We were swanky…we went to Red Lobster with my grandparents every Friday night!
My parents came from fairly white bread backgrounds, but branched out as adults. (Although my dad had to teach my mom to share chinese food.)
We had some white bread foods, like tuna noodle casserole, but that was when money was tight.
My mom loved to cook. She made curries, cassoulets, all sorts of vegetables, and other stuff that has slipped my mind at the moment. She also gave me my deep love of escargot. (Sauteed in garlic butter with a baguette for dipping–yum!)
Christmas dinner was roast beef, yorkshire pudding or popovers, and artichokes with hollandaise sauce. Her hollandaise was so good I can’t eat the stuff made in restaurants. I think her secret was adding a little extra lemon juice to the recipe, which gave it a little tanginess. Her dirty secret was that she made it in the microwave. “Double boiler? Pffft! Unecessary. And less to clean.” Yes, that is a quote. Everyone who tried the hollandaise loved it.
And it took me a long time to get used to what most restaurants call a Caesar Salad. She made it the old-fashioned way, raw egg, anchovies and all.
Is it any wonder I really enjoy good food as an adult?
Whoops. I’m 35, grew up in and around Boston.
We not only drank Tang, but mom tucked a pop tart and a Space Food Stick in our white bread lunch every day. And we had every hope that eating Space Food Sticks would somehow give us the energy we needed to become astronauts ourselves!
Damn you. I had successfully erased both these meals from my memory banks until now.
A couple of the posts above bring back memories of having sugar sandwiches (one piece of white bread toasted, margarine spread on it, and then liberally pour sugar onto it, and finally fold the piece of bread in half, sugar inside the bend of course) and drinking Tang while listening to the news of the space program.
I grew up in Cleveland, graduated from high school in 1980, and yet managed to totally miss the bagel bandwagon until college (oddly enough, my college was in a much more ‘white bread’ part of Ohio, too). I was in line at the cafeteria, where it so happened the full breakfast came with your choice of either toast, an English muffin or a bagel. I’d never even heard the word ‘bagel’ until the serving person asked the guy in front of me which one of those choices he wanted. Fortunately for me he wanted the bagel, so I actually got to see one, too. 
Cleveland is quite ethnically diverse, but at least at the time I grew up, people tended to separate themselves into their own ethnic enclaves, so if you never made it over to certain parts of town, there was stuff you missed out on.
I love bagels now - onion is my favorite.
I grew up in the '50s in New Jersey. Yes, it’s just across the river from NYC, the American Mecca of bagelry. We never went there. My family was from the Philadelphia area, so we knew about Tastykakes and scrapple. And real sticky buns.
I remember coming home from elementary school one day, telling my mom there was a new girl in our school, and she was colored. My mom, bless her, told me very directly and sternly, “Don’t you ever forget that no matter what color her skin is, that girl is just like you on the inside.”
There may have been Jewish folks in our little town; if so, I didn’t know about them. My older sister met Jewish girls when she started college, though.
Yeah, we were pretty “white-bread.”
Do you mean Mitch Miller?
Wow… this is truly a frightening thread.
I just thought my family was “white bread”. Now I know that we were some variant on whole grain wheat bread!
I grew up eating fairly white-bread stuff, at least for Gulf Coast Texas, although by some of your standards, it’s inexcusably adventurous.
Pork chops, cream gravy, rice, collard greens, etc… and my grandfather would make gumbo on occasion if he and I had a successful fishing/crabbing trip. We also boiled crabs in Zatarain’s crab boil on the same occasions.
The part of Houston I grew up in became a heavily Asian (primarily Vietnamese & Chinese) part of town while I was still in elementary school. We always had top notch Asian food for as long as I can remember.
Mexican food was always an option if we went out to eat- my first memory of eating out at a restaraunt was at a Monterey House on Bissonnet in Houston in about 1976 or so.
My Aunt was more or less a gourmet, and frequently treated me and my brother to lunches at exotic(for a kid) places in Houston.
We did have some White Bread tendencies however. I never had smoked salmon until I was in high school. I didn’t eat sauerkraut until I was in college (parents loved it; I thought it smelled like ass, and wouldn’t eat it). and the capper, our cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving and Christmas still has the can ridges in it!
Another question from a Brit… Is this “miracle Whip” the thing that we call “Salad cream?”
Well, of course! How else would you know where to cut the slices? 
We grew up so “white-bread” that when our community actually had a black family move in and the kids go to our grade school everyone considered it a great novelty. All the kids and all the families wanted to know them and be their friends so they could tell their relatives and friends how avant-guarde they were because they actually knew someone who was black and was actually friends with them.
I remember bragging to my cousin “yeah, I have a black friend at school. He’s really cool.” Therefore I was really cool.
Both are tasty!
Space Food Sticks! My mom had to stop buying them because I’d eat so many in a sitting. I miss those things.
This thread is giving me a craving for Marlene Hollander casserole (named, of course, after the woman at church who gave Mom the recipe). It’s just layers of egg noodles, hamburger, tomatoes and mushroom soup, with a little parmesan on top.
41, raised in Iowa. (Pork, incidentally, goes with everything.)
Hampshire reminds me that I come from such a white-bread place, that I had never seen a black person until 1973, when a policeman and his family moved there.
I don’t know the correct term for the opposite of white bread, but when a Black co-worker went to New Hampshire, she called me and asked “Why didn’t you tell me there’s no n****** up here?”
In terms of food (honestly, even our canned jellied cranberry sauce appears next to Mom’s homemade whole berry relish), we enjoyed many of these “white bread” foods, but also lots of adventurous ethnic cuisine, including Italian, Mexican, Chinese, German, Polish. My mom is a great cook, and not afraid to try new things. Her attempt at “ham balls”, however, will live in infamy. Not even the dog would eat those nasty things.
But in terms of white/black demographics, we were even worse. I was born in 1974. In my high school, in the four years I was there(graduated in 1992), there were 2 black students in a school of 2500 - none at all in my class. One had been adopted as an infant by a white family. Only one came from a black family who actually lived in town. There were quite a few “Asians”, but no one of any of the Latino flavors that I knew of.
And I grew up less than an hour away from Chicago!
We thought they were the last word in cool. Now that I think back on them, they really tasted like shit (and I have no idea what they were made of, either) but the nostalgia factor is through the roof!
I’m 28.
My family is so white bread that when I discovered bagels at a friend’s house at age 12, my mom had to ask me what they were. (I think she knew, but she needed to be reminded.)
We had chicken or beef with potatoes pretty much every night.
We never ate spaghetti. Or any other pasta, unless it came in “sidekick” format or “Kraft Dinner” format.
Kraft Dinner (Mac & Cheese to you Americans) was often a side dish.
Ketchup was, and still is, a favourite condiment.
I am so unused to spicy food that I dislike mild chicken wings and find medium ones uncomfortably hot.