It was the Hershey Hotel in Hershey, PA. The city of my birth. Whilest that my parents and I lived there we were dirt poor. Lawn-chairs for living room furniture, baby sleeps in the closet kind of poor. (I was the baby.) My parents would look at this restaurant and hotel longingly in this time, saying things like “Someday we will be able to eat there/stay there” and other such things. Then going home to their one-bedroom apartment and colicky baby.
Fast-forward about 15 years. We now live in Iowa. Dad is a doctor; Mom owns her own business. Built their own house, take yearly family vacations, generally doing better than they ever thought they would. Think to themselves, let’s head back to Hershey and stay at that mega-expensive hotel and eat at that classy, classy restaurant! This will be their shout to the cosmos–“We have done it! We have succeeded!”
That’s the back-story. You need it for the emotional buildup.
We are at the restaurant. Dressed to the nines, prim and proper, elbows off the table. Mom and Dad beam to each other across the table. Sure the room we were staying in was small and cramped, outdated, and not worth whatever they paid for it. They had made it! Then the rowdy table next to us decides it would be a good time to take pictures of each other. It is so dark in that restaurant that each flash blinded us. Ok, ok, we could deal with that. My food comes. Had I mentioned it was dark? I push over the tiny little quail leg, or whatever it was and stab the first bit of meat I could see. Chew it. It’s not meat. It’s that little bit of crunchy cartilage at the end of the bone. Almost retch. Realize how much this meal means to my parents, swallow. Eat the rest of the meal, but can’t get the crunchy yuck out of my mind. The rest of the table feels much like myself. Meal is carried out in silence.
I guess the meal itself wasn’t so bad, but the mood sucked. Here was my parent’s shout of triumph, and it turned out that their dreams about this day were sooooo over-inflated. We checked out and moved into a Holiday Inn or somesuch place the next day.
My grandmother is the sweetest, kindest lady on earth. She helped raise me while my parents worked. She’s an absolute saint, and a funny, cool person. She is, however, the worst cook on God’s green earth. She cannot cook anything. Her meats are overcooked and dry to the point of being dessicating agents. Her vegetables are soggy and tasteless. Everything she cooks sucks ass.
A full list of the truly horrendous, inedible, stomach-turning crap my grandmother has served us over the years would take more server room than the SDMB has, but the worst cases would be:
1. The Night of the Veal
My Dad and my sister were out west once and my grandparents kept asking Mom and I to come over and have dinner. The night she finally relented, she had made an attempt to cook veal.
Veal is not easily prepared, and it showed. You had to see this stuff to believe it. She had baked it. On one side the veal was absolutely carbonated. Rock solid. On the other it was soggy and uncooked; I’m pretty sure she never thought to turn it over. She had mistimed the finishing times of the various items on the menu and so it was cold, too. It was indescribable - I have never eaten anything as disgusting. But we suffered through it. Dysentry was rampant in our household for some time afterwards.
2. Dressing It Up
On another occasion the whole family was over and we were having some overcooked, tasteless crap. A garden salad was presented and we all threw as much of it on our plates as we could, reasoning that the more salad we ate, the less of the hideous meat and starch stuff we’d have to eat. But then I tried putting the salad dressing on.
It SAID “French dressing” on the bottle, but what came out of the bottle was this weird multicoloured goop. I tasted it and it was utterly revolting. We had to ask, and you know what she’d done? She had taken a whole much of mostly-used bottles of dressing and MIXED THEM TOGETHER. French, Italian, 1000 Islands, Ranch, and Blue Cheese. Oh Lord, it was bad. Lordy lordy.
With regard to Lutefisk and VIRTEE’s difficulties with it, lutefisk is a Norwegian heritage food and lutefisk is not cooked with lye. Usually in is boiled with salt water. Lutefisk is cured with lye. Hunks of codfish, for all I know the whole damn thing, are thrown in a barrel and covered with a strong solution of lye water. You get the lye water by dribbling water through wood ashes. Once the cod has steeped for long enough for the fins to fall off, it is dredged out and dried. Once dry the stuff will not rot. At all, ever. In the old days it was bailed like hay and, once winter set in, was displayed on the sidewalk in front of the store where dogs peed on it with out noticeably altering its taste.
Lutefisk is the Norwegian’s iron ration. It is what you eat after you have eaten your shoes. Lutefisk is the last barrier between the Norwegian and starvation. Modern Norskis eat the stuff in celebration of the deprivations their ancestors suffered. There is a sort of macho thing about it on the order of eating live mice. Not one in a hundred, however, think that it is anything but disgusting.
As far as taste and texture goes, poorly prepared lutefisk can be an experience that will warp a guy’s outlook for the rest of his life. Well prepared, however, it is only a premonition of death. UF-DAH!