Many years ago, Kraft made the same kind of kit for “Italian Spaghetti.” A box with some spaghetti, a can of sauce, and a packet of Kraft Parmesan cheese. No kidding–a kit for this!
Anyway, my mother would buy it, and we’d all eat it. It was good, but no better than you could do with spaghetti, sauce, and cheese bought separately. But Mom knew that any Kraft product wouldn’t be too spicy, and would be unlikely to cause us kids any upsets. You just never know about that ethnic food, after all.
Is it any wonder that today, I love spicy and savoury cuisines from around the world? Thai, Szechuan, Mexican, Greek, Italian (real Italian, unlike Kraft’s version), Spanish–bring 'em on. Load on the cilantro, the garlic, the chilis, the soy sauce, and so on, and let’s eat!
Yeah! The first time I saw a bagel was at the house of a girl I went to school with. I was like 10. I’d stayed overnight and her mom had these doughnut-shaped things spread very thickly with what I thought was butter for breakfast. I started to scrape the stuff off and her mom goes, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t like this much butter.”
She goes, “That’s not butter, it’s cream cheese; don’t you know what a *bagel * is?” I was like, “No, we eat toast at my house.”
Her mom snorted nastily. I just kind of chalked it up to kids of divorced single moms living in apartments and their *outre * tastes.
My would never have even attempted to make a pizza. But we did often have “yoxamosh”, apparently Wisconcin’s version of “hot dish”. It was pretty good, actually, essentially a home-made hamburger helper type meal, with noodles.
Hrmph. Provel may not legally be ‘cheese’ but damn it’s good. But it is the best on pizza when mixed with mozzarella. Me = from St. Louis and worked at Imo’s on and off for 5 years. It’s made with cheddar, swiss and provolone. Y’all just don’t know what’s up. We’ve had people come in to Imo’s that had moved to other places and were back visiting to get some pizza because they missed the old provel. It’s a regional thing - if I was born in NY or Chicago I’d feel quite differently.
My family meals weren’t too bad…not diverse because my father is extremely picky and I am too - but at least I will try stuff. We basically just had a lot of steak, chicken, burgers, pork chops, spedini, roast, etc with fries, mashed, or baked, garlic bread with PROVEL ‘CHEESE’ and stuff. Nothing exciting, but we ate bagles and got to pick between mayo and miracle whip (which I prefer). We ate tacos, sloppy joes, pasta, shrimp, filets, pb&j. All regular stuff to me. I ate chinese and stuff at friends’ houses because my parents don’t like it. My mom and I would go out for Italian when we weren’t with my dad (seriously the man only eats meat and potatoes. And frosted cheerios). We’d go out for seafood, local pizza. I didn’t get a lot of diversity (now that I am older I see my dad has food issues from childhood) but I don’t think we were ‘white bread’ either really. The only thing that was weird is that I didn’t eat eggs until I was in the fifth grade - my mom never offered to make them because she HATES the smell - a friend served me up some scrambled at her house when I was 10 and was appalled I hadn’t eaten them. When I discovered I loved eggs, mom got over the smell.
The only signature dish I remember growing up was spaghetti. Mom made it with a can of Contadina tomato paste mixed with water & oregano. She always neglected to stir the spaghetti as it was boiling so about half the spaghetti was in the form of large stuck-together clumps.
Yum! I loved it. There’s not a lick of Italian in our family, either.
This is what we mean when we say “white bread,” except poor kids don’t get the Wonder Bread brand. You get the yuckier store brand which is never as soft & white & yummy.
Doritos are exotic. Ritz are ritzy. The only casserole topping is saltine crumbs dotted with margarine.
The only rice was eaten as a hot breakfast cereal, with milk and sugar. All Chinese food, even La Choy was out.
All cooked vegetables are boiled, either with a bit of margarine or a piece of bacon added for flavor, and you can tell they are done when they change color. All vegetables came from a can, except corn on the cob and those you ate raw, namely celery, lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots. Onions are a flavoring to be used sparingly.
“yoxamosh” is a nearly exact phonetic rendering of the Polish “Jak sie masz?”, literally, “How are you?” There are bunches of Polish Americans in Wisconsin. Are your relations among them?
My mom made great strides over the years in overcoming the cuisine and palate of a 30’s and 40’s Nebraska childhood, given a tight budget, the grocery and restaurant limitations of a small midwestern city, and my fathers reluctance. On the other hand, when I was growing up, my father would complain if any of us put ketchup on our hamburgers or used steak sauce.
Still, there was plenty of green bean casserole and the like at larger family gatherings. (Complete recipe: a bunch of green beans and a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup topped with crumbled potato chips and baked until hot.) Not to mention that acme of the Lake Wobegon culinary arts, hamburger hotdish.
I well remember the pizza kits in a box Auntie Pam mentioned. We thought it was such a treat and so much fun to make on a Saturday night. In retrospect, it was pretty crappy pizza.
My Mom still say spaghetti is too much trouble. She only made it when it was requested for birthday meals. She won’t even make mac and cheese because it’s “so hard”. My Mom went wild sometimes, she’d open a can of chilli and melt a piece of American cheese in it. We didn’t get those fancy casserole things, it was too much trouble. Everything was fried in a skillet with cream of mushroom gravy dumped over it. Even our potatoes came out of a can or from an instant ready to mix bag. I honestly didn’t realize you could buy potatoes until I got married and moved out on my own.
