Very much an IMHO thing, but I find lamb to be one of those dishes which is very, Very easy to overcook. And the minute it passes medium, it tends to get noticeably tougher, loses most of it’s distinct flavor, and is left tasting strangely gamey to the majority of American palates.
But medium rareish leg of lamb with cloves of garlic inserted into paring knife pricked incisions, with sprigs of rosemary, properly rested and sliced thin is indeed the food of the gods.
Back to the OP - growing up, we ate what was prepared for the family, although if it wasn’t to taste, my parents were more than willing to make a quick PB&J for my brother or I, so that we didn’t go to bed hungry, but otherwise nothing special would be made. So there wasn’t a kids specific option, just a pretty utilitarian backup, which I felt was fair.
The two things I liked (and picked up from my dad) that other kids looked x-wise at me for were peel-and-eat-shrimp and smoked whitefish. My friends normally would only eat deep fried fish or shrimp (think Long John Silvers) but I wanted the P&E with lemon every single time. And my father was a huge fan of smoked whitefish, which admittedly, if heated, can make the whole house smell pungent, and most kids aren’t fond of food with finicky small bones, but I loved that distinct smokey-fish-salty flavor.
I still prefer the canned asparagus over fresh, I’ll lay out half a dozen on the side with a garden salad. Some older women at an old workplace when we had a “bring a plate” day would bring canned Asparagus on a slice of white bread with the crust cut off. Actually yum.
Same for me in the 50s/early 60s. Two sayings from my parents applied:
“You’ll eat what you’re given and you’ll like it”
“All the more for the rest of us”
That said, I think only liver was a problem, but I think that only appeared once or twice. I certainly ate pickles, kippers and occasionally shellfish from a chap who came round the streets on a Saturday afternoon (can you get winkles any more?)
Perhaps the oddest thing was a phase when I took to the dog’s biscuits.
I grew up in a time when the kids ate what the rest of the family ate once they graduated from baby food. But there were already children’s cereal and it was expected that most kids would get and enjoy PB&J for lunch. We were all supposed to hate liver, Brussels sprouts, and canned spinach. I got braunschweiger for lunch or bologna because the docs imagined I was allergic to peanuts and have always loved liver. Sprouts I didn’t take a liking to until I could cook them myself so they weren’t watery and overcooked. Canned spinach is still a hard no. But I do like spinach.
Cafe au lait here, made by Mom just before bedtime. I think I was around 5 too when that started. I wonder if that’s why having caffeine before bed doesn’t affect my sleep.
Herring beet salad (rosolli) yum! We ate whatever Mom cooked.
Escargot. I’m not sure how I first tried them but I was really young. I alway used to get them as an appetizer whenever they were on the menu (which used to be more often back in the 70s).
Funny thing I don’t remember the last time I had them. Mainly because you hardly ever see them anymore. Of course anything is good when drowned in herbed garlic butter.
As a child, I loved pickled herring with onions. I don’t think we had it with sour cream back then but that’s how I still enjoy it today.
Also jellied pork hocks. Basically pork bits in savoury aspic. We would sprinkle vinegar over it for extra zest. It was essentially a peasant dish but very tasty. Looked something like the picture below, similar to headcheese. To this day I still enjoy the aspic that surrounds some fancy French patés because it reminds me of it. I also like sliced headcheese as a coldcut.
Yeah, I ate them like the fruit they are. I also loved grapefruit. Fortunately, we had a tree of each in the backyard. We also had an orange tree, but it was a Valencia tree, so the fruit was too sour for eating. I know. It’s inconsistent. But I like my oranges sweet.
Urg, hate aspic.
We always ate what we were given or we went hungry…until we were old enough to handle feeding ourselves.
