A friend was lamenting that her 3-year-old won’t eat the Costco prosciutto any more. She will only eat Serrano ham (which, fortunately, my friend buys at Lidl for not too much). That reminded me that my mother told me I only liked the imported ham from the deli from before I could read to know which was which. I assume she bought it on sale once and stuck getting it for sometime thereafter until I could be coaxed back into eating the domestic variety.
I also remember going to dinner with my wife’s cousin in New York one time. We decided to go out to a sushi restaurant. We were going to go to one a block or so away when her cousin’s 4-year-old son complained that the sushi at another restaurant was much better. The four-year-old got his pick. I thought the sushi was quite good, so maybe he knew his sushi.
Do you know any very young kids with high-end food preferences? Were you one yourself?
My mother never understood why I asked for proper deli meat in sandwiches. She thought the Carl Buddig stuff was just fine. It wasn’t. It all tasted the same to me, which is to say plastic-y.
I grew up on peanut butter and jelly on white bread, bologna, jello, box cake, and my mother cooked meat and taters. We seldom went out to eat, but I did develop a taste for ‘the good stuff’ and seafood, and I was ENDLESSLY mocked for it. ‘Oh, she doesn’t want ordinary food, she likes steak and loooooobster, haw-haw.’ Well, yes, I did, I became quite a foodie and have remained so. Sorry about my high-falutin’ ways, jerks. No, I didn’t want the ‘kids menu’ at the Seashell Inn, I wanted the shrimp cocktail - that was endlessly hilarious to them.
I did not. I have passed my adult selectivity on to my children, however. They will not eat normal kid food, as a rule. Chicken nuggets are out, as are fast-food hamburgers. This makes eating on the road a bit of a challenge.
I way maybe 14 when I started thumbing my nose at cheesecake with air whipped into it, rather than the dense cream of a real New York cheesecake like Junior’s of Brooklyn.
My kids didn’t exactly have snobby tastes as kids - but they didn’t have normal “kid” tastes. They might eat a burger or chicken nuggets in a bowling alley or something - but not at a restaurant. At restaurants, they wanted seafood - and not the popcorn or fried shrimp that sometimes shows up on a kid’s menu. If we got Chinese take-out , they didn’t want fried rice/lo mein from the neighborhood take out-joint - they wanted jellyfish and chicken feet from an authentic Chinese restaurant . My husband eventually regretted exposing them to these foods because we could never just order from the kid’s menu.
Not exactly snobby, but I had to have the name-brand sugary cereals. Once my mom tried bringing home big plastic bags of generic brands of cereal, like ‘frosted wheat flakes’ or ‘sweetened puffed corn’, and I was 'awww hails no".
My mom and my maternal Grandma did appreciate good chocolate, and for Christmas and Easter we would get Sanders chocolate Santas and Easter bunnies (Sanders is a local Detroit area candy maker- not sure how well known they are elsewhere). So I grew up with a knowledge and appreciation for quality chocolate. Again, not sure whether that’s snobby or just a healthy appreciation for the finer things in life at an early age. I didn’t mind Hershey’s chocolate, but Palmer brand chocolate, which our other Grandma would give us, was pure garbage.
Raising our kids, we limited soda pop but the kids got Coke or Sprite on pizza night. Once my friend had brought his kids over and left some Kroger brand ‘Big K’ colas in our fridge. When I tried giving it to our older son, his reaction was “this no-brand cola SUCKS!! I WANT A COCA-COLA!!!”. So I went into the kitchen, fished out an empty can of Coke from the returnable bin, and gave him back the glass of Big K cola while pretending to finish pouring it from the Coke can. He took a big drink and said “ahhhh MUCH better!”
As a toddler, if Mumsy tried to palm off non-Buluga caviar on me or fill my milk-bottle with bottom-shelf scotch instead of Glenfiddich, I’d throw a temper tantrum.
Kidding. I wasn’t a very fussy eater as a kid, but I did have a rather mature palate from an early age.
