Funny, my mother made some super fantastic Swiss steak- always tender and that tomato, rice , cube steak mix of flavors just really was one of my favorite meals as a kid ( I even requested it for my birthday at least once). We were talking about things she used to make recently and she admitted it was one of her least favorite meals. She is an amazing cook - now even more so knowing she could make things she didn’t like still taste fantastic. Her only miss was green enchiladas- it involved spinach and some kind of cream cheese or ricotta. We were pretty spoiled by her cooking at that point so we never let her forget and and she never made it again. We were pretty miserable about it IIRC- she even tried to bribe me at one point to finish the leftovers but I refused (and it was so bad that I got the ice cream cone anyways).
Not a lot of misses in my family- my grandmothers were both very different but very good cooks. My Northwestern born grandmother- only complaint is she was a mincemeat person so as kids we’d shy away from her gravy especially but I do remember it tasted fine. My Southern born grandmother never had a miss at all and she was crazy for kitchen devices. The only real miss was my grandfather- he liked to char the hell out steak. I still liked it but thinking back, it was well-done and burnt. I was in my early twenties before I tried medium rare anything and it may have changed my life.
My mom made a version of that. She got the recipe from one of my aunts, who got it out of some '50s women’s magazine.
Lime Jell-O, Lemon Jell-O, mayonnaise (mom probably used Miracle Whip), diced red apples, diced green apples, walnuts, and cottage cheese. If Pepto-Bismol were green, that’s what the salad looked like. Mom called it ‘crap salad’, because it has a bunch of crap in it. (Kind of shocking, really, since mom was not prone to profanity.) The thing of it is… it was actually tasty. I wouldn’t miss it if it did not appear for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but I always ate it.
Well I considered Nana’s fried okra a miss, but in retrospect, if I’m going to eat okra at all (and as an adult, nope), it would have to be Nana’s fried okra or nobody’s.
But I came in to say that she once promised, when I got married, to share her recipe for fricaseed owl. Thankfully she never did share it, nor in my lifetime as far as I know did she cook it. I think this must have been some survival dish from her youth. I frankly wish she had never even mentioned it at all. That might have been the first indication that she was losing it.
My mom’s mother was an excellent cook. She was active in the Eastern Star and often cooked for their functions. We loved going to her house for Sunday dinner. She’d always have two main dishes, like sliced ham & country fried steak with gravy. Four vegetable dishes. Two kinds of pie.
It was a wonderful meal. Like going to a restaurant.
My dad’s mother was the wife of a sharecropper in the 1920’s and 30’s. She never used very many ingredients. Always trying to stretch food to feed many mouths.
That was necessary when they didn’t have any money. But she never changed how she cooked. If a stew recipe called for 2 cups diced carrots, she used 1/2 cup. She always added water to things.
The old joke, company is coming! Add more water to the soup! Defined her cooking.
My mother was a good cook and an outstanding baker. Her fails were liver and onions, and a dish called creamed peas and new potatoes. It was served in a silver chafing dish on occasions like Thanksgiving, and it was the blandest glop I can of next to that Elmer’s glue some restaurants try to pass off as gravy.
Her chocolate chip cookies. They were like hard dry rocks. They literally did not spread out at all, just remained lumps. You could break a tooth. Unfortunately, the true recipe has been lost. I have one that I wrote when I was about ten that when tested provides totally different cookies. My cousin has one that is completely different that I haven’t tried but it uses Crisco which I am positive she never used. If it sounds like I am nostalgic for them you are right. To anybody else they would be horrible cookies but I would gladly eat them again in memory.
My mother was generally a VERY good cook, but boy could she murder a fish, whole house stunk for 2 days. I grew up thinking I didn’t like fish. Turns out I just don’t like smelly old fish.
The only screw-up I remember in Gramma’s kitchen was strictly a one-off: She had some garlic butter in the fridge, in preparation for making garlic bread, and due to a mix-up of tubs, it ended up getting used on waffles. Which worked about as well as you’d expect.
My grandmother (an immigrant from Eastern Europe) was known as a great cook, but the one thing she couldn’t master was hamburgers. I think part of the problem is that she didn’t really get what the finished product was supposed to be.
She would mix ground meat with breadcrumbs and onion greens, and make patties that were too thick. And not uniformly thick, but thick in the middle and thin around the edge, like a meatball that got pinched around to look like a flying saucer. She would cook them in a skillet on very low heat to cook through the middle, and the result was very soft, grey and greasy. I’ve wondered if maybe the meat mix was similar to something she would use for pyrizhky, and she figured it would also work as a hamburger. She had it in head that kids loved hamburgers, so she would make them for us as a “special treat.”
Breadcrumbs in burgers are not unheard of. I’d even say they were somewhat popular. A cousin made burgers when we visited a couple/few years ago, and she had breadcrumbs in it. It’s a tim-honoured way of stretching the meat. I don’t mind them.
That said, if it has breadcrumbs in it, it’s a ‘meatloaf burger’.
Yeah, totally. I’ve heard other people talk fondly of the burgers that their grandmothers made using breadcrumbs to stretch the meat. Just somehow in this case … it wasn’t working out.
Something my grandmother made and I’ve never seen elsewhere: baked butter beans. Yep, those HUUGE dried overgrown lima beans. The thing is, I’m prettysure there was nothing else in the recipe. Nothing like onions, definitely no bacon or ham hocks, I don’t even think she added salt. She’d dump an entire pound bag of the beans into a bean pot, fill it to the top with water, and then bake it for several hours, topping up the water level as it evaporated, giving it a stir now and then.
The final result was a pale yellow mush flecked with the empty skin left after the beans disintegrated.
I’m not sure it tasted actively horrible (beans are pretty bland after all, and there was nothing else to taste) but the texture with those limp nasty skins everywhere… ick.
I always thought that that was the ‘gruel’ that orphans got fed in Dicken’s novels.
My grandmother was a great cook. Some things she made that I didn’t like because I was a kid. Bacalao salad had fish AND starchy yucca AND gross guinero bananas. To my mind, they named it yuck-a for a reason. As I grew older I learned to appreciate it. Never loved it, though.
But the one thing she could not cook was pork chops. She learned that under cooked pork would give you worms, so she fried her pork chops until they were dry and crumbly. Not even the circle in the middle was edible. They were so bad I thought I hated pork chops until I got married and my husband wanted some. So I found a recipe and followed it and OMFG! Chops are DELICIOUS!
My mother’s mother is a hybrid Southern/German cook in Ohio River Valley tradition, and she was good. Fried chicken, roast beef, homemade bread, and pies were her specialties. My mom claims that, growing up at home, grandma had some strictly original interpretations of newfangled things like pizza (she topped it with cottage cheese), but I was never served any of them.
My dad’s mother, on the other hand, was a midcentury cook. If it didn’t have cream-of-X soup, Lipton onion soup mix, cream cheese, food coloring, cheez product, or jell-O in it, it wasn’t on the table. Someone tipped her about putting coffee in gravy to make it brown. Mostly it made the gravy taste like coffee.
).