While at university, I went to a fellow-student’s parents’ house for the weekend. We were both recent ardent converts to vegetarianism. The parents fitted into the ‘white bread’ description.
Friend has a brainwave: “I know - let’s cook them a vegetarian lasagne for Sunday lunch”.
(Subtitle: Let’s show them what real food tastes like").
We went shopping on the Saturday afternoon. It was a mad enough scrabble for the ingredients as it was, in that part of the country. To quote another friend from the same region: “I never saw an aubergine (eggplant) till I went to university”.
On Sunday morning, we set to work. We hadn’t bought garlic, either due to an oversight or on the deluded assumption that every pantry has some garlic in stock.
The corner shop was no help. This was in the days before Sunday trading so the supermarket was closed. The neighbours were not much good either, until one produced a small jar of “garlic powder” that had lurked unused in her pantry for ages, probably as part of a spice rack she’d been given for her wedding in the late 1950s. With no better offers forthcoming, we had to make do with it.
Friend’s mum was a star. She was the one who went door to door in search of garlic on a frosty Sunday morning. She also bravely tried the less-than-tasty “exotic” dish we had created, but dad wasn’t having any of it. Poor Mum set to work and made him a quick ‘fry up’.
My mom had a pretty white-bread childhood growing up on a farm in the 40’s and 50’s, but then went off overseas and married herself a foreigner! A foreigner with a beard! A foreigner who cooked! And then they bought a house in Massachusetts next to actual Eye-talians! By the time I was growing up my folks were suburban radicals, stocking a full spice rack, making their own sauces and cooking things you could smell before you opened the door.
The closest white-bread story I have is via my father: he said the one time he’d threatened to leave my mom was when they were still dating and she cooked tuna-noodle casserole with potato-chip crust.
Back in the 1950s my parents discovered Mexican food. I’ve forgotten the name of the place, but it was “family owned” and, IIRC, there were several of them in Dallas. In the small Texas town where we lived, my parents were considered rather adventuresome for eating Mexican food. Other than Mexican food, they were about as adventuresome as clams, foodwise. If they hadn’t been eating it for years, they wouldn’t eat it at all. I was in high school before I ever tasted cauliflower; I was in college before I ever tasted eggplant. I’m 66, for those who wanted age information.
I never tasted a bagel until I was in my 30s, or real garlic until I was in my 40s!
The most “ethnic” food we got was a) spaghetti, made with a packet of sauce mix, tomato paste and water added to ground beef, and b) Kraft Pizza In A Box, maybe twice. Mind you, this was in a little town in the middle of nowhere, in the '60s, before you could get a pizza everywhere. No food from any other culture came into our house. Our vegetable situation was about the same as lee’s. They all came from a can, except tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, corn on the cob, carrots and celery. Chicken Rice-A-Roni was a staple. I also never had a taco until I was in my 40s!
Now, my mom was a pretty good cook, but unadventurous. She made a lot of things that were really good, but it was really white bread food. We were spared casseroles and anything with cream of mushroom soup, or anything topped with crackers or melted process cheese. I am so used to the flavor of Miracle Whip that I can’t even eat mayonnaise. When I first tasted it, I thought it was gross. I only have two uses for MW, though - on BLTs and in potato salad.
My wife’s story is a whole different kettle of fish. Her mother was so inept in the kitchen, she never ate good food until she married me! I turned her on to onions, fercryinoutloud! And salt and pepper on food!
I grew up in the US, Mid-Atlantic area, early-to mid 70s. I graduated from high school in '82. To add another bit to this, I didn’t go to school with black kids till I was in high school, and not with any other ethic groups (Asian, Jewish, Hiapanic, etc.) will college. That’s how freaking white bread my upbringing was.
The only vegetables we ate were Green Giant canned Niblets (corn), and LeSeur peas.
Although we did order chinese take-out, never once did the order vary. Egg rolls, chicken chow mein, sweet and sour pork, almond cookies. And we never ate the rice. We did always put it in the fridge with the leftovers, but always threw it out untouched two weeks later.
My sister and I now are both rather adveturous in food choices, and have been known to tease our mom by quoting Marge Simpson. “Ore-GAH-no? What the…?”
My father was another oldsmobilian. Our lawn was cared for better than most burn victims. So I gots the white-bred street cred.
Actually, I was raised half white-bread and half white-trash. Luckily, it was in the DC metro area, so there was diversity. I remember a jewish friend of mine who stayed over one night. Previously, his mom had been incredulous that my mom ate grits. Because, ohmygawd that’s, like, such a hick thing. So we took a picture of the kid downing a big spoonful of it for her benefit.
It wasn’t until college that I discovered that Chicken Cordon Bleu is baked, not fried into submission. “What the hell is wrong with this chicken? It’s all light and flaky, not hard and greasy.”
It’s made with cheddar, swiss and provolone. Y’all just don’t know what’s up. We’ve had people come in to Imo’s that had moved to other places and were back visiting to get some pizza because they missed the old provel. It’s a regional thing - if I was born in NY or Chicago I’d feel quite differently.