat loaf and I decided to try to make it for him for the first time. That’s when I discovered that a properly made one tasted good and it has become a favorite of mine, too.
I actually liked Swiss steak; I haven’t had it (or thought of it really) in many years. Maybe it was relatively good compared to the other garbage I had to eat.
Nah. If you had mine, you’d still like it 
It’s a bit time-consuming and involved, but it is tasty.
Do you have a electronic copy of the recipe? I’ve never tried making dishes from my childhood, maybe I will start with swiss steak!
No, but here ya go:
1 and 1/2lbs. whatever boneless beef looks good this week, cut into medallions
1 sm. onion, diced
1lb. white mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
8oz. tomato sauce (canned is fine)
8oz. beef stock
Salt and pepper
Flour for dredging
Vegetable oil
Pound the beef medallions to death with meat mallet or marble rolling pin; season meat and flour with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a heavy skillet. Dredge flattened medallions in flour. Sear in oil for just about one minute on each side. Remove to Crock Pot and cover with tomato sauce and beef stock. Saute onion, mushrooms and garlic quickly in the same pan you browned the meat in. Add these to Crock Pot as well. Cook on low for 4 hours or high for 2 hours. I always serve this with garlic and cream cheese mashed potatoes.
Swiss steak? Time consuming? Involved? Nothing could be easier!
Chuck a big hunk of salt and pepperd round steak in a covered roasting pan or dutch oven. Cut up a bunch of celery and onions, chunk it in with the round steak. Dump in a couple of large cans of tomatoes (whole, diced, stewed- it’s up to you.). Add a couple of bay leaves, about a tomato can of water, salt and pepper, and a dash of kitchen bouquet. Cover and braise at 325F for an hour and a half. Remove the lid and continue cooking for about another 45 minutes. About 2 1/2 hours total. Fall apart tender, simple, easy, and tasty.
Thanks! I’m going to try it this weekend if I have time.
I agree that Swiss steak is another in the list of undesirable meat. Because in our house it was always made from an inedibly tough cut of meat. No doubt a means of economizing inherited from my grandmother’s Great Depression kitchen. I might have liked the flavor of massively sautéed onions otherwise, but onions were ruined for me by overuse in futile attempts to improve the shoe-leather taste of Swiss steak.
Speaking of which, I read that during the potato famine the Irish developed the habit of undercooking potatoes. If a potato wasn’t cooked all the way through, the hard center was called the “bone” and they left the potato-bone in on purpose. Call it “Irish al dente.” The reason: If it was hard to digest, the stomach would feel it had had enough after eating only a little. Starvation cuisine.
Yeah, the Depression sure put the kibosh on home cooking for a few decades, didn’t it?
Another nausea-inducing thing my mom made was “garbage soup”. Doesn’t the name of it just make your mouth water? Essentially, it was all the leftovers in the fridge dumped in one big pot with a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Leftovers in our house were bits and pieces of the remains of canned peas or creamed corn, plus scrapings off of chicken carcasses or congealed blobs of spaghetti. Good Lord, that stuff was godawful. It looked like vomit-in-a-pot.
I wonder if anyone has actually had Leftover Parfait?
‘It finally happened! The bottom layer is last week’s leftover parfait!’
I’m sorry, but that’s horrifying. And I’ll eat all KINDS of weird stuff - I love Tuna and peanut butter, which I’m afraid to say in person.
Joe
Then the steak wasn’t cooked correctly. Stop casting aspersions on a perfectly tasty and decent dish. A good swiss steak, or swissed steak, which may in fact refer to a tough round cut, and the meat processing and tenderizing technique that is used- Swissing, a mechanical pricking and needling of tough cuts to tenderize.
I tend to agree with this etymology, but it also has that amish feeling. Besides the process, could it also be of swiss recipe? Maybe it refers to a slow braising?
B.t.w., I’ve never had Swiss steak made with Swiss steak. I have only ever eaten Swiss Steak made with a 3-4lb. round steak, unadulterated. The tenderizing was al in the braise.
Strike the last…unfinished… newt
Then the steak wasn’t cooked correctly. Stop casting aspersions on a perfectly tasty and decent dish. A good swiss steak, or swissed steak, which may in fact refer to a tough round cut, and the meat processing and tenderizing technique that is used- Swissing, a mechanical pricking and needling of tough cuts to tenderize, is a smple and hearty dish, and quite delicious, no worse than a NY steak nutritionally, in fact, steak in the swiss style it is more nuritious than a garlic butter and mushroom slathered steak
I tend to agree with this wiki etymology, but it also has that Amish country feeling. Besides the process, could it also be of swiss recipe? Maybe it refers to a slow braising?
B.t.w., I’ve never had Swiss steak made with Swiss steak. I have only ever eaten Swiss Steak made with a 3-4lb. round steak, unadulterated. The tenderizing was all in the long and slow braise an the acidity of the tomatoes.
Or maybe this is all cultral and dilletante, Johanna. Pehaps in your city perspective–your soy, fish, and vegetarian and anti-cholesterol world you would look down?
Wha…?
In my house, it’s Leftover Soup. I might start with actual homemade soup, or I might start it with some leftover spaghetti sauce, which becomes Tomato-Beef soup, and then… as the week progresses, leftovers get dumped in. Vegetables, potato, whatever’s in the fridge, or even left over on my husband’s plate! :eek: (Hey, it gets boiled pretty throughly.) I try to keep in mind whether I’m still going in a chicken or a beef direction, but it’s all good for the pot.
Funnily enough, I’m the only one who eats it. And you sometimes, it’s really, really good! Unfortunately, each pot is entirely unique, and a deliciousness achieved cannot ever be duplicated exactly again, due to the varying nature of ingredients and quantities.
Tuna fish sandwiches with cheese.
Baked apples with diet soda.
Wheat germ on EVERYTHING.
Salad with canned peas and carrots.
Liver and onions.
I am so glad I no longer have to eat at my parent’s table.