This also perplexes people who read or watch Shakespeare and interpret the references to corn incorrectly.
“Cereal” sounds like something you eat with milk and sugar for breakfast, whether cold or hot (e.g., corn flakes or oatmeal).
That was a marketing coup from Kellogg’s. Cereal means a grass cultivated for its edible grain. And breakfast cereals are indeed made of cereals.
ETA: With lots of sugar, and some other stuff too.
They had those at a work banquet I attended, and I asked one of the waiters if I could have an unopened one to take home – they were seriously cute! He brought me like 12 of them.
With all of their improvements to MREs over the years to include adding many ethnic meals and flavors, the one thing they can’t master is breakfast. The omelet with ham was universally reviled.
There were also T-rations. Large trays off food heated in immersion heaters. Mostly I would prefer a MRE to a T-rat. Again the breakfasts were awful.
duplicate.
Cost Plus World Market has 6 packs of mini-bottles back in the “World Food” section. Plus Amazon, of course. The problem with those bottles (and the sachets, too) is that they don’t hold enough. When I put hot sauce on something to mask the taste, I want a lot of it and my resistance to hot has only increased over the years.
Besides breakfast* the other thing Natwick can’t master is pizza. The MRE “Pizza Slice” meals are universally reviled.
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- Of course, other countries just include muesli or porridge or sweet biscuits and condensed milk and call it good.
MRE pizza was always promised but they didn’t deliver until after I got out. Never had a chance to taste it.
Although several meals were decent, the chili mac MRE remained the best.
Chili Mac is hard to fuck up. Even Boy Scouts can master that recipe. Still needs Tabasco though.
MRE Pizza is hard to describe. A dense slice of bad bread smeared with preservatives (now with new fake tomato taste!) and spotted with the Government Cheese they didn’t pawn off on the Poors back in the 70s. Granted it’s a far reach to make ration-friendly pizza, but what we’ve got is just pathetic.
IIRC the chili mac came with a packet of hot pepper flakes which made it spicy enough.
They give those little bottles out as freebees at the Tabasco Museum on Avery Island. When I was there they were offloading bags of them from a cancelled shipment to the Middle East.
By 1940, spaghetti was a pretty common dish found throughout much of the United States. Chef Boyardee started selling their canned spaghetti in the 1920s and was cranking them out for Uncle Sam during World War II. My grandmother was a WAC and was in Europe following the D-Day invasion. For one reason or another, the only rations her WAC unit had available for a week or two was spaghetti. Once she got out of the Army she refused to eat spaghetti for the rest of her life.
If I remember right, the specification they issued when they were looking for someone to make the D rations was that it shouldn’t be any more tasty than a boiled potato, so that the troops wouldn’t be tempted to eat it as if it was candy outside of combat.
Fun fact: The Tootsie Roll was invented as the first attempt at that, but failed because it was too tasty (and so troops would raid the emergency stores before an emergency).
my dad called Mres “meals rejected by everyone”
he ran the Fort Ord chow hall for about 2 years in the early 70s and became noted for his ability to procure fresh ingredients from the local farmers since people liked the food no one looked too closely on what he was doing
Apparently, he sent several film roll containers of seeds from Vietnam, Thailand, and other places. He started a grow room in his and my mom’s basement in seaside and although it was mostly for his and his friends’ personal use if a farm had surplus eggs hed trade a bag or two for them …
it all ended when the war ended and they clamped down on such shenanigans… or attempted to anyways
The same is true for “biscuits” and “cookies.” You’ve probably heard the story about the Brits who ordered “biscuits with sausage gravy” for breakfast while on holiday in America, just to see how ghastly a concoction it was.
Turned out it was quite nice:
Biscuits and Sausage Gravy Recipe: How to Make It (tasteofhome.com)
I was eating in a Latvian restaurant once when some American tourists ordered “Mushrooms Julienne,” thinking it was a kind of salad with thinly sliced mushrooms. They were unpleasantly surprised to find it was chopped mushrooms baked in a sour cream sauce.
I had to convince them to give it a try, since it really is delicious.
(Maybe this was a joke, but according to Wikipedia the Tootsie Roll was invented in 1907.)
I think you’re right about 1907, but Tootsies are good for emergency rations due to their high sugar content. In the Korean war, there was a winter battle where the allies were being supplied by air. The code word for ammunition was “Tootsie Roll.” But when someone asked for more ammo, someone at the other end of the message misunderstood and sent a load of tootsie rolls. They were still welcome, though, because the high calorie content helped keep them warm in the freezing weather.
My dad was in the navy during WWII. He was in UDT-11 which was driven around the Pacific on the USS Kline. In the history of UDT-11 they say
Before leaving Maui, a get-to-gether was arranged for the two outfits
to get acquainted. For the men there was a beer party and picnic with lots of beer and hamburgers, for the officers a cocktail party and chicken dinner. From the first meeting, each unit has had a liking and respect for the other.
When I was a kid my mother became disabled so dad did a lot of cooking, We’d have shit on a shingle at least once a month, and SPAM fairly often as well.
Tootsie rolls and charms were the first brand name candy in MREs. Both awful. When Skittles were added they became a big trading commodity.