Neither set of my grandparents could cook really, but I remember a few things for sure: Whole wheat bread (thought it was nasty–Ha! what did I know!) , beer-battered fried fish (thought it was scandalous but delicious) fresh green beans (had to trim them myself) Fried chicken almost every Sunday night, Salad–which I didn’t eat until I left for college.
My mother says that, when she was young, her father would take all the leftovers in the refrigerator and throw them into a pot, calling it “garbage stew”. I was never subjected to that but my grandmother (on that side) wasn’t any great cook either. We would get excited when she made chicken soup because it was the only thing that rose above mediocre. It wasn’t great but it was better than anything else she made.
I am always a little jealous of people that had grandparents that could cook something delicious from the “Old Country”. We didn’t really have an Old Country and none of my grandmothers could cook worth shit. My paternal grandmother was as sweet as could be but somehow got perpetually stuck in 1950’s style cookbooks. She thought it was really exotic when she bought an electric wok but didn’t really know how to use it so she produced a lot of charred vegetables mixed in with pieces of mostly unidentifiable meat.
My maternal grandmother spend most of her time smoking and drinking on the couch but there was word in the family that she could make really good homemade macaroni and cheese. I had it once and it was…passable.
My mother could only cook a few things but my father could cook meat, seafood and fish really well. I still use his hamburgers as a standard and few top them. Oddly enough, I can cook fairly well and fail to see how anyone struggles with it. Just a few basic techniques combined with your own taste buds get you 90% of the way there.
Neither of my grandmothers had any culinary skill, but they both raised a fair number of children and cooked for all of them. My maternal grandmother’s best dish was pork chops, and they weren’t much good. And she once made me a bowl of Triscuits and milk because, come on, they’re just like shredded wheat.
My paternal grandmother pressure cooked everything until it was uniform texture and color. When I spent the summer with her, I asked for bologna sandwiches. She kept it frozen to ward off food poisoning, so I usually ended up with frozen bologna chips on Wonder Bread.
My paternal grandparents were farmers, and Grandma was a good cook with a very limited repertoire. She raised chickens, and fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans were served for lunch or dinner every day.
When my siblings and I visited the farm, she always sent a sack of fried chicken home with us, for eating on the long trip back. We told her we wanted sandwiches. We got pieces of fried chicken – bones and all – between slices of bread.
Her sugar cookies were legendary – until in her old age she started making them with leftover bacon grease.
I think grandma was just ahead of her time with the bacon sugar cookies. (Though I suspect bacon fat cookies were not all that unusual back in the old days. Certainly lard was a common fat for pastries.) Sounds lovely, though! I bet they’d be a hit in some hipster coffee shop. (Even though the peak of the bacon trend has passed, I hope, it’s still pretty popular.)
I’m not much on sweets at all, and I’d try the bacon sugar cookies. They sound like something that might have the judges swooning on a show like Chopped or Iron Chef.
Bread.
My father’s mother produced a loaf of bread that would serve better as a doorstop. Dense, dry, not particularly tasty. “Neutron Bread” is the description I’ve once seen that would fit it best. Oh, and she put raisins in it. I hate raisin bread, even if the loaf is otherwise good, so that didn’t help.
On the other hand, she made great chicken soup fro scratch every Sunday.
My mother’s mother was a much better cook, and made pastries.
Only way to eat a beet as far as I’m concerned. I just canned up a batch of pickled beets a few weeks ago.
But what about borscht!? (Roasted beets, too, especially in a salad with goat cheese and the like.) We actually do a Polish version of borscht that is a mix of pickled and non pickled beets.
No, just no. Pickled is the only way to go.
Hey, that was me! My grandma did that! 
Grandma cooked only a few things, but she did them passably well…fried chicken, mashed potatoes, spaghetti sauce, grits, boiled peanuts.
Now, Mom…she has less interest in food that anyone I’ve ever known. She served TV dinners, or whatever could be produced by following the directions on the box, or opening a can.
I cook, but my husband had to teach me.
Reminds me of an old story from the area where I grew up. The next town over, where the high school is, had so much natural gas in the area that it got piped into homes at no charge. This prompted some residents to leave their stove going 24/7.
See, the gas was free but matches to light it cost money.
Boo!!
I’m not sure what the exact deal is, but neither of my grandmother’s could cook a vegetable without boiling it to mush. From the comments, it appears I’m not the only one. Thankfully both my parents didn’t inherit that taste.
