“Bars” Long before anyone who was nobody heard of biscotti, mom knew how to fossilize the right mixture of flour and sugar. Remember how the Children of Israel had to stomp straw into mud to make bricks in “The Ten Commandments?” Mom’s recipe allowed substitution of coconut flakes for the straw.
“Jell-O Salad” Two words that should never go together. Especially if this means lime Jell-O, mini marshmallows and shredded carrots. When this combination of consistencies hits your soft palate, your gorge says “hey, this feels like vomit, but it’s going in the wrong direction,” much as its cousin the sphincter responds to buggery.
“Casserole” Who could fuck this up? Noodles with tuna or Spam (or how about both and call it Paiea?), with a can of Campbell’s’ (“Campbell’s,” “McDonald’s” – why do Americans have to slander Scotland while insulting our own palates?) cream-of-whatever soup glopped all over it. How about a crunchy topping? Sure, gourmet casserole has shoestring potato sticks or onion ring topping, but you kids like crumbled soda crackers just fine. Hey – aren’t these the same frozen peas that Dad had in his lap all weekend after his vasectomy? “So what,” Mom insists,” they’re still good! They’re just fine.”
Salisbury steak. I still can’t eat hamburger patties swimming in gravy. The last time I ate it (about age 8), I ralphed it right back up all over my plate. She never made it again if I was within 5 miles of home.
Just the title of this thread brought up a long-suppressed memories. Mom used to make something she called “Italian Wop Delight” (yes, that’s both racism and redundancy). It was fried Italian sausage, bell peppers (capsium), and onions. Gave me heartburn before I know what the word for it was.
Not my mom. Dad was in charge of dinner for many years because he got home from work first. He loved to “cook.”
Mr. “One-Pot” – yeah, I like the entire meal to taste like Worcestershire sauce and cumin. Big slimy onions all over everything, and lots of pepper.
Instant spuds and Minute Rice – bleh. Also – I liked butter on my taters. But if he had made gravy (and he always did), God forbid that I should quietly get up and fetch the butter dish: “Whaddya need butter for? I made gravy right here! (grumbling to my mom) I went to all the trouble of making gravy, and she doesn’t want any!” Repeat every time we had potatoes for 17 years. :rolleyes:
On the other hand, when Mom cooked – yum. Real carrots, tender, glistening with butter. Real mashers, with lumps and everything. Golden baked chicken with crispy skin.
My mother came from a family where all the MEN were great cooks…my grandfather, my uncle, my cousin. Just my luck.
I don’t remember anything that was perfectly horrid, just…bland. Suburban '60s food. I swear she bought garlic by the CLOVE. Probably because my Old Man would’ve gagged if she’d produced anything with flavor.*
Meanwhile, my grandpa and uncle were nightly whipping up Old World delights, living like the fuckin’ Mayor of Prague and his son.
*Couple years after my Mom died, my Old Man was definitely on the decline healthwise, and I was visiting. My sister, who lived with him, told me he had no appetite anymore. He wanted steak one night. So I did what I do at home…rubbed a couple of rib-eyes with cut onion and garlic, seasoned with salt and fresh-ground pepper (had to dig out an old decorative pepper grinder) and oregano. He poked at one and pronounced “It stinks.” I told him, no, it was SEASONED. I grilled them and served them up and he INHALED his. Of course he wouldn’t think to compliment anyone, but my sister told me she hadn’t seen him eat like that in months.
I did not have a mom but my dad made this ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE CRAP ALL THE TIME, here is the EVIL recipe:
cook a bag of egg noodles (flat, skinny ones), in an oven safe bowl mix in 2 cans of tuna fish (lightly drained), top with a can of Campbells mushroom soup, bake in a 350 degree oven until the top gets crusty, FORCE your children to eat this crap (it encourages them to move out as quickly as they can).
Nothing with fins that came out of the water was edible after Mom got through with it. And I like fish. But, not Mom’s.
OH, THE RAMPAGING SHITS I HAD FROM MOMMA’S FISH!!!
My brother and I would lovingly pick blackberries under the hot Southside Viginia sun,bring them home to Mama to make"TOXIC cobbler". The berries would be rendered into a medicinal bitter mush topped by a corrosive crust as tough as shoe leather.
Once she opened the oven to check on her Birkenau berry blunder and a small mouse was trapped in the heat of the oven. Mama screamed, the poor mouse jumped in the cobbler, my brother yelled "It was a suicide! But he died for us all.
