Actually lutefisk, like cardboard, is edible with enough melted butter.
And you, Chronos, devour all things eventually. With or without butter.
That cheese was something! Mild flavor like american cheese, but a little sharper and with out the rubbery texture/plasticity of american singles. I seek out and love all sorts of cheese-from the strongest blue to the gooiest, long aged soft cheeses and still think fondly of that cheese!
Boiled eggs and potatoes with mustard sauce. According to my mom, German peasant food. Mustard sauce was made with a roux, then yellow mustard was dumped in. It was served hot. It sounds gross to some people, but I loved it.
My mother made a dish back in the 1960’s that is certainly not common now (thank Christ!), but I suspect may have been back then…probably snaffled from the Australian Women’s Weekly cookery pages. I swear this publication alone was probably single-handedly responsible for the onset of food refusal and eating disorders…virtually unknown prior to the 1960’s!
Anyway, it was called Chop Suey, a concession to the introduction of Chinese cuisine in Australia, along with dim-sims and other abominations. Basically it was minced-meat, fried up with an onion and green beans and cabbage, then stewed in a broth of (reconstituted) dehydrated Continental Chicken Noodle Soup. It was friggin’ disgusting.
And as I’ve said in many a thread over the years, I don’t know how my sibs and I survived childhood with a mother who was such an atrocious cook! RIP mum…still love ya and all, but my GOD…what were you THINKING back then? 
Cinnamon toast. Spread margarine onto white bread, sprinkle sugar on top of that and cinnamon on top of that, then stick it under the broiler of the oven till it was crusty. Loved it.
Haven’t got much to compare with some of the stuff already mentioned. Personal least common thing for me probably would have been peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. Loved those things.
My Mom made a killer city chicken, which seems to be a Western PA-Eastern Ohio thing. Looking back, I bet it would have been even better with a mango or tomato chutney, if we’d have known such things existed at the time.
My Dad was the most adventurous eater in the family; he was the main consumer of chicken gizzards, hearts, etc. He liked scrapple too. The entire rest of the family left him to it.
My mom insisted on serving liver once every two weeks or so. I ate it, but I distinctly recall that when I first moved out of the house, I thought to myself, “Well, one benefit is that I’ll never have to eat liver again.” And I haven’t.
That’s funny, I worked with two guys who both grew up poor and they were rhapsodizing about that cheese. They both said that they wish they could find it in stores.
When I was a kid we’d make up a batch of popcorn and eat it the usual way: hot with butter and salt.
But then we’d save the leftover popcorn and eat it for breakfast the next day. And we’d eat it like cereal: unheated, in a bowl, with milk and sugar.
That’s a time-honored tradition harking all the way back to Pilgrim days. Good stuff!
I thought I invented those! Peanut butter, bologna, cheddar cheese and lettuce. Best sammich ever!
My dad’s favorite snack was Vienna sausages on saltine crackers. That’s like eating a spoonful of salt with a heaping helping of saturated fat!
Being from the south, I have seen many servings of cornbread mixed with buttermilk, mostly the older generations who have since passed. I don’t see it anymore.
Together? Very unusual, at least to me. Cracklins go in the cornbread.
Many of the things mentioned in this thread seem like common things for a particular region. Rhubarb, gooseberry, and sugar cream pie are three wonderful creations from where I grew up.
About miscellaneous chicken parts- there is a local restaurant here that serves up a mighty good fried chicken gizzard plate. Chicken livers are available too. The first high school I taught in had fried chicken day every Wednesday. The lunch ladies cooked up the livers, hearts, and gizzards and put them in the teachers’ lunch area. Yum!
I have noticed fresh chicken feet in the grocery stores lately. I find it curious that they are labeled “Chicken Paws”.
I have fond memories of that cheese as well. We got it in giant 3 pound (I think) blocks. If you could get a reasonable sized slice off it (challenging) it was the best cheese for making grape jelly & cheese sandwiches.
Ha! I saw the title of the thread and came rushing in here to say, Chicken gizzards!
Now, my daddy was a butcher so we ate every part of everything you can and don’t want to think of. We usually had gizzards with the chickens’ hearts and livers, too. I would love to have a dish of those again.
We ate other “offal”: beef brains, tongue. And at other times, we ate the choicest cuts, like Del Monaco (NY Strip Steak). Mm-mm, I don’t think you can be raised like that and become a vegetarian with any conviction.
Oyster dressing. I’m not sure how common that is outside of Louisiana.
Squirrel, either fried up like chicken, or boiled with rice. We would boil the heads with the rice and crack the skulls open and spoon out the brain. It was really cool to find a brain that was nice and smooth intact. We also ate all the meat around the head of it and the tounge.
My Dad always raised hogs, so of course hogs head cheese, which I think some might refer to as “souse”… lets see, my brothers and Dad would eat the lungs and some other innard part, but they called it “lights”… I didn’t like that part.
A couple times we had turtle, and there is dove season in the fall, where a group of guys would start early the morning of dove season and be evening, we’d be eating dove.
Chicken gizzards fried up are very normal still around here. We only have one grocery store but it has a great deli that sells fried gizzards and livers every day.
I love gizzards and livers and they are a cheap meat as far as a meal, I have just gotten to where I don’t like frying anything. I will just stop by the deli sometimes and get my fix of gizzards and livers.
Us neither. Which led to some strange adolescent hunger situations, like eating things straight from the freezer, and making a detour back to the house after taking a digger off your bike and your neighbor finding you crawling around in the road looking for your teeth and her picking you up to take you to the dentist, in order to put the peanut butter away and wash the knife so you didn’t get caught eating without permission.
Oh yeah, my father would stop and examine a rabbit or squirrel that he had run over, and if the meat was good he would take it home and eat it. My father grew up after the Depression but his family did not get the memo that the Depression was over. Got a few strange food stories due to his upbringing.
Growing up, I thought this was a regional thing. As an adult, I’ve been surprised to learn that it must have been a family thing, because the only people who have ever heard of this are related to me.
But I grew up eating pancakes with Jolly Green Giant corn niblets mixed into the batter.
Corn is sweet – it’s friggin’ delicious.
I remember going to Perkins pancake house when I was little and crying when I got my pancakes because they didn’t have corn in them and were therefore, WRONG. The waitress couldn’t do anything to fix it because I don’t think they had canned corn on hand at Perkins. My stepmother thought we were crazy – we moved in with her and my dad when I was about 11 – the first Saturday breakfast we also got cornless pancakes and pitched fits.
I still make them this way, as does my sister. I will occasionally make blueberry or pecan or something conventional, but my go-to comfort food is corn pancakes and eggs.
I suspect it started with my Grandmother and her massive garden. Probably had a bumper crop of corn one year and she was desperate to figure out how to use it all up so BAM into the pancake batter.
My stepmom used to lay down bacon on the waffle iron, let it cook a second (not long enough, IMO – she should have crisped it first) and then poured waffle batter over it. That’s really good too, if you’re a bacon face.
I can think of some other oddities like mayo samiches and buttered saltines, but corn pancakes.
If you have heard of this or had them, please let me know because I think my family are culinary freaks.
My first husband loved when I would make bacon pancakes. I did it maybe twice. I would cook and drain and crumble the bacon then put it on the skillet and top it with pancake batter.
I think corn in pancakes sounds fine (not ideal, but okay). Did you use syrup? I’m probably okay with it because of our eating syrupy cornbread!
Yes, maple syrup, although now I either use real maple syrup (at like $8 a bottle or something ridiculous, but OMG totally worth every penny) or will make syrup out of whatever fruit I have on hand.
Let me know, if you try it, how you like it.