A recent conversation brought up the idea of the weird foods we were raised with. This person grew up on the East Coast of the US, while I grew up in Northern BC, without television to influence my parents’ food buying choices. We had an amazing number of very specific weird childhood foods in common!
For example: creamed canned salmon with peas, on toast. This doesn’t, on the surface of it, seem particularly weird, except that the peas (of course) were from a can, therefore more grey than green, the ‘cream sauce’ had no actual cream in it (white flour, I believe), and the toast was white bread.
Another: canned soups such as tomato (bland liquid, pinkish because of added milk, no lumps) and cream of mushroom (bland whitish liquid, weird lumps). Nobody made soup from scratch when I was a kid. Maybe I’m the weird one, because I still see these products for sale in the stores, but who is eating them?
Memory flash: packaged chicken noodle soup, with needle-like noodles and a strange sharp flavour. This was considered to be a necessity when ill, despite the fact that the only detectable chicken was in the form of minute cardboard cubes.
Macaroni with canned tomatoes was a childhood staple in my house. This was elbow macaroni with a can of tomatoes dumped into it, with maybe some salt and pepper for seasoning. Otherwise, blah-nd. It was a favourite amongst the kids except me.
The east coast version added hamburger and V8 juice to the canned tomatoes and macaroni. They called it ‘American chop suey’ (really?? Weird!)
Another variant is what my mom called ‘guck’. This was hamburger cooked up with various (canned) veggies, including tomatoes and served with macaroni. Heavy on the macaroni. Some spices were added to this, so despite its name, it was edible.
Another way to eat burger (my favourite!) was cooking it up with onions, water added to make a thinnish gravylike sauce, the whole mess served on mashed potatoes. Lots of salt and pepper. Yumm. (Weird!) They had that on the east coast, too!
Many of my favourites as a kid are things I would now find inedible. I loved to broil slices of process cheese on toast until the cheese developed a thick blackish skin and cracked open to reveal the orange goo underneath. Sprinkle it with lots of seasoned salt, yumm. (Weeiiird)
I liked liver paste smeared on bread with tomatoes, lots of mayo and enough pepper to blacken the whole mess.
I used to like cheez whiz and strawberry jam sandwiches. This was all with white bread, of course, but at least my mom sometimes made the bread.
Speaking of homemade bread (this is not weird but talking about childhood food reminded me): fresh from the oven, smeared with butter (actually it was margerine then but I prefer butter now). YUMM…
Other weird pan-coastal childhood snacks: saltine crackers thickly smeared with margerine. Nobody ate butter then. Sometimes we’d stack them so there’d be several layers separated by margerine.
Baloney is weird. Period. Therefore, any combination of food involving baloney (excuse me, bologna) qualifies as weird. The weirdest being plain baloney sandwiches, followed closely by baloney with anything else.
Fried baloney. It served to help disguise the bland pinkness of the ‘meat’ with char, but really, why bother?
Do they even make baloney/balogna anymore?
Cheez whiz. An early version of kraft dinner was cheez whiz mixed with macaroni.
I’d say ketchup was weird, but I still eat it on fries, so I guess it doesn’t qualify. But in those days, I ate it with everything, including eggs. (weird!)
Everything from a can. Nobody grew food when I was growing up except for maybe cucumbers and tomatoes (for sandwiches). Although, to be fair, my grandparents generally had a lush garden (I remember weeding it). But who ate from it? Maybe it was the grownups. Aha! They ate the garden veggies and fed the kids the wieners with canned pork and beans (almost forgot that one…the ‘pork’ was really a glob of lard. Brrr).
They’ll claim it was because we refused to eat the veggies. Of course, all I remember being offered (and forced to stay at the table until I finished) was the disgusting canned stuff. Sitting at the table for hours holding a mouthful of canned peas that I couldn’t swallow because everytime I tried, I’d gag. (Anybody else belong to the ‘Clean Your Plate Club’ growing up?) Eventually I escaped by finding a way to spit it out unobserved.
Tomato sandwiches were weird even then! I’m talking about the kind of tomato sandwich we used to be sent to school with, which, by the time lunch rolled around, had turned into pink mush. Inedible even then.
Iceberg lettuce. The name says it all.
My kids will have their tales to tell of childhood weird foods. But the nature of the weird food offered them was different. Things like strange things in stir-fries and failed experiments which I’ve forgotten but they are doomed to remember forever.
I did briefly try forcing my kids to eat the food I put in front of them. But one of them put a stop to that by the simple expedient of vomiting into his plate.
Now why didn’t I think of that?