I always try to figure out why my siblings and I will eat most foods and enjoy them and I think my first idea is that there was a little Chinese place by our church and we went there on many happy Sundays and got the family meal and I can’t remember anything we didn’t inhale. Add to that one set of grandparents from the Pacific Northwest and the others from Oklahoma/Texas/Alabama and we were exposed to seafood, chili, weird but cheap food like weenies in a can, mincemeat gravy, etc but really just a wide variety of food and while we might not have to eat something we really hated we were NEVER , I mean, not ever, offered any substitute for what the grownups ate. Probably my earliest grown up food was stealing homemade canned smoked salmon from my Pacific Northwest grandparents and eating it in a garage with saltines. I also loved scallops when I was very young but I don’t know if scallops changed or my taste buds have but they are the one seafood I don’t love anymore.
We were lucky also that my mother was an excellent cook but would also do Campbell’s soup casseroles one night then on weekends we would have teriyaki chicken or fajitas and we ate lots of fish (cod usually) as a regular weeknight dinner. I did like steak when I was very young but I thought it should be pretty burned like charcoal like my grandfather would make it until my early twenties.
Thing that happened to me, as a young’un, I was te tomao juice kid. Not tat is an adult food, as such, but man was I into that stuff. Then one dinner, my mom put out a tomato aspic. I mean, I will never understand the appeal of aspics in general, and it might have been ok, but she put the one foodstuff of wrongness that makes me gag: green bell pepper. That experience put me off tomato juice since.
My mom has always told me that my first word was “broccoli.”
And as a little kid, I loved any and all seafood, including things a lot of my current adult friends would not even consider trying. Mussels, oysters, octopus, pickled herring, anchovies, sardines, sashimi, shellfish.
I also loved vegetables in general. And sparkling water, which is another one my current adult friends won’t touch.
We were, of course, expected to eat what the adults ate and were not indulged with separate meals if we didn’t like what was on offer, but we were also human and did actually have preferences anyway.
On the “fight me, I’m not eating this” side… I was borderline fearful of spicy foods. My dad liked REALLY spicy foods and would often want me to eat foods of lots of different heat levels. Worse, he would swear it wasn’t spicy when it very much definitely was. Sometimes, I think that was just a “oh my god stop complaining and eat it” thing and sometimes it was “lol look at her face when I feed her this pepper.” So I was wary of anything that looked like it might be spicy, including red sweet peppers and paprika. I did try to be a good kid, but I can see now that I was pretty difficult in a lot of ways and this was one of those areas where I was prepared to take the beating and have to sit in my room or at the table all night long.
I do like spicy foods now and, although I’m vegetarian and don’t eat seafood anymore (and yes, I do miss it), I still eat plenty of things (like almond butter, seaweed, chickpeas, and freeze dried fruit) that make my picky meant-and-potatoes friends squeal.
Not something completely different, either when I was a kid or when my kid were young. Maybe something a little bit modified, like spaghetti with no sauce or something like that. What actually happened more often was that I ate something different than my husband and kids, since I’m not a fan of chicken feet or jellyfish and they are. They liked all sorts of “un-childlike” foods, which caused some surprised servers at restaurants, because they absolutely wouldn’t order from the kids’ menu, which back then was chicken nuggets/hot dog/burger etc.
My dad likes sardines, but he had to give them up after having a couple of gout attacks. He would offer some to us kids, but we all refused to indulge. I’ve never had them, either.
As for parents making kids eat things they didn’t like, I’ve heard, more than once, some variation of, “The first and last time I forced a child to eat something, I ended up cleaning the whole meal off the floor.”
Huh, I’ve never heard that. We generally made the kids try a “no thank you helping”, about two bites, of anything unfamiliar. Except when they were five. Five years old are picky eaters, we told them, and you don’t need to eat anything you dislike when you are five. With the expectation that they had to try new foods again when they turned six.
My husband and i are both picky eaters, but our kids eat most things, and aren’t afraid of trying new foods. So i fell that strategy worked.
You’ve very possibly never heard that because the people who end up cleaning the meal off the floor generally don’t just make the kids try a couple of bites of unfamiliar food. I’m assuming @nearwildheaven is talking about the same situation where I’ve heard something similar , where the parent “forced” the child to either eat the whole serving of a disliked food or finish a meal after they said they were full and the kid vomited - except the people I know weren’t all smart enough to learn after the first time.
