And on the Menu Tonight... Vomiting!

So people don’t like peas that much. This I gather from reaction to my question here yesterday about the most hated childhood dishes. They also dislike brussel sprouts, and really anything in the cabbage family. (Do you know you can’t eat  cabbage and broccoli and such  if you're breast-feeding? If you do your baby will draw up its legs and howl with stomach pain. You can’t have a whole lot of chocolate either or the child will be flying around the room like this baby in Gary Larson's famous Bellybutton Slipknot cartoon. (See left. We miss  you, Mr. Far Side! )Myself I try not to focus on things I dislike. Still, I'll never forget the first time and only time our mother gave us lobster.  It was  even more expensive then than it is now and for sure it was WAY beyond the range of what our little family usually ate. And here our mom had gone out and bought it for the 'young hooligans' as she sometimes called us. Bought it, boiled the big pot of water, committed the horrific act of murder-by-scalding, then cracked the lone lobster open and set out the melted butter.This is how Nan looked around the time of this experiment.This is how I looked.Mom might  have guessed we could never measure up to the high gastronomical bar she was setting for us.      Nan took her first bite and went "Ewww!! Ack!"  I took a bite and turned a kind of purple plaid.“Terry’s going to faint again!” Nan cried. (I was a tireless fainter: in church at the doctor’s office, during flag-raising ceremonies in school. And i really did turn a kind of mottled color just before I went sheet-white and keeled over backwards. But I didn’t faint. I ran from the room, hightailing it after Nan who had scooped up the fanciest wastebasket in the house, made from a kind of elegant rigid ricecloth, and spit the half-masticated lobster bite into it.  I watched it slither down inside the wastebasket and turned more of a Madras this time.  Then I threw up all over my  little sneakers, a pair of red P.F Fliers if memory serves. The next night we were back to nursery food, an ectoplasm of soft-boiled egg, a little toast, and a side order of canned spinach. And for the rest of my childhood every time I looked at that wastebasket I thought guiltily of Mom’s gallant effort to introduce us to a higher kind of living.Maybe fine food is like a Thomas Hardy novel: you have to get to a certain age before you can enjoy it.  

Clean Your Plate

People are heavier now than they used to be and to me that’s a mystery. When I think of all the bacon and eggs and pure suet devoured by my family of origin I really see why they all died of cardiac arrest.But food was different then, it's true. That classic Jell-O salad I referred to yesterday really was hugely popular. By the time the 60s were launched it had been sweetened with mini -marshmallows but a decade before that it was either the slimy syrup of canned fruit cocktail you saw imbedded there or the olives like these.  (Octopus eyes, eh?)It was no time to be young I can tell you. Children, powerless beings that they were, sat at the table and shut their mouths while the grownups droned on. Shut their mouths and tried as best they could to force down the food in front of them on account of all the starving children in (Europe, China Armenia -it depended on what country’s name your parents' parents drilled into their heads when they were young.)Everyone ate together and dessert was always served, though it was as likely to be what they called Fish-Eye Pudding as anything else.Fish-Eye Pudding was really Tapioca pudding with those little capsules of unchewable goo laced throughout it.We lived in fear for all our childhoods. What would they put in from of next? I live pretty fear-free now since I'm the one making the food. And when I go out I'm also safe. I don’t like carbonated drinks so I have no fear of the fast food joints and their super-sized calorie barrels. I'm not too crazy about any dish that makes me feel like an oil spill has occurred inside my mouth either so burgers and fries hold no fear for me.There’s really only one food that makes me shrink in horror and that is Creamed Chipped Beef. Sit me down in front of a plate of Creamed Chipped Beef and I’ll confess to anything rather than open my mouth.So…what vintage dish does that to YOU? Anything like the 10pm Set-Out you see here?  :-)