I liked everything my mom made, except for ONE THING - an offensive puss-oozing open sore on the face of all things culinary - which she called, innocuously enough “Greek Meat Rolls”.
They were the most foul, putrid, gut-wrenching things I have ever had the displeasure of seeing set before me on the dinner table.
Ever since I first encountered this monstrosity, I stated very clearly, and for the record, that I did not like the things.
So whenever I came back to visit from college, she made them the first night I was there, without fail.
Sincerely funny stuff, Sojourner; hooted out loud on that one.
Man, this thread brings back some hideous memories. My grandmother (an excellent cook, btw) did the instant milk thing. ::shivers::
My mom didn’t like cooking to begin with, and it sounds like she used the same cookbooks/product label recipes so common in the 60’s. Some of 'em were actually pretty tasty, in a retro, comfort food way. But two stand out for real ghastliness:
"Salmon croquettes", which were just canned salmon (skin and bones left in), seasoned madly with dried onion flakes, egg for binder, ground cracker meal outside and fried. Dry as wallboard but the capping grotesquerie was the “sauce”: nothing more than a medium white sauce with disgusting grayish-green canned peas in it.
Sputniks (doncha love it?): hamburger meatballs with instant rice mixed in. Of course they were richly seasoned–maybe–with a little salt and pepper. Just grayish hamburger spheres with weird, crunchy little rice projections sticking out. They looked obscene and tasted worse.
Her pineapple upside down cake was sickeningly sweet. Her salmon casserole was absolutely awful (she used that canned stuff too). But her Glop was delicious. It consisted of leftovers and gravy. My mom made good gravy.
My mom is actually a pretty decent cook, but my step-mom… that’s where all my culinary horror stories come from. A few examples off the top of my head:
•Meatloaf. Rather, stepmmom’s celery loaf. She put so much celery in it, and so little flavor, to this day I can’t even look at a meatloaf.
•“Veggie” soup. An excuse to empty the fridge.
• Instant milk. We refused to drink it, so they started cutting 2% with instant. After a while, I refused that as well. I love milk, but won’t drink less than 2%.
• Instant mashed potatoes. Usually burned on the bottom, so instead of lumps, just little chunks of charcoal in each bite. Mmmm…
• Salmon patties. Much like the croquettes, made from canned salmon. Even the cats turned up their noses.
In general, most meals were overcooked and underseasoned and fresh ingredients were never a priority.
To this day my mother can’t cook worth a damn. Her worst, though, is Hamburger Stew: Ground beef, big chunks of potato (with the white-hot nuclear centre), onions (not chopped or sliced, no, nice big chunks), and water. MAYBE some salt and pepper. That is the entire list of ingredients. Let me tell you, you have not experienced bland until you’ve tried this stuff. Also, she didn’t break up the ground beef properly, so you would get big chunks that were cold in the middle. It’s worse than it sounds, really. When I was old enough to get my own way some of the time, this was the one thing I would absolutely refuse to eat, no matter how hungry I got.
I don’t know how my sisters and I survived our childhoods because my mum was a shocking cook. Still is unfortunately.
But the one thing that stands out above all the other horrid things we had to endure was Chop Suey. Basically it was minced meat, green beans and a packet of Chicken Noodle soup swimming in ‘See-yu’ sauce (they didn’t call it soy sauce in Aus. back in the sixties). Seeing that stuff cooking on the stove induced an immediate bout of anorexia for me.
My mama is still an excellent cook and was always trying new recipes to keep us kids interested in eating dinner together as a family.
There was this ONE NIGHT though, where she makes "meatballs mole’ " - some sort of mexican dish that marries chocolate and tomato sauce. We sat down to dinner sans Dad because he was working a bit late. All three of us kiddos took a bite, shuddered, made faces, offended Mom greatly and were sent off to bed immediately - it seems we insulted her with our reactions :rolleyes:
We hear Dad arrive home a few minutes later, Mom tells him how she’s been slaving over the stove all day to serve us this new dish and we hurt her feelings. Dad rousts us all from our beds and tells us to get back to the table and eat our dinner. Dad joins us and takes his first bite.
My mom was a great cook, so I don’t mean to slander her, but she fell down sometimes with cooked vegetables. Who knew that spinach could attain the consistency of stringy vomit, replete with chunks of potato? Or that zucchini could become slimy, viscous evilness in the wrong hands? Now, I like both spinach AND zucchini, but not cooked. Oh no, never cooked.
