I saw this on Facebook this morning and it took me back to my childhood. My mother was a good cook, but she cooked a few "normal" things like meat loaf, beef roast, pork roast, fried chicken, spaghetti. I remember the day she was excited to try a new recipe she'd just learned about. It was called "lasagna" and it ended up being so popular that it became part of her regular list of things to cook. My father loved Italian food so much he insisted he was part Italian, not Irish (to the best of my knowledge there is no Italian blood in my DNA).
I remember when my father tried this new food he heard about. You had to go to the store to get it. It was called "pizza." This little hole in the wall place in North Beach made the pizza when you came in. I got to stand on a box to make me tall enough to look over and see them making it--and they would give me pieces of cheese while t hey were putting it on the pizza. We never had things like "pepperoni" or "sausage." When we got the pizza, we would go to the liquor store next door and pick up a gallon jug of red wine for my father to have with his pizza.
I don't remember when my parents learned that you could order Chinese food and have it delivered. "Let's have C* food" (my parents always used the negative slang term for Chinese which I never realized was not polite until I was an adult). We usually had fried shrimp with hot sauce, fried rice, chow mein, and fortune cookies. I don't remember a vegetable dish, but we probably had at least one.
I remember waiting for seasons for fruits...you didn't have strawberries until strawberry season, or oranges until orange season (which was in the winter, so Santa could put oranges in our Christmas stocking).
I never had yogurt or curry foods until I was an adult. Most days we had oatmeal or cream of wheat for breakfast. Oatmeal was served with cream (real cream) and brown sugar and cream of wheat with white sugar. If we had cold cereal, it was either corn flakes or Rice Krispies...never sweetened cereals (did they sell them?). Lunch sandwiches were peanut butter & jelly, bologna, or tuna or egg salad, always on white "balloon bread" (which I still prefer)
I remember seeing pineapples, but didn't know how to cut one and I was an adult before I tried. My mother made pineapple upside down cake occasionally, but always with canned pineapple.
Things are so different today, and I suspect our kids had even stranger foods than most of their friends, since we often had food from the country of the guests we were hosting (I got to be a good Brasilian cook!) How many of our kids' friends knew about feijoada?
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
Happy Birthday, Char!
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