When was the last time you saw Kool Kids???
Hot Tamales and Mike and Ikes are everywhere. But Kook Kids? Nowhere to be found. 
A lot of the foods mentioned here are things I’ve had – and even sometimes still have. Herring in sour cream is sold in jars at most groceries, and is yummy on crackers as an appetizer. Liver is harder to find than it once was, but I enjoy it now and then. (Chicken livers, especially made into rumaki as an appetizer, are delicious!) You can still get pineapple upside down cake – glop on some whipped cream for an especially wonderful dessert.
I sort-of collect old cookbooks, and one item often referenced that I have never had and never seen in the stores is shad roe. I think you could get it fresh, but it also apparently came in cans. A Google search indicates you can get it, but cod (not shad) and it is a bit pricey.
Has anyone here ever had shad roe? Was it good?
My mother loved it, so we kids were forced to eat it. It’s one of the few things I can’t stand to this day (though I love chicken liver and liverwurst).
She also liked tongue sandwiches. :eek: (Actually, tongue isn’t that bad, although I wouldn’t order it.)
One thing we had a lot as kids in the Bronx were fried smelt. I never see them any more although I think they may be available in other areas.
Anything croquettes. My mother used to make tuna croquettes too, and a few times even lamb croquettes.
Succotash. Only time I would eat Lima beans when I was a kid. My mom would make it from scratch, cut the corn off the cob, soak and cook the Lima beans and add roasted red pepper. There was also a canned version in the Northwest from Sunny Jim. They made soda pop, jams and jellies and canned vegies.
My father used to eat pickled herring with raw onions, and pickled eel sometimes as well.
You used to see pickled pigs feet on the back counter of bars to be sold as a snack, but even back then I couldn’t remember anyone ever ordering some.
After a trip to the dentist, my mother and I would go to a cafeteria and get chicken croquettes. They were the traditional cone shape and smothered in chicken gravy.Yum.
I collect them too!
Fresh shad roe is common in fish shops along the Atlantic Seaboard in season (mid-spring). I’ve made it several times, as it is a favorite dish with Rex Stout’s private detective character, Nero Wolfe. See The Nero Wolfe Cookbook for a variety of recipes.
It’s a bunch of fish eggs contained in a fetal sac. You generally poach it. I find it kind of mealy and not particularly appetizing, and haven’t cooked any in years. And I’ve never seen it canned.
Smelt and sardines are popular in NYC Greek restaurants. Grilled or broiled, not fried (they are fatty enough on their own). They are heavenly, with a few squeezes of lemon over.
I love the IDEA of croquettes…MEATBALLS! But I don’t do the deep-frying thang.
In season, we would get fresh smelt at the fish store, and fry it up at home. This was an Irish/Italian neighborhood. Of course, this was back in the day when there were separate fish stores and butcher shops.
Something we used to have regularly were swordfish steaks. They must have been pretty cheap for us to have afforded it. I can’t recall seeing it on a menu for many years, but maybe Mediterranean type places have it.
Anyone interested in food from the middle of the last century will enjoy this -
Personally, my favorite is the “Cranberry Crack”.
The best book on retro food is the brilliant Square Meals by Jane and Michael Stern. You can get a very cheap used copy on amazon and it is priceless. There are lots of stories and commentaries on the various recipes. Anyhoo, just gitchyseff one!
There’s a chapter on the Cooking of Suburbia, the patio meals where the neighbors were invited, parties often represented in Doris Day/Tony Randall movies. Appetizers, clever grilling recipes, cute desserts often involving Jell-o sculpture of some kind. But the one recipe that caused me to laugh hysterically sitting up in bed one night was in the section on fake exotic food. You take a cabbage and stand it up. You carve out a shallow, cylindrical cavity in the top, into which you place a can of Sterno. Then you impale cocktail sausages all over the cabbage on toothpicks, a design that, oddly, resembles today’s electron photos of the coronavirus. You briefly pass the sausages through the volcanic flames of the Sterno then dip them in a sauce. But it was the name of it that got to me: “Flaming Cabbagehead Weenies with Pupu Sauce.” 
Ambrosia salad. This was a staple at all parties, picnics, and large family meals for decades. Couldn’t have a family get-together without it. Not that I was a huge fan, actually I thought it was kind of gross, but it just sort of totally disappeared sometime in the early 90s.
Would I be out of line if I said, “Band Name!”
I just did a google search on that, and my god! It’s actually a thing. I never would have believed it.
Not only is that something you don’t see any more, it’s something I had never seen.
Doubting Thomas over here, who just HAD to google it, too. Scholars will puzzle over the bump this search phrase is receiving!
Hmm, bits of food on a stick, briefly cooked and enjoyed communally. Best I can figure, someone encountered fondue while on an exotic vacation, drunkenly described it to friends back home (“No, no, see, it’s already cut up, and impaled on these little sticks, see, and then the oil gets hot and you cook hick you cook hick you cook hick oh, just eat the fucking thing, man.”) and then after a few years had fogged up everyone’s memories, they tried to re-create it (“Were they on sticks already?” “I don’t remember a cabbage.” “Well, do you remember him saying NOT cabbage?”) and their friend wrote it all down, and then decades later, we’re all sitting around wondering what the hell Flaming Cabbage Head Weenies (featuring Pupu Sauce!) is all about.
I agree. Makes a helluva band name.
For the Doubting Thomases. LOVE the plate in that picture. I think we had those plates…
Square Meals — great book, everyone who eats food should own a copy. I bought mine WAY back in the ‘80s, when it was new and you had to go to a bookshop to buy your books.
When Little Banjo was just a lad, he personally kitchen-tested every ice cream confection in the “Lunch Counter Cuisine” chapter. I swear by the “He-Man’s Tuna Noodle Casserole,” and a good friend is a big fan of “Milky Way Cake,” in which the main ingredient is candy bars.
My favorite recipe title is “Gas Company Rumaki.” The Sterns found their favorite rumaki method in a promotional pamphlet issued by the Milwaukee Gas Light Company in 1961.
I love the chapter when the Sterns stopped by that farmhouse for Sunday lunch and the elderly couple got slowly soused during the meal.
Trivia: did you know that Jane Stern did a mid-life career change to EMT? Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself By Becoming an EMT?
OH, I LOVE THAT BOOK. I bought it in the 80’s, too, and have made many of the recipes. In fact, I misplaced it once a few years ago, panicked, and immediately bought it for $$$ online. … It is just delightful reading about American cuisine through the decades. I made Chocolate Bread with Vanilla butter, chocolate syrup for ice cream, and made the Milky Way Cake several times. …I think I have all of the Sterns’ books, the Road Food tomes about special restaurants to check out in every state are especially good reading, sort of like the food tv shows (Diners, Drive ins and Dives) - 'If you’re ever in Georgia, be sure to come to the church service Sunday in the parking lot of Maurice’s Piggie Park ’