Does your family have a schism, rift, or feud over any perticular food or dish? In my family it’s the infamous “Chicken n’ Dumplings or Chicken n’ Pastry?” standoff. One faction maintains that it’s only dumplings if you make actual dumplings to put in there. Otherwise it’s just chicken n’ pastry. Others maintain that it doesn’t matterif it is just strips of pastry, it’s the same recipe. Apparently this battle has raged out of my sight across the battlefield of the holidays to the point that no one ever brings their version of the dish to an event attended by the inlaws.
A less contentious battle is the macaroni and cheese issue. On side likes to bake the dish after topping it with cheese just to the point of a few scorch marks. Others hate this because then you have to remove the scorched areas instead of just diving in with a spoon.
So what culinary differences divide your family? I suspect that many of them revolve around the concept of “That’s Not How Mom Makes It.”
There’s a huge mayo vs. Miracle Whip divide in my family. It worked out well for me when my doctor put me on a gluten free diet: I didn’t have to worry about them getting crumbs from re-dipping the knigfe in my mayo.
I swore this would not happen but somehow, it did.
All three of my children put ketchup on their hot dogs. Early on, they picked it up from classmates and refuse to use mustard.
My wife doesn’t seem to think this is a big deal, but to me this is one step below not eating rice out of a bowl with chopsticks properly. (Which fortunately, they do.)
I pointed out that at several of the world’s best hot dog joints, as profiled on TV on the Food Network or the Travel Channel or something, did not allow mustard to be applied on their dogs inside the store - if you insist on using ketchup, they give you packets and send you packing. No dice.
Some people say they put ketchup on hot dogs “as a kid” and only learned to like mustard when they were older, but as for me, even as a kid I never liked hot dogs or bologna until I had some with mustard. Then I tried brown mustard and Dijon mustard, and that awful turmeric French’s yellow stuff wouldn’t cut the mustard with me any more either.
Me ex wife’s family is well-known in the gourmet food industry. They eat it and live it. If you want the rarest cheeses or the choicest meats or the freshest seafood, you look no further than their refrigerator because it is always better stocked than a specialty market.
However, they have no concept of how to cook American food. The first 4th of July of spent at their house, they said they were having a nice, normal cookout. I helped cook the hotdogs and hamburgers and brought them to the table. I went to make mine and realized that something was horribly wrong. There were no buns whatsoever. I assumed they forgot so I asked where they were and they looked confused and said they never used buns. They just used regular bread to eat hotdogs and hamburgers.
I had tried that before in a pinch and it is soggy, sloppy, nasty, and disgusting and I was having none of it. I got in my car and drove straight to the store and got hamburger and hotdog buns. They said they still didn’t understand the point. I always made sure to buy them from that point on as well because they never would.
I forgot to mention the BBQ. My dad is from North Carolina and when his nieces Texan husband got transferred to Fort Bragg, there were some… confrontations… on the nature of BBQ. But my family was in the majority so Mr. Paratrooper knew when to pick his battles.
My wife, whom I love dearly, was unfortunately raised in some horrifying and bizarre cult in which they place ketchup on pot roast instead of gravy as the Gods intended.
This strange affliction has carried over into her adult life and no attempts to alter the brainwashing have so far succeeded.
My husband and I have many opposing views on food, but they are non-issues, because we simply eat what we please. He doesn’t like vegetables, so I eat them and don’t cook him any.
My birth family was different. My father would make delicious macaroni and cheese, and every. damn. time. he would open a can of stewed tomatoes and dump them in. No amount of begging by me and my sister, or even trying to wrest the pan away from him, would get him to stop. We tried to get him to let us serve ourselves and then put tomatoes in his portion, but he just ruined the whole dish every time with watery, acid tomatoes.
He used to like to make stewed prunes for himself (for predictable reasons). His method was to put the prunes in a saucepan, add some water, sprinkle on some cinnamon, turn the stove on high, and walk away. I cannot calculate how many pans he destroyed (and the prunes along with them). I begged him to let me do it. But he’d just go out and buy another box of prunes and burn the shit out of another pan.
Coleslaw: I say no onions, he says onions
Coffee: I like mine strong, he likes it weak
Bread: I like the real deal, he only likes sliced white
Margarine/butter: I don’t use it, he does
Bacon/meat: I like mine rare, he likes it well done
Tomato sauce: he’ll put it on anything, including on the table at every meal, I take it straight back off
Vegetables: I like most things except carrots, the only veg he will eat are peas and carrots
Hot meals: he will only look at meat and three veg, I like pasta, risottos, curries, stir-frys, soups, salads
Cakes: he likes buns and dry pastries, I like gateaux
Lettuce: he like iceberg only, I like anything but iceberg
I do not cook for him since Greek Lamb-gate. I made slow cooked lamb in tomato, garlic, rosemary and lemon juice with feta polenta and greek salad. He was so adamant that meals must consist of meat and veg only that he scraped all the sauce off his lamb and picked out the cucumber from the salad. The polenta was a no-go zone. Prick.
That was three years ago and the most I have made for him since is a cup of tea. With spit in it.
As a newly wed, my brother told his wife that her sage and onion stuffing at Christmas wasn’t as good as Mum’s.
I think that was the last time he’s had sage and onion stuffing at Christmas. He was somewhat aghast at her solution that he make the Christmas dinner the following year. By the time he got married, he’d never made any dinner any more complex than beans on toast to my knowledge and from what I can tell, his culinary arts have not developed any in the twenty or so years since he’s been married. Because he still complains about the lack of proper sage and onion stuffing on his Christmas dinner plate. Though only to me, if I’m there.
He asked me to make it one year when I spent Christmas with them, but I told him that if he wasn’t prepared to learn, there was no point in me pissing off my sister in law for him. I did suggest that he ask Mum how to make it. But no. Wimminz work, you see.
