My family was so White Bread that......

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

Stack of white bread on the table, check… I used to take four slices of that crap, nibble the crusts off the stack all the way around, then smash the inside flat, fold it, smash it again and fold it into fourths, then eat the doughy blob as though it were food. My teen rebellion began by using my allowance to buy Oroweat Wheat Berry bread…

No butter, Imperial margarine.

Kraft mac & cheese and a diet RC cola for snacks. Mmmmm, cyclamates!

Tuna casserole with potato chips, check.

All vegetables come frozen in a cube, except salad. Salad is chunks of iceberg lettuce, a tomato wedge and some cucumber if you were lucky. Good Seasons Italian dressing drenching it.

Pizza in a box, check.

Jello vegetable traps, check. Especially orange with shredded carrots and raisins, shudder!

Space Food Sticks are evil but they can be thrown down a storm drain on the way home from school pretty easily, since it’s impossible to convince Mom not to include them in the first place.

Pizza = Shakey’s.

Everything that wasn’t fried in margarine or lard was fried in leftover bacon fat–a large jar of which was always in the fridge.

Tuna salad was oil packed tuna, shitloads of mayo and sweet pickle relish. Ghagh! If you’re REALLY lucky it’s also got hard boiled egg and black olive in there…

Meatloaf. Hamburger, ketchup.

It wasn’t all bad, though–chili had spice in it, as did tacos. Spaghetti was chunky and even though the parmesan came out of a green canister it was there. Can’t mess up broiled lamb chops, and sure wish I could go back in time and pick up a shitload of those at what? ten cents a pound? We come from Southern stock so we’re all from gravy culture–and if you’re gonna be a determined carnivore, gravy makes it all worthwhile. Mom made awesome oatmeal raisin cookies.

Then I went off and married a vegetarian who explained that iceberg lettuce is Satan and any salad with fewer than 12 ingredients in it (minus the dressing) wasn’t worth bothering with. Then he showed me the magical health food store with the live culture kefir, the fresh ground peanut butter (without sugar! Gasp!) the honey ice cream, the sharp cheese sandwiches with sprouts and avocado and such like. It was a quick slide to ethnic food land, garlic everything and a front yard landscaped in herbs from there!

And yeah, Dad had an Olds but it was a 442 and I wish I had it now!

82

Well, we weren’t exactly white bread since my mother hated white bread and would only buy wheat. She called white bread “New Guinea clay” and to this day I have no idea what the hell that means.

Let’s see:

Tuna casserole every Friday. I love it, though.

Fried bologna sandwich with the little wedge cut out and served on buttered bread.

Pizza from a Chef Boyardee box.
For some Appalachia cooking:

Rice made with cinnamon and sugar and served as a side.

Cornbread served with butter and syrup.

Fried mush with butter and syrup.

Bean soup with catsup in it. (Actually, this works pretty well for navy beans, so I’m not knocking it.)

Green beans with ham bones. (Ick.)

Green beans and potatoes with ham bones. (Ick ick.)

83

Yes, but did Mom bother to shape it into a loaf, or did she leave it in the exact shape it held when she dumped it out of the styrofoam tray? :smiley:

84

(emphasis mine)

I fail to see how this is relevant. You could have been eating chitlins off of Queen Elizabeth’s wedding china and it still would have been white trashy. I mean, they’re chitlins. :smiley: :wink:

85

As I recall, at first she really tried to do what she could with the crap… I guess we were going through a spell where the household budget was a bit tight and we saw a LOT of meatloaf. So much so that Mom got a tad desperate and started throwing whatever crap she could on top to make it “different.” I distinctly recall the day when my dad picked up what looked like meat lump with dandruff (turned out she’d sprinkled the unfortunate item with poultry seasoning) threw it away and yelled that he never wanted to see crap like that on the table again. I felt bad for Mom, but I can’t say I was overly upset about the Meatloaf Manifesto itself… Upside was that Dad kicked down for a bit more grocery money and it was a darned long time before I had to contend with THAT again!

I had a terrible flashback when husband #2 accepted an invitation to dinner with his dad and step mom. We sat down–to plain hamburger meatloaf with ketchup, plain white rice (no butter in the house, no garlic salt, no dill weed–I was trying, dammit!) and mixed vegetables (the worst!) from a frozen cube. Iceberg lettuce salad (JUST the lettuce, mind you!) drenched in bottled French dressing. No salt or pepper on the table. No spices in the kitchen. I picked at it as best I could, but on the way home I absolutely INSISTED we stop by Tommy’s for a chiliburger to take the taste (or more accurately, the lack thereof) out of my mouth…

Now when I make meatloaf, it doesn’t have hamburger in it at all (unless I can score some ground buffalo)–I use ground turkey, pork, chicken and italian sausage for mine, and no way am I gonna put ketchup all over it…

86

I had a half white-bread childhood.

