Childhood clues that you'd become a foodie...

[Mistinguett]

This is maybe the earliest childhood memory I have, I was probably 2 y old.

To be able to keep an eye on me, my mom had me sit on the counter next to the kitchen sink while she was cleaning some fish. I had this habit of digging my finger deep into the freshly cleaned, open fish and taste it. I got scolded for it so I figured that when she slightly turns her head I could get away if changing the tactic. She caught me only when she noticed that I suck my toe.

That would translate today in my love of sashimi I guess.

[ohmyganache]

Oh remember a lot... my great grandma Cunninghams chicken and dumplings, my cousin jeremy and I making cinnamon raisin muffins at age 6 or 7, eating fresh peas that I grew in the garden when I was an early teen, making a cookbook when I was super young (my mom still has it)...

[slyaspie]

My mom tells a story that took place when I was nine months old. Every year she cures her own olives, several different varieties and flavors. It was the time of year that she had them actively curing in big buckets covered with cloths and she kept them underneath the kitchen table. This was because my parents had only been in the country for about a year at this point and were living in a tiny apt. and saving money for their first house. So the kitchen table was the only place big enough to store giant buckets. Apparently when my mother wasn't looking, I tottered over (I walked early) dipped my hand into all three buckets, took out equal amounts of olives from each, settled myself comfortably beneath that table and proceeded to eat them. By the time my mother found me I had eaten close to fifty or sixty olives. She freaked out because she thought I was about to choke. In her mind, what baby can safely be given something like an olive with the pit still inside? But when she looked closer she saw that not only had I not eaten the pits, I had managed to eat them clean and had lined them all up in a row right in front of me. First were the really dark pits from the wrinkly, super salty black olives, then the dark reddish brown pits from the tangy, oily, vinegary slitted brown olives and last were the light colored pits from the green cracked olives that were cured with garlic and cracked coriander. Even at that age I knew to save the best for last and to this day my mom's cracked green olives are my favorite thing in the world. She says that in the midst of her screaming freakout I looked up at her with a calm smile and oily olive smeared mouth and laughed. Then I put my arms up to her so she could pick me up.

That was long wasn't it?

Like another poster said above, my favorite holidays were also the first cherries of the year days. The only other fruits that rivaled them in my eyes were the first loquats and the first figs. I would settle myself in front of a big bucket of them and go crazy with delight. And by age eight or nine I had developed excellent one handed jackknife fruit carving skills.

[ghostrider]

I have no idea how old I was, but I'm pretty sure it was pre-10. My folks realized that I knew my way around the kitchen - I guess I just watched & learned - & on nights when they went out they would leave me a burger patty, a potato & an onion. I would chop up the latter two & make hash browns and then fry up the burger. (I guess I'd picked up some basic knife skills too.) We always had a can of bacon drippings for frying. Deadly but dang that was good! I always looked forward to those nights.

[Chloe]

When I was at primary school I told my teacher that my favorite food was Dover sole.

Chloe

north Portugal

[Luckylies]

I asked for kitchen utensild for my bat mitzvah 'today you are a woman...."

[Hest88]

My mom says I was very picky as a child. And I was. She complained that I would only eat duck wings from a particular store, or that I only liked a certain kind of sea cucumber, or hot and sour soup made by a handful of places. I suppose I could say I had a rather sensitive palate early on, but truthfully I really was just picky!

[Bob Musa]

strange... just as most women i know who came up from poverty now have a closet full of shoes, so do i have a love of food from being hungry as a child. spam, baloney and lettuce fried in bacon grease, lima beans, lots of sundays featuring fried chicken and pork chops loom large on my childhood food memories.

and then of course we had to hold our hands up to the sky when it rained to keep dry ....

editied because i forgot to mention S.O.S. which was often served...

Edited June 6, 2005 by Bob Musa (log)

[Daniel]

I grew up with a father born on the upper west side of manhattan and a P-Dutch mother who grew up on a farm.. My father's uncle owned an appetizing store next to Russ and Daughters.. My mother had cows, chickens, corn fields and went so far as to churn her own butter.. So both families gave me a lot of food exposure..

But the biggest influence in my life was going to Spain when i was in second grade.. We had an exchange student,my sister and I went to visit there family.. They owned a restaurant in Madrid where we spent a lot of time during our visit.. It was the type of place that had animals hanging in the window... From that trip I loved trying all types of food. My sister who was in the 5th grade at the time became a vegetarian and was a vegan by 9th grade.. .It just shows to go you how different things impact people..

[Curlz]

I just remember always being happy to go to the grocery store (still am), and helping in the kitchen. Someone gave me a kids' cook book when I was about 6, and I remember I'd read it over and over again, but I can't remember if I ever cooked out of it. I also remember thinking that the 'things' that came out of friends' EZ Bake ovens were gross. And you have to realize that my dad is my direct link to the food/wine DNA; he's been in the wine/spirits biz for 50+ years, and has been a member of the Chaine des Rotisseurs for almost as many, so I'd hear about the elaborate dinners that my parents went to with his business associates or Chaine members.

Both of my parents cooked, and they were happy to have help--even from little hands. I think my mom realized that I liked to cook early on and it helped her figure out how to go back to work full-time when I was 9; she'd do some prep work for dinner and leave everything for me in the fridge. At 3:30 when my bro and I got home from school, I'd call her at work and she'd give me all of the instructions, which I'd follow to the letter, and Voila! I made dinner most nights! One of her oldest friends worked at that job with her, and every time I see her she says "I'll just always remember those daily calls...'Put the chicken on at 4:30 at 350 degrees..." heehee

The other thing I thought of as soon as I saw this topic was when I suggested to my Spanish teacher that the Spanish Club (yeesh, I was a geek) come to my house for a night of cooking Spanish food. I was 13 or 14 at the time; should have realized then that my party/event planning skills were being honed...!

