Years ago, someone posted that his or her mother put American cheese on delivery/take-out pizza. ‘They charge for extra cheese!’
My wife has told me many times over the years that her mom made something the family called Friday soup. Lima bean soup with noodles is exactly what it was. She just read your post and said that her mom made the noodles from scratch and also put stewed tomatoes into this dish. All of her siblings talk about how gag inducing this mess was.
OP checking back in.
My wife’s grandmother made an out-of-this-world potato salad. I had never had its equivalent and my wife wrote down the recipe as it was dictated to her by her Ukranian grandmother who seemed eager to pass it on.
After many failed attempts, she realized it wasn’t in the assortment of ingredients but in that one little touch that her grandma had failed to mention.
The potatoes had to boiled and then allowed to soak in very salty after-bath. A fact that the grandmother never thought to mention.
End of story: my wife has now perfected the recipe and I’ll say that it is far superior -with a taste that POPS!- that old Bubby could ever dream of.
My grandmas were sweet old people (well, at least on my mother’s side), but I can’t remember either of them preparing any food which was memorable (in some instances, it was doubtfully edible).
The most pervasive memories I have of eating over at my maternal grandparents’ house are of a machine that converted a decent-looking cut of steak into tubular pink rivulets of tissue, and of my grandfather slurping down a large, revolting bowl of borscht containing unidentified floating objects.
From Malcolm In The Middle:
Mmm, I’m starving. What’s for dinner? Leftover parfait.
It’s even worse than it sounds! Once a week Mom cleans out the fridge. Anything that doesn’t have something growing on it gets served for dinner. Did we have spaghetti or Chinese food on Thursday? Neither. Ah! No digging! (SQUELCHING) Sunday, Saturday, Friday. It finally happened! The fifth level of this week’s leftover parfait is last week’s leftover parfait!
Walmart.
My mom was similar in her treatment of meats (except for her love of steak tartare, go figure), but we also had a tradition of soft-boiled eggs, which were delicious. That said, when they were hard-boiled, they invariably had that green/green-grey exterior to them that put me off hard boiled eggs for the longest time. Chalky texture, sulfurous smell, blech. What I can’t believe is how many restaurants I’ve been to where I see overcooked hardboiled eggs like this. Maybe it’s because of my mom I’m ultra-critical about hard-boiled eggs and notice it, but I’m astounded at how many times I’ve come across this. Just ruins the egg for me. It’s really not at all difficult to do it right.
And Swiss steak (or smothered steak) is delicious! Which reminds me, I need to make it this week for dinner, as it’s a dish everyone agrees on. (And, to be honest, the lima bean dish sounds good to me, but I love lima beans, and don’t quite understand why they have such a bad reputation. I mean, it’s pretty much a bean like any other, just bigger and creamier.)
Or Amazon
You are the first person who seems to know what I am talking about =)
I will do swiss steak, beef stroganoff and even salisbury steak but tend to vary recipes [for one thing I am deathly allergic to mushrooms] and it can be tricky getting the right flavors and mouthfeels - beef can be a pain in the rump to cook sometimes [too fast and it is rubber, too slow and it is mush]
Don’t know, maybe it was the recipe? And we did ham in other ways that was just fine, even a mustard glazed baked ham, just the hamloaf was disgusting.
Jello [compound] salads can be a pain, and yes the mayo/cream cheese/cottage cheese is supposed to be whipped in to make a mousse. When properly made they can be excellent and when not done right, nasty.
I’m not old enough to have enjoyed my grandmother’s cooking. The torch had been passed for family gatherings by the time I could remember. From what I was told by my mother she was a wonderful cook. Traditional Italian cooking for the most part. She had too many organ meat dishes in her repertoire for my liking. One would be too much.
My mother attempted to replicate some of my father’s favorite meals from his youth. His mother died when he was quite young. Corned Beef and cabbage. Rice and bread puddings. Various soups and stews. She failed miserably.
I believe our taste buds diminish as we get older, and we remember fondly back to(or not fondly back) foods of our childhood. Trying to replicate the recipes is not always a success, they don’t taste the same. Literally.
My mom never really learned how to cook so all the cooking duties went to Dad and dessert baking to us kids.
Mom could do simple things like pea & cheese salad, Dad tried that once when Mom was away and made everybody sick! I’m guessing he used mayo that had gone bad. When we moved out of that house, the wood paneling in the boys’ bedroom still had a stain from one of my brothers barfing on it.
Dad’s idea of spaghetti sauce was military-style glorified ketchup. I was sure thankful when he started buying Prego.
Mom did get more adventurous as I grew older. She was good at the salmon loaf from canned salmon mentioned earlier. Her lasagna was Prego, cooked ground beef, and cottage cheese(!) stirred together and layered with the noodles. Sounds weird but it worked. Then there’s what she called “Macaroni & Fish”, no idea where she got the recipe but it was kippered herring, margarine, and Parmesan cheese stirred into cooked macaroni. Not only not as bad as it sounds but this made the basis for my bachelor chow, I used tuna rather than kippers and condensed soup in place of margarine.
