Food memories.....

[hillvalley]

In her blog JennyUptown asked people to share their food memories. I had the same idea during my blog, but forgot to get around to it. Here is me getting around to it!

*  What is your first food memory?

*  What is the food you can remember hating?

*  What food do you associate with a particular age, say being six years old? Being in college?

*  Think of your favorite person growing up - a friend, a special aunt, a teacher, etc. - and name the first food that comes to mind when thinking of that person

I love corn beef. Yes I know I spelled it wrong, that is just how I think it's spelled.

Jewish rye, deli mustard and as much meat as the bread could hold. Grandma always brought down a couple of pounds when she came to visit. (She brought a ton of food, but that's a whole other thread.) One year on visitors day at sleep away camp, when I was about 11, she brought me a pound of corn beef.

That night after my family left I walked around camp eating corn beef, slice by slice. Normally we were supposed to turn in whatever food was left, but for some reason they didn't take my corn beef. A few years later, when I was a CIT, I asked one of the counselors why I had gotten away with breaking the most important rule. (The story was a bit infamous by then) She replied that the head counselor told everyone to leave me alone because she had never seen anyone enjoy cornbeef that much.

Now, when I eat corn beef, I think of my Grandma and how one of my favorite people brought my favorite food to my favorite place.

Edited to add Jenny's quote. I forgot it! Sorry.

Edited January 14, 2004 by hillvalley (log)

[FistFullaRoux]

Maybe this should be about your favorite food in a favorite place. My favorite food memory isn't even my favorite food, but it was so perfect.

As a kid, on my grandfather's back steps, eating the pears from the tree in the back yard. On summer afternoons, the back steps were the shadiest spot around. He'd take out his pocket knife (which was one of the few things I decided I wanted to keep after he passed away), and cut off a slice of those hard little pears that never seemed to get fully ripe and hand it to me, then he'd cut off a slice for himself, and we'd watch the world go by. It was perfect.

It's the only time I can really say I enjoyed pears.

[GSBravo]

My grandmother passed away many, many years ago and her funeral was one of those traditional Southern ones.

The family and friends gather 'round to remember the dearly departed. And we eat. A lot. You may know, or have heard, that at Southern funerals everyone brings food over.

The food that is bought in ranges from the mundane (the Aunt who picked up a bucket o'chicken) to the sublime (macaroni 'n cheese from the oven, ham, BBQ). There is enough food to feed a small army. I kid you not.

Someone had bought over a peanut butter pie. Made from scratch. I had never had it before. I figured I like peanut butter, so let's give it a try. This was the best thing I had ever eaten. I kid you not, I mean it was real good. I probably ate half of it.

Soon there was one slice left and I was in the kitchen eyeballing it when one of my cousins came in. She asked what it was. I told her. She asked if it was any good. Without hesitation I told her it was the nastiest thing I had ever eaten. I finished it off after she left the room.

Then there was that time with my sister where I ate half of her soft serve cone in one bite.

[morela]

I think I developed my palate the most by eating play dough. Wasn't much into paste, though.

Now you can even make microwave play dough.

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/7875/recip3.html

[JennyUptown]

One of my fondest food memories is making apple pies with my grandmother. Whenever Nana wanted to make a different kind of pie (lemon meringue, which I found disgusting, was her personal favorite), I'd plead and beg and cajole until she agreed to make an apple one in addition.

But even though I liked the pie, what I really liked was eating the apples, covered in cinnamon and sugar, out of the pie pan before she could put the top crust on.

[Mudpuppie]

I think I developed my palate the most by eating play dough. Wasn't much into paste, though.

Heh! I can distinctly remember the metallic taste of the spines of Little Golden Books.

My best memory, though, is eating corn on the cob with my grandpa. My grandpa never met a meal he didn't like -- seriously. Each meal he ate was the best ever; he'd spend the entire mealtime, plus the three hours following, talking to anyone who'd listen (or wouldn't) about how great that meal was. But corn on the cob was his favorite, dentures notwithstanding. He could eat 8 or 10 ears in one sitting.

I'd visit my grandparents in Indiana during the summer. Grandpa and I would go to the farmstand to by a bushel, then we'd sit in the yard, husk the things, and talk. Grandma would boil them up. If it was too hot in the house (and it often was), we'd eat those ears on the front porch, butter dripping off our elbows onto the concrete.

