Since neither you nor Monty has stooped to mention it, I guess I’ll have to bring up the cornerstone of Mormon cuisine: green jello. Marshmallows and grated carrot optional. 
Come to think of it, Monty’s a convert. He may never have had the privilege. 
My family was so White Bread (gosh, that’s amusing, we aren’t white)…my lovingly packed school lunch:
Kraft Cheese and Crackers
Juice Box
Hostess Pie
Cracker Jacks
(all expired food bought at the swap meet)
Or
wonderbread with mayo and bologna and a kraft single
homemade apple sauce
We didn’t eat starches (rice, noodles) or chicken (except fried, for church dinners and such). It was all veggies and beef or pork or seafood with lots of veggies and fruits. I don’t think that’s white-bread, but more farmer-food. It amuses me that my mother switched to low-fat chicken and starches, and now it seems that the nutrition advice pendulum swings to whole foods.
I think I’ve blotted Jell-O transgressions out of my memory, so I could go on and try to lead a normal life
I think my fave is Mormon wedding punch: Kool-Aid and Sprite mixed together, with scoops of sherbet ice cream floating on top. Yum!
God, this thread is bringing back some memories.
New Englanders actually have a dish called “Italian Chop Suey”–elbow macaroni, hamburg and tomato soup. And then there’s “Buffalo”–hamburg, creamed corn and mashed potato casserole.
Coffee. I grew up thinking I hated coffee because all there was at home was instant. When my new husband made real coffee, I was like “That smells so good. What is it?” And I became a real coffee drinker, though I still can’t drink instant.
OK, another dumb foreigner question. What’s with all the cooking with soup? I have never heard of this before. To me, soup is a meal in itself and not something you add to another dish. Or does the American definition of soup encompass things like stock?
It’s mostly Campbell’s Condensed Cream of Mushroom soup. It’s the universal, ubiquitous goes-with-everything cooking ingredient. The ultimate sauce of white bread cooking. For instance.
My grandmother back in the 40s apparently made spaghetti with tomato soup. Which is odd, because she’d been a professional cook in several households, although her Nova Scotia farm roots came out in her own cooking. Her pot roast was out of this world, though–with potatoes, celery, turnips, carrots, and onions cooked along with the meat.
My mother, OTOH, liked exotic stuff, but I had two younger and decidedly unadventurous brothers, so she couldn’t do a lot when we were kids. I grew up with pizza and bagels all around in the Bronx, of course, and real Chinese and Italian food, but I didn’t start liking Chinese food until college. During high school I’d order spring rolls and beef with snow peas and no sauce.
My folks say that while you could always get ethnic cuisine in certain neighborhoods, for ordinary folks the only exotic restaurants were French, Italian, and “Chinese” (totally fake American dishes like chop suey), with some German places in Yorkville.
When I lived in Minnesota, there was a dish called “hotpot”–chopped up meat, elbow macaroni, canned vegetables and creamed soup, topped with something crunchy.
Is anything more white bread than elbow macaroni (except white bread, of course)?
I remember all we had was spaghetti or elbow macaroni. No such word as pasta. And we covered it with “shaker cheese.” I honestly thought that was the official name for it. We didn’t have Parmesan.
On Chinese Night, we ate Chun King Chicken Chow Mein with the corners of our eyes scotch taped up and substituting “r” for “n” in our speech: “ah so, missah Chip, you wan some roodles”.
Oh my God… there isn’t much I miss about being in Korea, but I DO miss those toast sandwiches. Mmm…
Every time we went to my grandfather’s place for holiday dinner, we had the same things;[ul][li]Grape soda []Onion dip from a plastic tub []Store brand potato chips []Orange Jell-O with raisins and shredded carrot []Boiled cauliflower with melted Cheez Whiz []Beef roasted to pale-gray death []Dinner rolls from a can Duncan Heinz Fudge Cake[/ul][/li]I didn’t think it could get worse until I ate dinner at my mother-in-law’s house early in our marriage, and she served a “salad” of shredded iceberg lettuce mixed with fruit cocktail and lemon pie filling. I referred to it as Fruit Vomit[sup]TM[/sup] in the car on the way home, and so it has been known ever since.
Regards,
Shodan
My mom was, and still is a “white bread” cook…
Had most of the food mentioned from USA, but haven’t seen the staple at EVEY meal at Mom’s: white bread torn up in pieces and slathered with gravy, any kind, depended on the meat. Guess this was just another way to get those much needed carbs and trans-fats.
No wonder my Dad came out as gay after 26 yrs or marriage…he wanted a chance of getting a partner that can cook…not that there is anything wong with that…
tsfr
I completely lost it when I got to this (ahem) delicious concoction. Because my husband’s cousin served nearly the exact same thing at a family birthday party in Minnesota a few years ago. I remember looking at the table blankly and asking her what that was supposed to be. She told me tacos, and then went down the list of ingredients. (She did substitute plain unseasoned boiled cut-up chicken for the plain unseasoned ground beef, and purchased grated “cheese” for Velveeta). I completely lost it when I came to the Miracle Whip. I committed the ultimate social faux pas of literally shrieking in horror at the food I was being served. Oh well.
