When I was a child, my mother insisted that no bread could be served without butter on it. That was the right way to do things. My PB&J had butter, my ham and cheese sandwich had butter, my salami sandwiches had butter, my tomato and/or cucumber sandwiches had butter (and thankfully, mayo), and every school lunchpail sandwich I took to school, made by Mom, had butter on it somewhere.
I don’t have to consume butter on bread any more. And food tastes so much better.
My dad made baloney and butter sandwiches for an outing once when I was a kid. My mother usually prepped all the food, but for some reason he did it that one time. It was a memorably awful culinary experience that I hope never to repeat.
Not that I don’t like bread and butter - I do! But most of the time, if you are going to combine bread and butter, that should be it. Adding any third ingredient is asking for trouble.
Not even rainbow jimmies?
Yeah, what was it about butter? My Mom kept telling Sis and I what “lucky, lucky children” (her words) we were to live in a family that could afford butter. I never got it, and I still don’t.
When our son was born at a hospital in South Africa, there was a Dutch couple there whose son was born at the very same time. So they invited my husband and I to join them in a traditional Dutch celebratory treat of buttered bread topped with licorice-flavored jimmies. We wanted to be polite, and it certainly was a unique, memorable time for all of us, so my husband and I choked it down with feigned enthusiasm, and thanked the Dutch couple for sharing their tradition with us.
But it was AWFUL.
well at one time they gave the optional “drain all or almost all of the water out and add flavor packet and mix to preference” which is how I eat my noodles and drives everyone else nuts …
Actually thanks to my stepmom depression era parents I learned to like scrambled eggs with milk and bread toasted or not added
a depression and before era thing … poor people ate a thin spread of lard on their bread because they couldn’t afford butter …
Yep. My mum who was brought up in a poor household in the north of England, even after she wasn’t in those circumstances, would always save meat drippings and skim off the fat. If we were hungry and she was busy, we’d get a thick slice of brown bread, spread with lard or beef dripping, sprinkled with a little salt.
When she made pastry or biscuits it was usually half butter, half lard (it does yield very crisp baking)
In Polish cuisine, we have something similar called smalec (“lard/pork fat”) and in Hungary a standard old school pub drink accompaniment is zsiros kenyér (“fatty bread”). Now, with smalec, when served on bread, it is often doctored up with bits of pork like bacon and onion. My father would always save bacon grease or whatever kind of meaty fat (beef, chicken) and whatever bits and pieces of crackling/bacon/chicken skin he could get in a jar or ramekin and use that as a spread, adding raw onions and salt to it at that table. I loved the stuff. Here’s what a typical prepared smalec would look like:
I can actually buy the stuff at the local Polish supermarket.
In Hungary, the fat used is usually undoctored lard, in my experience, but similarly served with raw onions, a sprinkle of salt and paprika, and spread with chicken or goose liver if being a little fancy.
I just looked up the menu of an old, old-school watering hole I used to go to about twenty years ago, and it seems they still sell chicken liver “fatty bread,” so it hasn’t completely disappeared yet.
I might have to try that!
There’s also lardy cake, which is probably best described as what would happen if you made brioche using lard instead of butter. Usually topped with a sort of lard and sugar caramel.
I always thought of it as a British thing but I also found it in Spain, where the topping also included coarse brown sugar, mixed with crushed pork scratchings (the crispy rinds after the lard is rendered out)
American cuisine is oddly skittish about lard, in my experience. I recall being in a supermarket in New Jersey asking for lard and the guy looked at me like I had three heads. (And, no, I wasn’t in a Jewish or Muslim area. The place did sell pork.) However, I live in a neighborhood that is very Mexican with a sprinkling of Polish and next door to a more Polish population, so lard is alive and well here. You can get freshly rendered lard here, still semi-liquid and warm to the touch at the closest supermarket to me, which caters to the Mexican population.
I think some old schoolers may still use it for their pie crust or other pastry – which is where I think of lard being used most in the context of American cooking – but in modern American recipes, it’s largely been replaced with Crisco, which is a brand of vegetable shortening.
Fwiw, the brand of noodle matters. I don’t get congee, i get nice distinct noodles, they are just soft and taste deliciously of broth. And if i didn’t overcook the beans, the remaining broth stays clear. (I often overcook the beans and get muddy broth, but that’s definitely a bean issue, not a noodle issue.) I’ve never had a problem with the broth getting cloudy from noodles, it just gets sucked up and disappears.