Grandpa was just about the messiest eater alive. Even though he'd wipe his face constanly with a wadded up, corn-soaked napkin, he would literally have corn ear-to-ear when he was done. (The napkin, in the end, only served as a corn vector.)

I can't imagine ever having a better memory. It's only coincidentally about food.

[Pan]

* What is your first food memory?

Sorry, I don't remember what memory is first!

Hmmmm...Well, I remember that when I was little, I actually used to like Chef Boyardee, though I soon graduated to Ronzoni or Buitoni ziti with tomato and meatball sauce made by my mother from scratch from Ada Boni's recipe in Il Talismano della Cucina. But it took longer before I had my first taste of real parmesan and romano cheese, not that yucky stuff that came out of a jar or can (which I didn't think was yucky when there was nothing better to compare it to).

I remember that I used to eat no part of chicken except the skin (and, I guess, the giblets). I called the skin "skinflesh" (pronounced "skinflush"). My mother used to chop up little bits of the breast, I think, and sneak it into soup I ate. It was sneaky, but I liked the soup. She was worried I wasn't getting enough nutrition.

I liked milk and pronounced it "melk" until I was 7. I remember one time when I was little but I'm not sure how little. We were visiting the summer house of an artist my father knew. I drank so much milk I got an upset stomach and my crap was white for 24 hours or so.

* What is the food you can remember hating?

Peas! Cucumbers were my favorite green vegetable, and I liked broccoli, but I hated peas. I actually still don't love them, except if they're flash-blanched for 30 seconds or so, just cooked but not mealy. And brussels sprouts. They were so bitter! I still find them bitter. They have to be boiled to death or otherwise cooked a long time for me to like them.

* What food do you associate with a particular age, say being six years old?

Pop Tarts. I forgot to mention them. I used to love Pop Tarts and eat them for breakfast most every school day. I wanted to have two but my mother wanted me to stop at one. There were also things called Breakfast Treats that I really liked. Very chocolatey. My parents decided pretty quickly that they were too rich, and stopped buying them. I also remember the lunches that my mother packed in my astronauts-themed lunchbox: A salami or peanut better and jam or cheese (cheddar, swiss, never American) sandwich, one or two little Mott's apple juice cans, some celery and carrots, an apple or pear or perhaps a peach or plum, and perhaps some cookies or a Ring-Ding. In the lunchroom, I sometimes bought a Hostess apple, cherry or - could it be? - pineapple pie.

The other thing that was common for breakfast was cereal. I think I liked Frosted Flakes, Corn Flakes, and Rice Crispies.

Being in college?

The meal plan was disgusting, so I got into on-campus apartments with cooking facilities in my sophomore year. I remember frying eggs in EVOO with sherry and eating them on Pepperidge Farm Branola or oat bread or toast as a quick meal. I remember my scrambled egg dishes with garlic, onions, tomatoes, basil, oregano, black pepper, cheese and wine over toast - a staple of mine in those days, really, and damned satisfying. I remember experiments of boiling chicken legs with sauteed onions, lemon juice, lemon zest, orange juice, broccoli, and sometimes ultimately adding some kind of cheese (not that great).

I also remember late-night trips to a diner in White Plains, NY, and meals of overly oily but tasty sandwiches (called Balboas) and french fries at a diner about 1/2 mile outside of campus called the Hilltop, IIRC. I remember late-night shopping runs at the Pathmark in Port Chester. And I remember taking the bus into White Plains on weekends to shop at the Shop Rite where all the shopping carts had big poles on them.

* Think of your favorite person growing up - a friend, a special aunt, a teacher, etc. - and name the first food that comes to mind when thinking of that person.

My favorite person growing up was my mother, and I think of that ziti with tomato sauce and meatballs, or the meat sauce. I think of many other dishes, too.

Remembering my father from back then, I think of his special egg dish, also an Italian dish, very rich, with lots of butter, and eaten over toast. And I also remember his kidneys flambeed in brandy!

From my grandmother on my mother's side, I remember her stuffed cabbage, with ginger snaps as her secret ingredient.

The only other person I can really think of who was special to me and of whom I can remember something edible was Mrs. Freeman, my wonderful kindergarten teacher, and the milk and cookies she gave us with love every day.

