My dad used to eat liverwurst sandwiches, which is okay (I guess) but he had this thing where he liked them drowning in mustard. Like more mustard than a normal person would ever put on a normal thing. Think turning the mustard jar upside-down over a sandwich.
When I was little, I loved these sandwiches. I’m pretty sure the main attraction was eating my dad’s favorite sandwich, because I don’t really remember the taste, but I do remember asking for a sandwich “just like Daddy’s!”
Now, the mere thought of biting into some liverwurst in a sea of mustard is enough to make me dry heave.
WAG alert: I don’t know if they get more sensitive, or if we just don’t need as many simple sugars for growing and running around the house like bansidhes on crack, so our body looses our taste for them in preference for things like leafy greens and fruit with the anti-oxidents our old, feeble and decaying bodies need. Even chocolate has magnesium and other micronutrients which are useful to old folk, as opposed to Sour Patch Kids, which are just not useful except as fuel. Most kids prefer highly sweetened milk chocolate, and grow to like semisweet or dark chocolate as adults. If you notice, most toddlers are carbaholics. When asked, my doctor tells me it’s because toddlers need more simple carbs for fuel, with only small amounts of protein and fats for tissue building.
When I was just starting college, I worked at a Foot Locker in a mall that only had 3 places to eat. The only one cheap enough for regular eating was a McDonalds. One day, I was eating a burger like usual, and it was like my body just rejected it. I took a bite and felt like I was going to puke. I have not been able to even smell a McDonalds hamburger without getting nauseous ever since, and that was nearly 20 years ago.
I used to love making weird sweet/savoury sandwiches with digestive biscuits. (I think graham crackers are the closest US equivalent - sweetish, wholemeal biscuits/cookies).
My top two favourites were:
Butter and Marmite (thickly spread and sandwiched between two digestives, so that when you squeezed them, blackhead-like threads would ooze out of the holes.
Blue cheese, especially Danish Blue.
No way I could eat those combos now.
Of all the foods described so far, yours were the only ones that really brought up the bile for me. I take my hat off for you, sir/ma’am. And then projectile vomit into it.
You know how you can buy those canned tamales that come wrapped in paper, and that have that nuclear sauce? And you open the can and microwave all the tamales and then scarf them all? Yeah, it’s horrifying. I think my dad still eats them, though. Worse yet, I remember the taste fondly.
I’m not entirely sure what digestive biscuits are, and I’ve never seen Marmite in person, but I used to love making peanut butter ooze through the holes in Saltines. It’s so satisfying and coily. If you squeeze the Saltines unevenly, you can end up with PB plugs of different lengths, or (gasp) some holes with NO oozing PB at all, so the point was always to carefully squeeze to result in a nice, uniform set of PB threads.
If you do, let me sell it! I get the commission, you get the face value when he…umm succumbs to the heart clogging goodness described above. Win/win! (well, except for poor Wolf)
There were/are several brands of those – the one I remember consuming is Nik-L-Nips.
My dad used to go to the market and get live chickens for his mother and grandmother to cook. He happily ate the resulting meals until the day he truly realized that the birds he was buying were turning into dinner. So he hasn’t eaten poultry for almost seventy years, but he loves beef.
Since he (a schoolteacher by day, musician on weekends and occasionally by weeknight) and Mom (full-time job as a housewife) had four kids within six years, the only kind of beef we could generally afford was the ground variety. I ate hamburgers, meat loaf, and the like for the first five or so years of my life, but I got sick on ground meat one night and have been unable to stomach it since, although I did love Chef Boy-ar-dee Lasagna so much that I picked the beef out whenever Mom made that particular dinner. Otherwise, I filled up on potatoes and vegetables, or convinced Mom to make the noodles or other starch separate from the meat sauce when she prepared something like Hamburger Helper.
Lincoln often ate an apple and drank a glass of buttermilk for lunch during his Presidency. A great man but, jeez, how disgusting. I’d want something a bit more substantial if I was going to win a civil war.
There’s very little I’ve grown to dislike. Either I disliked it as a kid and dislike it now (raw onion, capsicum, anchovies) or I disliked it as a kid and have grown to like it (mushrooms, asparagus, curries) or I’ve never tried it (eggplant, olives). The two that most readily spring to mind are black cherry jolt cola, and vegemite on saladas/cruskits. The former is a pity, because I love cherry flavoured colas and I used to drink several bottles a day but now it’s just too sickeningly sweet for me to deal with. The latter is less of a “I hate this food” and more of a “this food causes me pain” issue. Vegemite-inspired heartburn is not a nice thing.
Blue cheese salad dressing. Doesn’t exactly “gross me out”, but I used to love it and now I don’t.
The transition happened when I was cooking in a restaurant where we made our own salad dressings. Our recipe for blue cheese dressing included celery seeds. I’ve always found the taste of celery to be extremely unpleasant, and once I knew there were celery seeds in my blue cheese dressing, that’s all I could taste when I ate it.
I don’t know if celery seed is common ingredient in blue cheese dressing, but any time I taste blue cheese dressing, I swear I can taste the celery seeds, whether they’re in there or not.
I can’t eat Carl’s Jr. Spicy Chicken sandwiches anymore. I used to eat them all the time when I was in high school, since they were big, only $1, and tasty. Then there was that time in college that I had three before going to bed and woke up thinking I was having a heart attack (acid reflux). Every time I see one, now, It reminds me of the fear of death.
Plus they stopped putting tomato slices on them. Cheap ass bastards.
