Growing up, my family ate fried chicken gizzards. You could buy them by the pound in the market. No bones and they were probably cheap. And they were delicious! Do they still sell them?
What uncommon foods did you eat while growing up?
We ate baked cornbread (northern style) with butter and syrup.
Also, rice as a side dish with sugar and cinnamon. Yuck.
I love rice with sugar and cinnamon. Besides, it’s not much different from rice pudding, which is a thing.
Both sides of my family come from Oklahoma, so Southern cooking was definitely a thing, but we didn’t really eat anything strange. Black eyed peas on New Year’s Day (although my mother loves them and eats them all the time), Mustard greens, okra (which I love). My Grandmother used to make mashed potato cake (which was chocolate) and vinegar pie (which was like a pecan pie without the pecans).
My mother used to make Tongue, and occasionally Brains…
Casserole recipes from the back of Campbell soup cans. I guess those would now be considered uncommon though we still do an annual Campbell Tater Topped Casserole bake-off at the local saloon. Knock yourself out. Oh, and Mum used to make me Pigs in a Blanket occasionally. I thought that was Haute cuisine.
This was a side dish, though! Like here is your pork chop, here is your sugary rice! I stand by my yuck. 
sheep’s brains and eggs
It was some time after I started school that I realized that it was possible to have a birthday with something other than . . . prune cake.
(For those who are back from the vomitorium, it was actually a spice cake that happened to have prunes in it. And it was quite good, in part because it was always covered with a mocha frosting. It was my mother’s recipe, but nobody knows where it came from — her sister had no knowledge of it. But it was and is a family tradition, and my sister does a killer reproduction on request.)
Green tomato pie. My dad was from Missouri, and made my immigrant mom learn how to make it.
Saw these in Africa. Wrapped around a stick for about a dime each. They were cured to death though and tasted only salty.
You can buy them frozen in a food store, at least in Europe.
Beans with sausage and dried fruit. A dish from the Sarre area, where grandma was from.
My mom “invented” a dish we affectionately called “slop.” It was spaghetti sauce on rice. Born of leftovers, we all actually really liked it, so she’d make it for us occasionally. She also made creamed ground beef on toast - I think it was a much less salty version of creamed chipped beef, and a cheap, filling meal back when ground beef was cheap.
As I think back, the food I ate as a kid was pretty boring and benign - mostly because my mom was figuring it out as she went along. Her mother never allowed her to cook, so she had to learn on her own. Interestingly, my mom went on the have a very successful catering business in her 60s and 70s - she only just quit doing it shortly before turning 80.
Nothing my family ate would be considered “uncommon” today - dated and representative of a shameful era in American cuisine, certainly, but not exactly uncommon.
But my mother did make one dish that apparently, for that time and place, was quite exotic: tacos! (This was in upstate New York, Missouri, and Maryland in the 60s and early 70s.) I assume she picked up the dish from her older sister, who lived in Albuquerque NM for a long time.
There was one other way in which our family was apparently odd: we did not have bread at every meal. It seemed like whenever I ate over at a friend’s house, a standard part of the meal would be a plate of Wonder Bread or something similar, and a stick of margarine. I remember thinking that was strange, because it didn’t happen at home, but perhaps we were the weird ones?
Sliced beef tongue, in two inches of aspic. With horseradish as a condiment.
…and we liked it.
And here I thought I was odd because we always stirred yellow mustard into our baked beans.
My mother made this disgusting dish of pork chops baked in milk. NAST. We would all quietly weep inside whenever it appeared on the table.
Only thing I can think of is flank steak marinated overnight in Wishbone French Dressing then grilled on the charcoal grill. Serve with dressing as gravy. Mine is the only family that I’ve ever known of that had that. Still do It’s one of our favorite meals.
Mackerel patties, the poor man’s salmon croquette.
My husband’s family did that, and I found it very odd. Not only was it odd, but it’s damned near impossible to spread fresh-from-the-fridge margarine on Wonder bread without ending up with wads of torn bread with chunks of margarine on them.
My favorite comfort food as a kid was soft-boiled eggs mashed up with saltine crackers. I’ve never run into anyone else who had this, or who isn’t violently repulsed by the sound of it.
…doublechecking timestamps on thread.