The one that stick out for my Dad’s mom was juice. It was about as strong as homeopathic medicine. Just wave it near the juice crystals, and that’s strong enough. It was like drinking water with color and you could just taste a small hint of disappointment.
My mom’s mom was probably the most amazing baker I ever knew. Her butter tarts were legendary. Her fresh bread was the best I have ever had. I still make Norwegian pancakes (they’re like crepes) from her recipe for my kids. Somehow though if she made soup it was always terrible. I never understood this.
My grandmother was a pretty bad cook. My other grandmother was an even worse cook. One thing both had in common was cooking pasta until it was beginning to break apart; I “invented” al dente partly as a reaction (since I hadn’t encountered it before, I count it as an invention even though other people had invented it first).
Paternal grandma was at least able to provide a good fridge for sandwiches and breakfasts, and to fry eggs to taste. She was pretty good with vegetables and omelettes and her fish was good, but she preferred to have someone else handle the meat (I understand Grandpa was happy to do this, but he died when I was 3 so I can’t vouch for the results; Dad and my uncles all could cook and all fried and roasted well). She hadn’t learned to cook in her youth, having been raised to have cooks; eventually she’d decided it was stupid of her to not be able to cook and set out to learn (when she didn’t have a cook, someone needed to feed the family; when she did have one, a minimum of knowledge is necessary for appropriate supervision). The few vegetables my mother cooked decently are those she learned from her.
Maternal grandma just hated cooking. When we went to visit, most menus would be either cooked by us or bought from the deli. And given how bad a cook she was, either option was definitely preferable. It’s from her that my mother learned to cook everything until being assured of its demise.
My mother, born in 1925, was a great cook, basing her meals based on what limited food options were available from her upbringing in the Midwest during the depression.
However, she didn’t stray much from basic farm food. She not only would add cheese to frozen pizza, but it was Velveeta cheese! Also you only bake it at 350 degrees, only for the minimum amount of time listed. It was always a limp, un-browned mess.
The one meal that really stands out was spaghetti - how exotic! My oldest brother came home from college in 1967 and raved about it, since we never had it. So she bought the spaghetti, some canned sauce (in a can, no jars back then), and based on what he suggested, used hot dogs for the protein. He directed her to cook it properly, heated up the sauce, and cut up the hot dogs into 1/2" slices. He left the room, and she stirred it all together in a big bowl. He was aghast, but it tasted the same anyway. She never really made spaghetti, or lasagna, or anything Italian or Mexican or anything else exotic after that.
My grandmother was not a good cook. She and my grandfather were children of the depression, and thus everything was cooked in a frying pan.
Also, she almost never threw anything away. I went to visit her for a weekend, when she was living in Florida, and she asked me if I wanted some apple pie. Without thinking, I said ‘sure, thanks Grandma!’. Turns out she had this frozen apple pie sitting in her freezer for years. It smelled and tasted of freon. The only time I ever tasted freezer burn nearly that bad was when a friend had ordered a pizza delivery from a Dominoes in Connecticut.
Needless to say, we ate out for every meal. She loved chinese take-out (didn’t matter how bad the food was). She had a collection of napkins and pepper and salt and sugar packets and duck sauce and mustard and soy sauce that filled a drawer, because she’d empty everything packaged into her purse on every visit.
And yeah, she wasn’t poor. My grandfather had worked for the city of New York for most of his life as a construction foreman in the NYC subways, and neither of them spent money. They wouldn’t even use AC in the summer, or hot water, or heat in the winter. Unfortunately, she lost it all when my mentally ill aunt and a con man stole all her savings after she went into the hospital because of a stroke.
Was that your story I recalled?
I just bought my daughter a cast iron frying pan, I hope she will use it, I’ve heard you can get iron into your food by using a cast iron pan. She is very low on iron but can’t take supplements…The apple pie reminds me of the time my mother bought one of those cheap, gluey blueberry pies around Thanksgiving. The frozen kind you bake yourself, but it’s really nothing special, just when you feel the need to have something cheap and sweet for the undiscriminating for dessert. That was when there were about 6 of us…Years passed, that pie was in her freezer and never did get baked, and people stopped coming over eventually for holiday dinners since she was past cooking. And then there were three of us, and the pie still in the freezer. No one wanted it! Finally I …would like to say gave it away to a friend, but I made her put it in HER freezer, where it has been since that day! So that frozen pie is about 7 years old this year, LOL.