My husband often cooks the noodles separately. He makes pasta e fagioli and serves a pot of soup, a pot of noodles, and a bowl of grated cheese. His noodles just tastes like noodles, not like broth. (And his broth is less clear than mine, because we use different beans and different cooking techniques.) He cooks them separately partly because it’s faster, and partly because he wants his soup to stay soupy.
There are certain foods that I prefer burned, including toast (black) and popcorn (bottom layer black). I also like my steak cooked Pittsburgh/Black & Blue.
Where I come from we call this “Scrabbled” eggs, not scrambled. That’s where you crack them into the pan and then scrabble them up, rather than whipping them with cream in a bowl before they hit the pan.
I like my scrambled eggs browned on both sides. And I never put an egg into a pan until the butter is lightly browned and has that good nutty scent to it. It tastes so much better that way. I’ll never understand people who like weepy runny eggs.
The same is basically true of all proteins; I want them thoroughly cooked. I want my steak to be juicy with clear juice, not red stuff. If you can’t manage that, slap some butter on it. My favorite way to eat any meat is stewed.
I like a lot of green pepper in my tomato sauce. I’m sure an Italian Grandma would feed it to the pigs, but I love it that way.
Not a huge fan of chili. It’s waayyy too much cumin for me. But if I have to eat it, I’d like some beans in it please.
I want ketchup on my hotdogs, and mustard on my hamburger. Both on both. Mind your business.
I only peel the very thinnest outer bits of the skin from citrus fruit. The whites are fine, leave them on. They have 90% of the fiber and vitamin C from the fruit. Why does everyone throw them out? People tell me they are bitter, but they’re not.
I peel the white off my orange, but them I’ll often scrape it off the colored part of the pork with my teeth and eat it separately. I like burnt toast, too, although i prefer it just before it burns. I didn’t understand pale warmed bread.
This just brought back a memory-- when my parents and I toasted marshmallows over the fire when I was a little kid, my mom liked to actually set her marshmallow on fire, let the outside blacken, then blow out the flame and eat it after it cooled. I tried it and actually acquired a taste for blackened marshmallow.
I didn’t do this with my kids, though. I think burnt, blackened food is not too great health-wise, so I taught my kids to keep the marshmallow far enough away from the fire, and keep turning so it gently browns all over but doesn’t catch fire.
Having been a Boy Scout, I prefer my bacon practically burned to a crisp. If it’s still not non-crispy parts it feels “raw”.
Just in case anyone here needed confirmation, I can provide it: everyone of you, every single one, is doing everything wrong. Without exception: the oil, the lard, the butter, the eggs in all their forms, the bread, the cooking and roasting temperature and duration, the soup and its consistency, the herbs, the seasonings, the milk (the horror!), the serials, the coffee, the tea, the gardner, the salad, the butler… in short, everything. Except pulykamell, he got the bit with the smalec almost right. And the Malort has me intrigued, that seems quite right too, wonder whether I will find it in Europe.
So keep it up.
I’ll be in the other thread minding my own business then.
I always thought setting marshmallows on fire till black was the norm. I never trusted those who meticulously lightly brown them over an open fire. That just ain’t right. Kick em out of the scouts!
Too much burned food may not be good for you (though the link between charred food and cancer is unproven), but there’s no problem with a little. In fact burned toast is good for indigestion.
I will warn you, the original Malort is one-dimensional, though I still enjoy it. It’s simply flavored with only wormwood, so don’t expect a sweet-and-bitter concoction like Unicum or Unterberg or anything like that. You can probably make something quite similar by macerating wormwood in vodka or grain alcohol (and then watering it down to the alcohol %age you desire for the latter). That’s why I like that Besk a bit more, as it adds other botanicals to the mix. That said, if you want a bitter flavoring agent, Malort would be good for that, as well.
Oh, I should have also left a recipe
https://kielbasastories.com/recipes/smalec-polish-lard-spread/
Apparently adding some apple to it is common, as well. My father never got that fancy. 
I kind of want to try it with apple now. The prepared smalec I get at the Polish store has everything but the apple, as well. I was there this morning, tempted to pick it up, but decided against it. Though I should have, as when I left the store, I remembered that my kids really like it on toasted bread, so I wouldn’t be the only one eating it. The apple-less version is also a good way to start recipes where you need some fat in the pan to fry some onions or whatnot. Adds a lot of extra flavors.
Yep, that’s me as an adult! There’s a perfect level of brown. Black is burnt and bitter (in a bad way for me), but a few flecks of black is okay and maybe even desirable, like on a Neapolitan pizza. But setting the thing on fire is a fail for me. As a kid, though, I loved setting them on fire and wasn’t so bothered.