For instance, every holiday part of the dinner is a jello cheesecake dessert that doesn’t last too long on the table … funny thing is I’ve bought real cheesecake and no one cares for it now if it’s one of those chocolate or candy-flavored (like reses peanut butter cups ect) ones in a box next to the frozen pies that don’t mind as much ,
Another example is the “ham” salad recipe that a lot of great grandmas learned to make in ww2 via USDA rationing cookbooks
it’s your basic meat “salad” for sandwiches except for the original recipe calls for ham … well in the “mock” version you shred chunk bologna
it was made that way for so long that when i tried using the original ham recipie no one liked it …
Cranberry sauce. I hate the stuff my husband makes from scratch with whole cranberries but will happily eat the transparent stuff that’s shaped like the can it comes in.
I greatly prefer artificial wintergreen to natural wintergreen, though. My idea of “natural wintergreen” is chewing the leaves of wintergreen plants – which are delicious. But they also taste leafy and a little bitter. The artificial extract just tastes delicious.
That’s funny, I never knew about this but I recently went to Kroger and saw some “ham” salad along with the pre packaged potato salads, cole slaw, etc. and there was what I thought was ham salad. I looked at a little closer and it was “Sandwich Spread.” Even closer it said it was made with bologna.
I never knew this was a thing, but it must be common enough for a national grocery chain to carry a Bologna Salad pre made and not an actual Ham Salad.
My contribution, although I can’t stand it is that my wife and kids love a faux lasagna. Same basic concept except it involves sour cream and the canned biscuit dough. I don’t have many details since I once sat down for “lasagna” and was served this. I’m not usually a fan of sour cream and when it suddenly appears where it has no business it was a bit off setting. I don’t know the exact details, and don’t care to find them… I just know I ate it once and I’m done. They still eat it occasionally when the kids are home and I make a sandwich.
Huh, I don’t think I would have called a dish made with biscuit dough rather than lagena noodles “lasagna” (fake, or otherwise). I’d just have called it some sort of casserole. But it sounds good to me.
I haven’t had it in years but I grew up on and grew accustomed to the maple syrup-flavored commercial pancake syrups (Log Cabin, Aunt Jemima, Mrs Butterworth, etc.). So as an adult when I bought real maple syrup for a lot more money, I didn’t like it as much.
I don’t know if it quite qualifies as “imitation,” but I prefer the processed ground-up/emusified meat style of McDonald’s chicken nuggets to actual chicken nuggets made from just cuts of meat. I mean, I certainly don’t dislike Chick Fil A’s nuggets or the ones I make myself from thigh meat (McD’s were better when they were a mix of light & dark meat), but there’s just something about a McD’s chicken nugget that really scratches an itch.
There are many types of lasagna. The ricotta-based ones are associated with Southern Italy. The classic Bolognese-style (northern Italy) lasagna, for example, uses bechamel, and no ricotta, for the white layer, and fresh lasagna noodles made from regular wheat rather than the dried semolina-based pasta. (That’s my favorite style, and the style seen more often outside the US. From my understanding, Italian-American food is more heavily influenced by southern Italian cooking than in other parts of the world outside Italy, where it seems to more usually be northern Italian styles.) Other parts of Italy will use mozzarella, but probably not cheddar.
So you may not be straying all too far from the “real thing,” after all.
More a substitute than an imitation: is salad cream a uniquely British thing? Quick explanation just in case it is.
Before manufacturers figured out how to make mayonnaise in a jar viable, they cobbled together their best viable imitation and sold that instead for decades - salad cream. Subsequently the mayonnaise-in-a-jar nut has been cracked, but salad cream won’t go away. It has a pleasingly cheap taste that offsets some of the virtue of the salad. Great with chips too!
Furthermore, I generally prefer (canola oil) margarine to butter; the taste is about the same to me, but the margarine is cheaper and easier to spread right out of the fridge.
Slow roasted and shredded pork shoulder, smothered in commercial BBQ sauce and served on a hoagie bun with sliced onions and slaw is actually tastier to me than most ‘real’ BBQ not to mention being greatly easier and cheaper to make at home
never done that, but during chemo i ended up with odd food cravings, but sour cream revolted me so I ended up with chunks of avocado topped with salsa and a dollop of mayo [mixed together into sort of faux guacamole, I guess] that is still after chemo surprisingly tasty.
Anybody else like fried spam on white with lettuce and mayo? Or just plain bread and mayo? Though I do like miracle whip interchangeably with standard mayo, even on something as simple as sliced beefsteak tomatoes.
[ok i am weird, I also like a dab of splenda and half sharp paprika on cottage cheese … sort of an almost sweet paprika icecream substitute ]
I like maple syrup, but I adore butter. And I dislike canola oil enough that I stopped eating some pepperidge farms cookies because they tasted like nasty canola oil. (That was when removing tropical fats was first a thing, so partly I tasted the absence of yummy tropical fats. But i also tasted the distinctive unpleasant flavor of canola.) I actually wrote to the manufacturer to complain, and I doubt I was the only one, as they switched to less nasty oils shortly thereafter.