I take it back. I remember the mother of one of my childhood girlfriends used to take me to Burger King and McDonalds, where Keren and I would have milkshakes and share an order of fries. Or we'd go to the really cheap Chinese place that we had to walk up a flight of rickety, dimly-lit, dirty stairs to get to (it was called Harbin Inn and some of the Upper West Side of Manhattan contingent remember it). I guess we had chow mein or chop suey there. The woman I speak of was a single parent and must have had some trouble making ends meet, but she did her best and I had a lot of good times with her daughter - we had been playmates since infancy. My parents never took me to places like Burger King (the closest they got was Friendly's, when we were in Massachusetts for the summer), nor did they take me to Harbin Inn (my mother told me recently that she saw roaches there but didn't tell me because she knew I liked the place).

There's also another person who should be mentioned here: Mrs. Carr, my fictive third grandmother (fictive kin=not blood relations). Mrs. Carr was a wonderful old black woman from the South who lived on 112 St. and Lenox Av. in Harlem when that was a really bad neigbhorhood. She was a poor woman, yet she got burglarized 5 times. She didn't want to leave the neighborhood, though, because she loved her friends and was a deeply religious woman who loved her local Baptist church. We finally persuaded her to take a nephew up on an offer to move in with his family in the Pittsburgh area, but sadly, she apparently died shortly thereafter (it was hard for my mother to get a definitive response, as I remember). Anyway, Mrs. Carr was an important good influence on me, and she used to bake all kinds of delicious Southern goodies, which I remember more in general than specific terms, but which I believe included sweet potato, pumpkin, and apple pies, shortbread cookies, and various kinds of delicious cakes with molasses. There's no doubt that my appreciation for Southern baked goods dates from that time.

Edited January 15, 2004 by Pan (log)

[hillvalley]

Nicely done Pan

[cbarre02]

I will never forget drinking a cup of coffe, and looking over my shoulder to see the exact coffe plant that the coffe had come from. I was an hour south of Bogota, Colombia. This was one of the wonders of my culinary career.

[bloviatrix]

My first food memories are from age 3. We went to England for the summer, and I disctinctly remember eating chicken soup with noodles at Blooms, which was a kosher restaurant near our hotel. Later on the trip we stayed at old estate which had been converted to hotel where I had my first Smarties. I loved those things. I highly doubt I had ever eaten M&Ms up to that point, so I thought all the colors were neat.

The other distinct food memory from a specific time in my life was when I was 17 and living in Jerusalem. For some reason, I had a craving for lox, and it wasn't available in Israel, so my parents brought me a vacuum-packed lox when they came to visit. Unfortunately, they didn't bring any bagels to go with. But that lox was like heaven.

Hillvalley, I also have a deli story from sleep away. One of my bunkmates received a salami from Schmulke Bernsteins on visiting day. The salami had a loop of string hanging from the end, so E decided to hang the salami from a nail in the rafters and let the salami "age." Four weeks later, the night before camp ended, she took the salami down. All the fat had migrated to the outside. And at 3 in morning we all sat around eating "aged" salami sandwiches using bread and mustard we had stolen from the dining room.

[Pan]

Nicely done Pan

Glad you liked it.

[bloviatrix]

How many of you guys remember drinking juice or any other liquids out of glasses that originally held Yerzheit candles?

[Pan]

Wow, that's spooky! No, I definitely don't remember that.

[chezlamere]

my grandmothers home made fruit leather. I remember the stuff on screens on top of saw horses all over her back yard. Peeling it off the wax paper in the winter. I think the last time I had this stuff was late 60's. I was on fly and wasp patrol, while it was drying.

[Toasted]

My favorite and first food memory occured when I was about three

or four. We lived in Newton Mass at the time and would frequently

walk downtown to Briggam's ice cream on summer evenings. The

night that stands out in my mind is the night I was finally allowed

to order ice cream in a 'big girl" cone instead of a baby dish.

I was so proud and excited and very, very careful not to drip

any chocolate on my dress.

[tastykimmie]

My favortie lunch dish that reminds me of my mom is: tuna sandwiches, french fries and green beans. I loved when we had that for lunch. The meal that most reminds me of my maternal grandmother is smothered chicken livers with rice and oninons with homemade biscuits...............HEAVEN - who can resist fried AND smothered chicken livers?

[ludja]

Edited January 15, 2004 by ludja (log)

[bigwino]

There are so many....