My mother was British and a good cook (that’s not necessarily an oxymoron). She rarely made child-geared meals for the family, so I acquired a taste for slightly atypical adult food from an early age. I grew up on dishes like steak & kidney pie, mince meat pie, shepherds pie, liver & onions, lamb & mint sauce, baked flounder in white sauce, jellied eels and whatnot.
I didn’t much care for the foods my friend’s mothers would serve when invited for lunch or dinner. Spaghetti-O’s and franks & beans never floated my boat. Ironically, in my senior years, I acquired a taste for many kid foods. Mac & cheese, I’m looking at you!
My mom made pancakes once a week. With real ingredients, and she served them with real maple syrup, which ruined me for the fake stuff. The horror I experienced the first time a friend’s parents took me to IHOP…
I was also choosy about bananas. One brown spot, and it was too old for me.
I think I was 9 or so when I tried filet mingnon, and it instantly became my favorite meat. I didn’t start refusing lesser cuts or animals, but I kinda lost my shit whenever I saw it on a menu, and my parents pretty much gave in.
I was a picky eater as a child. The only exotic tastes I had were for king crab and lobster, which we seldom got. I didn’t become a food snob until I started cooking.
The crusts always soak up every bit of saliva in my mouth so it’s like eating sawdust. No, thank you.
When I was 9 or 10, my grandmother declared she didn’t want to make Christmas dinner that year, but that she’d take us all out for dinner. She had three kids, plus eight grandkids, so it wasn’t a huge number of people. We went to the Hotel Miramar in Santa Monica. I ordered the lobster. I’d never had it, and I liked all seafood, so I wanted to give it a try. I loved it.
But I was teased unmercifully for years afterwards for my “champagne” tastes.
My dad always bought blackberry jam because it was the cheapest. I thought it had no taste. I only wanted raspberry – which was the most expensive jam in our market. I didn’t want it because it was expensive; I wanted it because it tasted the best to me. I think I’ve mentioned before that I hate margarine and love butter. That was a real trial. I’ve never bought margarine for myself in my life.
I’m the same. But people who live in countries that grow bananas will tell you that Yanks eat them much, much, much too green. It is claimed that they are more nutritious when they have lots of brown spots.
I thought that soup and salad was the most elegant, ladylike meal to be had. I would order a cup of soup and a side salad at a restaurant and feel very fancy.
My daughters are 8 and 6. They eat some combination of about ten different foods (I’m not really exaggerating all that much.) But they love their Parmigiano-Reggiano, accept no substitutes. I introduced them to Italian parmesan years ago, and I’ve tried subbing in some domestic parmesan or Argentinian parmesan, both being a bit cheaper, but no dice. They noticed it right away, and will not eat their pasta topped with anything but Italian parmesan, which they call “the salty cheese.” (And, you know what, they are right. There is variance among the various Italian parmesans out there, but none of the domestic or non-Italian copycats I’ve tried taste right to me, either. Like, not even close. Well, there is one exception. I picked up a hard, aged Lithuanian cheese whose name I forget at the Eastern European grocery by my house, and that was acceptable for them, but not quite the same thing.)
Ha. Reminds me of a lunch item at Lindberg’s Nutrition. It was “ladylike” sandwiches made from date nut bread spread with olive cream cheese with a scoop of raspberry sherbet. The sherbet was in a little bowl on an elevated stem. Very 1950s ladies who lunch in gloves and hats.
and my mother cooked meat and taters. We seldom went out to eat, but I did develop a taste for ‘the good stuff’ and seafood, and I was ENDLESSLY mocked for it. ‘Oh, she doesn’t want ordinary food, she likes steak and loooooobster, haw-haw.’ Well, yes, I did, I became quite a foodie and have remained so. Sorry about my high-falutin’ ways, jerks. No, I didn’t want the ‘kids menu’ at the Seashell Inn, I wanted the shrimp cocktail - that was endlessly hilarious to them.