Mom and Dad grew up in the same town, and I think were both pretty white-bread when they met.

Then Pearl Harbor happened and Dad went off to show Hitler a thing or two. The troop ships moved pretty slowly, and the apparntly lived on spam and bread made from weevle infested flour.

He spent a lot of time cleaning up Italy after the Germans were routed, and then on to North Africa. And he tried and learned to love every exotic dish he could find. Which was still a little white-bread, cause things were scarce following the occupation.

But mom stayed totally whitebread. Thus my dad was forced to learn to cook…but mom still cooked on weekdays.

Mom didn’t beleave in using ANY spices, salt included. One thing she made that I dearly loved was scallped potatos with leftover ham cooked in. The ham added enough salt and smoke flavor that it was one of two things she ever made that tasted at all, much less tasted good. The other was apple pie beyond compare, which also got the needed spices for some unknown reason.

I was the kid that thought the school lunches were good…well for a weekday anyway, and why would you want to go to school on weekends?

As a result of my upbringing, I can and do eat darn near anything…even parsley

43 YO. (parents had me VERY late in life)

87

This thread, especially the bagel stories, really reminds me of whne I went to Japan.
I bought a ‘bagel’ at 7-11 (they are everywhere) and opened the package and discovered it was essentially a soft dinner roll with a hole in it with a thin line of a sweet chocolate cream drawn around the inside. “What the fuck is this?” came out of my mouth. I really wanted a bagel that morning.

88

Come to South Korea. There’s a very popular fast food here called 토스트 (toast). Essentially, it’s a fried egg sandwich. The common things in all the varieties are:

  • The white bread is toasted in a ban greased with butter.
  • The egg is fried inside a little metal square that is exactly the size of the bread.
  • The sauce is a certain mix of fruit jellies (each chain of these restaurants has their own special mix).
  • Piece of ham (which I specifically inform the cook to not include in my orders).
  • Most varieties also have a piece of cheese on top of the egg.

Now, I would never have thought of putting jelly on a grilled cheese sandwich. To my surprise, it’s delicious. I’m now addicted to them. Here’s a link to one chain’s website.

89

Bryson also relates that ordering wine in any Aussie pub at that time was grounds for bodily assault. (Australia had at that time been producing wine for most of the century, although really good wine was still a few decades in the future.)

90

I am whitebread central: 39yo, born and raised in Utah. I grew up on Miracle Whip, tuna casserole with potato chip topping, spaghetti w/cheddar cheese (still like it that way), and just about every other abomination mentioned in this thread. Mormons, I’ve found, have a real flair for scary food (though I’ve found that here in Ohio Amish “food” is much the same).

I do need to add “garlic” bread: Toasted white bread with margarine and McCormick’s Garlic Salt sprinkled on top. I didn’t know that garlic came in little white cloves until I was well into my 20s.

My mother also made an odd casserole that featured corn tortillas and peanut butter. Years later, when I lived in SoCal, I figured out that it was the Mormon bastardization of Mexican mole!

91

Damn! Seems I grew up whitebread and didn’t even know it! :smiley:

Growing up in Scotland, a lot of the items posted on this thread as unbelievably bland were just sooo exotic. Pizza I first tasted in my teens, same with spaghetti (unless you count the stuff out of a tin), Indian foods, most Chinese foods, meatloaf (tasted it once and loathed it - is it supposed to be made with ketchup?)…pretty much everything I eat now I didn’t eat as a child in fact.

Salads were chunks of lettuce, tomatoes, radish and cucumber. All laid out separately on a plate with no dressing whatsoever. Casseroles were unheard of. Noodles? Whoah! Vegetables had to be boiled into submission. Most meals were meat and two veg type with no spices. All food was plain. Just try eating minced beef cooked slowly for two hours in nothing more than an Oxo cube without loathing it. Then repeat weekly.