New England Boiled Dinner made by my mother with the GREY corned beef. None of that red stuff for me! The house reeked for days and the leftovers were just as good as the fresh stuff. I make it now myself and feel like I'm in first grade again.

The Caesar salad made tableside at the Waterlot restaurant in Bermuda. It seemed so utterly fancy to me to have a salad built right in front of you. I was spellbound every time I went. (Well, I was very young).

The first time at Benihana (or one of the knockoffs). I think I was in grade school. I distinctly remember thinking "I could do that". And I did. It got me started cooking.

The nine course dinner at L'Auberge du Pere Bise in Tailloires, France. My first dining experience in a real high end restaurant. The layers. The flavors. The ingredients. Thank God for studying abroad! My friend and I had to split the bill across two credit cards and then lie to our parents that we each bought the other a birthday dinner. God, it was expensive.

I don't come from a family that holds dining and food as important parts of our lives.

I must be adopted....

[cakewalk]

How many of you guys remember drinking juice or any other liquids out of glasses that originally held Yerzheit candles?

I still do it. It's nostalgic.

One of my first (and fondest) memories is of eating hot borscht that my grandmother made, straight from her huge pot on the stove. I can remember standing on a chair by the stove and reaching into the pot with a fork to get the beets, still warm. My grandmother would make a lot of borscht and fill old nescafe jars with it and give a few jars a week to my family and others. We would drink it in glasses (yes, yarzheit glasses), cold from the refrigerator, and the beets would stay at the bottom of the glass and we'd eat them last.

Every so often there'll be a thread here about which foods people absolutely hate, and beets seem to fill that slot for so many people. It makes me cringe every time I read it Oh if only you could have tasted my Bubby's borscht!

[ludja]

How many of you guys remember drinking juice or any other liquids out of glasses that originally held Yerzheit candles?

I still do it. It's nostalgic.

Pardon my ignorance, but how did drinking out of the Yahrzeit candle glasses become a tradition?

Is it just a hospitable shape and good recycling practice? Or does it have any other significance?

I learned (from Google) that Yahrzeit candles are lit in memory of loved ones. (Interesting that Yahrzeit sounds like Jahrezeit... ?time of year?)

Thanks

[cakewalk]

How many of you guys remember drinking juice or any other liquids out of glasses that originally held Yerzheit candles?

I still do it. It's nostalgic.

Pardon my ignorance, but how did drinking out of the Yahrzeit candle glasses become a tradition?

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it a tradition. It probably had more to do with thrift than with anything else.

Yarzheit glasses, as you noted, are lit on the anniversary of a family member's death, and on certain Jewish holidays in memory of those family members. That adds up to a lot of glasses! They're strong, sturdy glasses, quite hard to break. So we always reused at least some. Most went into the garbage because there was a limit to how many glasses we could break, even in my family. It was a stiff competition between Yarzheit glasses and Flintsone jelly glasses.

[ludja]

How many of you guys remember drinking juice or any other liquids out of glasses that originally held Yerzheit candles?

I still do it. It's nostalgic.

Pardon my ignorance, but how did drinking out of the Yahrzeit candle glasses become a tradition?

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it a tradition. It probably had more to do with thrift than with anything else.

Yarzheit glasses, as you noted, are lit on the anniversary of a family member's death, and on certain Jewish holidays in memory of those family members. That adds up to a lot of glasses! They're strong, sturdy glasses, quite hard to break. So we always reused at least some. Most went into the garbage because there was a limit to how many glasses we could break, even in my family. It was a stiff competition between Yarzheit glasses and Flintsone jelly glasses.

Thanks for explaining; interesting story and nice to learn a little about the tradition.

I *did* think of those jelly glasses too...

[Mudpuppie]

Thanks for explaining; interesting story and nice to learn a little about the tradition.

I *did* think of those jelly glasses too...

In my house, we had a collection of glasses that were originally Armour dried beef jars -- remnants of creamed chipped beef. () They were the perfect juice glass.

[snowangel]

Grape pie, made by my grandmother and I is a toss up with my first dish of kao soi in Chieng Mail in 1968 (or so) when I was but a child.

[hillvalley]

How many of you guys remember drinking juice or any other liquids out of glasses that originally held Yerzheit candles?

When we cleaned out my grandmother's apartment a few years ago we found a box full She became angry when we refused to donate them to Goodwill. They were recycled instead.

Edited January 16, 2004 by hillvalley (log)