I grew up on everything here, although we did change out occasionally from potato chips on top of the tuna casserole to crumbled saltines. Multiple Jello abominations? Check. Bland casseroles of elbow macaroni, some kind of canned tomatos (usually chunky since that’s what I hated, so I got them several times a week), ground beef, no spices whatsoever, and a few slices of cheese on top? Check. We did often have rice instead of potatoes, but it was either Uncle Ben’s or that true excresence, Minute Rice. Everything cooked into submission, of course. My dad would only allow meat to be served one way, overdone. And don’t forget the “ambrosia” dessert for every potluck – a mixture of pistachio pudding mix, Kool Whip, crushed pineapple, grated coconut, and mini marshmallows.
The one exception was that we did occasionally have yummy fish; one year we had a neighbor who was a salmon fisherman, and would bring home a couple of big fish and give us a chunk. So we’d have it grilled with lemon butter sauce. Yumm! Even that, of course, was always overdone, but it’s hard to ruin fresh salmon on the grill.
Now I’m married to a guy who lived all over Asia for over 20 years and has collected recipes from everywhere he’s lived. He almost never uses salt, but everything is incredibly deliciously seasoned nonetheless. It’s really been an eye-opener, let me tell you.
I love bread and gravy. My mom was the Gravy Queen. No matter what kind of meat was served (even ham slices or hamburger patties), she’d find a way to make gravy from it.
Does anyone ever cook up some elbow macaroni and eat it with milk and butter? I could skip the macaroni and just do the milk and butter, but I need some texture.
I grew up in a far-flung and very white outpost of the British Empire, so the big ethnic culinary triumph was curried anything.
What you did was get your tuna/chicken/whatever, make a thick white sauce, add an adventurous half teaspoon or teaspoon or so of Keen’s Curry Powder, and a bunch of sultanas, and voila, curry. Most frequently tuna curry in our household. Over rice. For a dash of true authenticity it’d be served with sliced bananas rolled in dessicated coconut to temper the, ah, fiery heat.
In my mother’s defence, as soon as we even knew anyone from Malaysia, she switched to making really rather awesome Malaysian curries, and then bought every Indian recipe book ever and started grinding her own spices and so forth.
I’m 30.
From what I’ve gathered here, it would appear that our poor (American) mothers were assaulted by three cooking philosophies:
Through gentle cooking, allow the natural flavors of the ingredients to mix and mingle to create dishes au naturel [i.e. without herbs, spices or salt];
It’s modern! It’s funky! Better living through chemistry! Besides, it all ends up in the same place [the stomach], so who cares what it tastes like or how processed it is!;
Ya never know where it came from. Look, you read The Jungle, right? Just cook the bejeezus out of it, and we’ll be ok.
Herbs are dangerous. They come from unknown places and arouse passions that are better left unspoken. Spices are even worse. They could even be Blood Spices for all we know. No, it is better for the soul and digestive system to refrain from the foment caused by unnatural tastes, things weare better off not knowing.
Personally, I prefer herbal anarchy and violent spiciness.
Vlad/Igor
Can it be, Vlad/Igor, that you have never seen The Gallery of Regrettable Food?
Um no, that’s American Chop Suey. I remember seeing it on the menu during elementary school…the weird contrast was that the area that I live is very Portugese. One day there’d be American Chop Suey on the menu, and then the next, there’d be linguia (sp?)
The only kind of cheese I knew was Velveeta, which Mother melted over asparagus and Wonderbread toast (asparagus grew abundantly in one corner of our backyard). Velveeta and Wonderbread could also be combined for grilled cheese sandwiches. Powdered milk, casserole recipes from Redbook magazine, New England boiled dinners, fish sticks, meatloaf with ketchup, goulash made with elbow macaroni, hamburger, and tomato sauce.
I always brought my lunch to school, but I noticed that when mashed potatoes were served, they were creamy and soft, not heavy and lumpy the way mashed potatoes are supposed to be.
No fast-food restaurants, no carbonated soft drinks except for ginger-ale if one was ill. I thought all soft drinks were called coke, which explains why I tried to order an “orange coke” at 15.
Chop Suey in a can was my exposure to Chinese cuisine. I did not learn about Chinese take-out until I was 19, living away from home for the summer. My roommate and her boyfriend told me there was some Chinese food in the fridge, in case I was hungry. I incurred her wrath by devouring it all - cold. I assumed it was left-over from their dinner at the Chinese restaurant. I had heard about “doggy bags,” but the concept of take-out was unknown to me.
Let the record show that the Chinese take-out incident occurred some thirty-three years ago and that my childhood mostly took place in rural and suburban upstate New York.
I have never said this on any message board.
But, I find I must.
You win.
Fruit vomit. Yikes.