To be fair, mum did try a few exotic dishes but she never really got that whole ethnic cooking thing. So stir-fry would come in sodden lumps oil-encased veggies and curries would have extra fruit added to sweeten them. I think she was confusing sweet and sour with curry there. On the plus side she was pretty damn good at proper sunday roasts and she did make killer mac n cheese - to this day I disdain to eat processed mac n cheese since she taught me how to make it properly and it tastes so much better. :slight_smile:

92

One of the dinners my mom often made was “goulash,” i.e., elbow macaroni, ground beef, and condensed tomato soup. My parents thought I was insane when I got a bit older and started adding to my portion the only spice available to me, garlic salt. Other common meals: Tater tot cassarole (tater tots, ground beef, cream of chicken soup, and american cheese), which is actually kind of tasty if I’m in a comfort food sort of mood, unnamed cassarole consisting of ground beef, egg noodles, and cream of chicken soup, and “slop,” a slice of bread covered in mashed potatoes which is then covered with ground beef, mixed with brown gravy. My childhood had a definite ground beef theme.

A few years ago, I made stuffed mushrooms to bring to Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house. My aunt had one and proclaimed their deliciousness and asked for the recipe. When I mentioned garlic, she said, “what, like garlic salt?” and I said, “no, fresh garlic, crushed,” she exclaimed, “wow! gourmet!”

93

HEnce the credence given to the BBC’s documentary on spaghetti trees

94

/Hijack

Man, I miss Shakey’s pizza. The player piano, the ambiance…

/Hijack
Not only were we whitebread, but my relatives seemed to suffer from the condiment tray served at every meal. You know the olives, sliced pickles, pickled herring, candied(?) beets and watermelon rind, and other strange miscellaneous condiments. Spaghetti, Swedish meatballs, tacos, goulash, steak, chicken, didn’t matter, all was served with a side of condiments. And, seeing that the plate never was that popular, the items would go back into the jars if they weren’t eaten…

95

I’m telling you guys, this thread is killing me. I even wrote about my obsession with w.p.f. (white people food) once.

I spent most of my childhood fantasizing about what my white classmates got to eat at home. It was always the biggest mystery.

I am not black (they ran the black family out in less than a year) but I was that kid. “Look, our resident heathen!”

Right now I’m working on a long-term project to take the quintissential WPF dish (at least to me) meatloaf, and ethnicise it across a broad spectrum. I already completed DesiLoaf.

96

Thank you. I was too embarrassed to ask.

97

My mom’s family were farmers in central Florida. White bread doesn’t begin to describe it, because if they couldn’t grow it or make it they usually didn’t have it. She educated herself out of it, and even made homemade Beef Wellington that was as good as any I’ve ever had in a resturant. She told this story on herself: When she first began dating, in her late teens, her date asked if she would care for a shrimp cocktail. She replied “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”

98

But now I can join in and be white bread, too.

I was 14 before I discovered that spaghetti is available other than in cans with runny orange sauce. The most exotic thing my mother ever did in the kitchen was to chop an onion and put it in the gravy. Brown onion gravy on snags was the height of her culinary adventurousness.

99

damn you Sinjin…your giving the white bread tips away for free… I’m not from sic “Missourah” but my paycheck comes from there…and dang, everybody knows,
Imo’s sucks…(cept’n for you St Louis dopers :cool: )

TsFr

100

My mother was a reformed white-bread cook. It must have been a generational/ social thing, because many of the things listed here by people near my age (43) are very familiar: Tang, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee DIY pizza in a box, LaChoy fake Chinese in a can, etc. Maybe it was a result of the McCarthy era, where it started with ethnic foods, and then WHAMMO! commies in the White house.

My mother made spaghetti sauce from scratch, but her idea of flavor was a few flakes of oregano, and the juice of a garlic clove crushed in a clove crusher. MY father would reserve some of the sauce and add cracked red pepper flakes to give it some life. She also made what my father called “Episcopal Cassrole” as she made it for church pot-lucks: a creamed squash casserole with bread crumbs browned on top. Rice, when we had it, was instant, but she made heavenly sticky buns with walnut bits. Our menu was fairly limited early on, and she seemed suspicious of herbs and spices. As we kids grew up and left, her tastes and menu broadend some.

Now, my wife has about 20 recipies in rotation from perhaps 7 or 8 ethnic traditions, and is always in search of new ones. We use whole garlic cloves with impugnity, and have the green and chipotle Tabasco Sauce on the table. A recent addition was a shaker full of ground sumac. New foods and rare spices are procured by any means necessary and used. Local oriental markets know us well. We make pilgrimages to the International Food store on Nolensville Road in Nashville, TN. I just didn’t know what I was missing until my wife started cooking and experimenting.

Vlad/Igor