Both of my grandmother’s were excellent cooks -two variations on a similar theme. Paternal grandmother was German-born and had come from a family of bakers. She made amazing fluffy, buttery rolls and fabulous, flaky pie crust. She kept the family afloat during the Depression providing baked goods to the grocery store in her small town. But being German, she cooked a lot of organ meat. Not that it wasn’t tasty, but I could never warm up to the textures of the meats. The gravy, however, was great, so I lived on mashed potatoes and gravy (and rolls and pie!) at this grandma’s house.
Maternal grandmother cooked for hearty farmhands - good, plain, stick-to-your ribs food in large quantities, heavy on the fats and carbs. But she had a lovely hand with seasonings and a real flare for vegetables, that left me a lifelong vegetable lover. Her real downfall was the dry, stringy, overcooked beef roast that was endemic to the era. My first experience with medium rare prime rib was revelatory.
Mom did not enjoy cooking, but had a few meals she mastered for special occasions or when company came. Like everything with Mom, if she spent her valuable time doing it, it was going to be done correctly. But, she had an inexplicable love for the blandest potato soup recipe ever - boiled, riced potatoes mixed with half-and-half, no seasoning, served in a bowl with a pat of butter placed in the bowl before the soup was poured in. Wow that was nasty. It was much like eating thin, grainy wallpaper paste. ������
Did not interact too much with either grandmother.
Mom had two handicaps going for her: 1) Coming out of the New England cooking tradition where you boiled everything until it was tasteless and 2) Growing up during WWII, so food substitutes were no problem. In the early years, we grew up with wonder bread, margarine, velveeta cheese and SPAM. Vegetables only came in cans, of course. Over the years, she got the message and brought her cooking style into the modern era, and was pretty damn good at it.
Now, for some reason, baking was never, ever a problem. Her blueberry muffins and coffee cake were legendary. And those cinnamon rolls on special occasions? Out of this world. Cookies were always tops, and the Christmas ones were unbelievably varied. And… she could make popovers that always popped just right. If you’ve ever tried to make popovers, you know how difficult that is. They look so easy to make, but I don’t think I ever had a batch where at least one or two wasn’t a flopover.
The miss was liver and onions. Somehow, she got the idea that we needed to have that as part of a healthy diet. Ugh. But it might just be me, because I can’t stomach organ meet, and probably wouldn’t like the best liver and onions in the world.
My Babushka made pierogis to die for. Other stuff great. But every veggie was boiled to death and she served up crap like turnip greens. My Mom did the same. Likely why I hate veggies today.
Liver was in mom’s rotation. Seems like liver, and the Swiss steak were the things she cooked in her electric skillet. I liked the liver, but my dad and sister had to put catsup on it to ‘cover up the taste.’
Mrs. L.A. said she used to like liver, until she became a nurse. 
And she declines any offer of serving up some menudo.
Both of my grandmothers were pretty good cooks. Let’s see…
My Dad’s Mom, if in possession of a batch of okra, would boil it, along with butterbeans and I dunno maybe squash or something. Doesn’t matter. You ever eaten boiled okra? Gooey snotty disgusting stuff. Okra is a perfectly delightful vegetable when prepared appropriately (thin-sliced, dusted in corn meal + flour with salt and pepper, and then fried); boiled? bleagh!
My Mom’s Mom was more “out there”; she could cook good food but would get some odd ideas in her head and put some awfully strange stuff on the table occasionally. There was a savory winter squash recipe we all liked but she got it into her head that winter squash was like pumpkin and pumpkin was something you sweetened and spiced and made pumpkin pie out of, so she added sugar and nutmeg and cinnamon to a recipe that had onion and black pepper and vinegar and hot peppers…
Neither of them could compete in the “what the fuck were you thinking?” department against my great-aunt, who most famously brought a lime jello salad to a family dinner and had incorporated shrimp into it.
And that’s what upgraded my mom’s meatloaf to “not my style” from “disgusting.”
Before she discovered packaged bread crumbs, which are nice and dry and uniformly small, she used homemade “crumbs.” Unfortunately, no one had ever explained that bread crumbs need to be made from stale, dry bread. She’d grab a couple of slices of Wonder Bread and rub the slices between her hands to break them up, producing bread pills. Instead of discreetly extending and binding the meatloaf, the bread clots would soak up the meat juices, expanding into grotesque gluey clumps. For many years meatloaf was my last favorite food.
Mom was also fond of canned pickled beets. These are still my least favorite food and I don’t know why anyone buys them.
I like pickled beets.
Grew up on pickled beets and love them, too! Anyhow, you don’t need breadcrumbs for a meatloaf. You can use fresh bread, but you need to soak it first , wring it out (or not, but I usually eat a good bit of moisture out) , and then break it up evenly with a fork or whatnot. Look up “panade” for various techniques.