Tropicalsenior

Do you have a good recipe or can you find one? Unfortunately, my grandmother did not write down her her recipes anywhere. To be perfectly truthful, I'm not even sure that she knew how to read or write. I have tried quite a few recipes from the internet and could never get the bread to rise. We thought about keeping one batch so that if anybody tried to break into the house we could beat them to death with it. I finally converted the flavors ingredients to a quick bread so that I get the taste but not the texture. Strangely enough, one of the flavors in the bread is anise. If you could help me

This reminds me of another hated German food from my childhood. Every year my grandmother made a couple tons of springerle cookies and they were required eating. To me, they were nasty little squares of anise-flavored plaster of Paris. Oh how I hated them! I always had visions of my teeth breaking off at the roots and even if you soaked them in something hot they still had that terrible anise flavor. To this day, I hate the taste or smell of anise. I used to tell my girls that licorice was made from everything that was scooped up from the factory floor at the end of the day just so

Wow! Let's hope they stay this way. My grandson would eat anything at 5 but he was raised in a restaurant atmosphere and had eaten in just about every type that there was.

From your bookmarks into mine.

Thank you, a very interesting presentation. Through his own family history he is able to illustrate the tremendous influence that the Chinese have had on the food of the world.

I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the internet or to television. I've witnessed that influence in action in the 30 years that I've been in Costa Rica. The older generation, 40s and up, would just as soon stay with their beans and rice and arroz con pollo. Maybe once in a while they'll go to McDonald's or KFC but they will not venture out of their food comfort zone. The younger people are more willing to try just about anything. We have sushi restaurants all over the place now. Thirty years ago, no one would have gone to them.

That looks like a wonderful movie and I definitely want to see it. Unfortunately they don't speak any English so it wouldn't be much fun for them. But thank you very much.

And there seems to be no logical rhyme or reason for all of our food preferences. We seem to be born with a natural affinity or abhorrence to certain foods. I have noticed that the way that young children are introduced to new foods does influence their willingness to be more adventurous. But it doesn't reduce those strong likes and dislikes, be it textural, taste, or visual. Speaking of visual, my grandmother had one of the most beautiful patches of asparagus that you would ever see. Each spring we would watch them sprout from the ground. No way was I ever going to eat those things. The

You are much too young to have lived through the elegant days of the dining car. Unfortunately they went the same way that the food went in the airplanes. Many eons ago, I worked for a company that did catering for the airlines and some of the meals that we put out were spectacular. There is just nothing spectacular nowadays about a bag of pretzels. The only time that I ever took a train ride that was long enough to take advantage of the dining car, I was much too poor to participate. By the way, that was when I was 18 and escaping from sauerkraut in Nebraska.

Seriously, you do have to admire people that can survive in conditions like that.

I love your food preferences. When my grandson was little, he would eat anything and he and I loved to go together to find the different foods. And we loved to hunt out the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants and get to know the interesting people that made these things. We lived in Seattle where there were hundreds of them. He's 44 now and has a very versatile food pallet. I'm sure that he would eat hakarl.

I went to the internet and found this, and this is disgusting enough but the young man that wrote the article that I read said that they did it even worse in the area where he lived. They split the shark open and filled it full of other fish and sewed it up before they buried it to ferment (let's be honest about it, it's rotting). Then they ate the whole rotten mess. Taste aside, this can't be good for you. I think those people have had their brains frozen a few too many times.

Some ethnic group in Alaska loves "ice cream" made from frozen whale blubber and strawberries, are you up for that? If so, come to Costa Rica and I'll make you some, as soon as our next shipment of whale blubber comes in.

I'll bet it doesn't cost $1,000 either.

Thank you, because I was about to go back and look through everything that you had written. And that might take me a while.

I don't know how this one got past me. But you have got to be kidding me. Was it @liuzhou that posted an article about a young Icelandic man that wouldn't eat fermented shark? It seems that they slit the shark down the middle and pack it with other fish then bury it until it is totally fermented (rotten). Just the description of the fish inside at the end is enough to give you terminal food poisoning. How have these people survived that all these years? Do we have any Icelandic eGers that can explain this.

I do too but the Nicaraguan couple that I share my house with just shudder at the thought. Carlos is pretty adventurous and will eat just about anything but he draws the line at sushi. Rosario could exist on beans and rice if that was all I would feed her. I've been feeding them a lot of tonkatsu which they love, and I finally got them convinced that if they go to a sushi restaurant with me that they can always get tonkatsu.

I don't know if old food myths can be considered history, but they are a history of how our thinking about food has changed through the years.

Yeah, you're right. It was just something that I read years ago. Seriously though, dining cars were a big thing and one big item in the collectors Market nowadays is the dinnerware that was used on the trains.

Wrong topic, however, the Internet won't back me up on this but maybe he was one of the first to figure out the double fry method.

No, I left Nebraska when I was 18 to get away from it. As far as I know all the rest of them are still back there eating sauerkraut.

Have you ever had pastrami? If you like that you will love corned beef and cabbage.

One of the funniest food rant articles that I ever read was from a young Scandinavian man that couldn't stand gefilte fish. In fact it was that article that put me in mind of this topic. I've tried them and I agree with you.

I had to go to the internet on that one and I am with you 100%. It sounds too much like the head cheese that my mother-in-law used to make. I have low gag reflexes but that one got me every time. ** but then come to think of it, everything she cooked did.

Some years back @liuzhou introduced a topic, So I would like to revive it but with a slight twist. Is there a food that is so fundamental to your family or to your ethnic group that it is almost mandatory eating but you can't stand it? Mine is sauerkraut. My father's family is German, all German, 100% German and everybody ate sauerkraut. I hated potluck style family reunions with my father's family. At least half the family brought something with sauerkraut. Sauerkraut salad, anyone? I couldn't stand the smell of the place. Every fall my grandmother made sauerkraut, huge cro