[jesteinf]

At a restaurant with my grandparents when I was maybe 7 (at the oldest), the waiter asked my grandfather what I would be ordering. My grandfather told the waiter to ask me. The waiter then asked me for my order.

I ordered steak tartar.

It's been all downhill since.

[joey madison]

Ah, when I was a wee lad, Sukiyaki was my favorite dish. I always thought it was wonderfully exciting to break out the wok. I also constantly begged to go strawberry and apple picking when they were in season. And foraging for blackberries, blueberries and morels while camping was such a treat.

[goldie]

A few memories:

Picking blueberries up in the upper pennisula of Michigan with my grandmother and always eating more than hit the bucket.

Summers with my southern grandmother and eating her wonderful cooking and getting to read her cookbooks. My mother would freak every year because I'd gain like ten pounds every time. The food was just so much better than my mother's cooking.

I started cooking most of our meals when I was in middle school. My mom hates to cook and I love it so she was more than happy to give me free reign in the kitchen. I think that was about the time I got my first subscription to Gourmet. The cookbooks were in the kitchen, so I spent many meals reading about food.

[lala]

While I was exposed to good fresh foods on the family farm in northern Minnesota, I think it all really started when I was 4 and my brother was 5. We spent the school year in England while my Dad worked in London, then spent the summer driving around Europe. I remember preferring the champagne to red wine when we toured wine regions, watching Italian women making ravioli by hand for lunch at one place we stayed in Italy. And I particularly remember Greece - those fantastic sesame rings sold by street vendors in Athens, and the great fun we had on Mikonos. The locals thought it was funny to try to make the small American kids to eat foods that adult Americans wouldn't eat, but we ate everything - octopus, hummus, moussaka. The lovely hotel people even made me a birthday cake, which we shared with our new friends. Who wouldn't love food after such a fantastic introduction?

[DonnaMarieNJ]

Honestly, I can sit here for hours (and often do) and read these posts!!! How I envy everyone's ability to put down on paper (or computer, if you please) your thoughts, dreams, memories, etc. so eloquently (sp)!

You make me feel I was there with you and I can taste, feel, smell everything you are describing!

[Chris Amirault]

Growing up in New England, I was exposed to two food traditions that, in their own ways, portended my future.

One involved Maine lobster and clam bakes, at which I would scavenge lobster bodies from people's discard bowls and pry the knuckle meat out, scraping my own knuckles to bloody shards in the process. I always sat right next to my grandfather, whose loose dentures required that he bite off the steamer bellies and set aside the necks -- every one of which I dutifully and greedily ate.

The other involved a slab of my grandfather the Gloucesterman's haddock catch being baked at 350 for an hour until grey, stringy, and dry: Yankee cooking at its bitter nadir. I spent a childhood brooding angrily over a cold plate while being interrogated about how it was that I "didn't like fish," when all the while I wondered about the conspiracy against haddock that pervaded my massive extended family and what I could do to correct this queer culinary injustice....

[lia]

Thought of another one....When I was in elementary school (maybe sixth grade) our class was used to taste test a new Schrafft's (I think) product. A sort of push up lemon ice. The test was blind, turns out we were choosing between the natural and the artificial lemon flavors.

Guess who was the ONLY one who chose natural?

[transfattyacid]

aged 6 developed a strong fascination with pyromania .

aged 7 embraced the sensory pleasure of being burnt .

aged 8 started my collection of cuts and abrasions.

it could only be one trade from there .

[ellencho]

Maybe not necessarily a foody but perhaps a fatty? My mom has told me about two separate occasions of me refusing to eat certain items at friends' homes because they didn't have any whipped cream to accompany the jell-o or their strawberries.

[Misa]

I used to say "Mom taught me how to bake. She taught my sisters to cook." And while this is mostly true, it didn't really matter. I was seven years old when my grandma bought me a cookbook (Betty Crocker Kids - I don't remember the exact title and it's at my mom's right now) and I began cooking out of that. Then, I'd find other recipes and cook from them. My family used to joke that I couldn't make macaroni and cheese from a box, but I could make anything I wanted to from scratch! (That was a little closer to the truth than I like to admit...)

Anyway, Mom and I used to get into arguments because, after she started having to work more hours (and several evenings), she would expect me to make Hamburger Helper. And, I would throw a fit. Eventually, I decided that I hated cooking, but baking was fun.

I've changed my mind quite a bit now.

[daniellewiley]

1. Eating raw clams, raw oysters and smelts with my dad on Montauk when I was three.

2. Making a Chocolate Rum Roll - all by myself - for my 8th grade English class.

3. My whole family was outside one day when I was about 6 or 7, and I got mad at them for one reason or another. I ran in the house, locked them out, and proceeded to make brownies from scratch. I ran to get my mom crying when I tasted the batter and realized that I had used 1/4 cup of salt instead of 1/4 teaspoon.

[Jean Blanchard]

When I was 9, my mother made me in charge of dessert for our family of six. So the first thing I did was buy 10 Jiffy Mix cake mixes in all of their flavors. I believe they cost $.10 each. My father would take a bite and every single time, he'd close his eyes and say that this was the most delicious cake he had ever tasted. I was hooked!

jb

[rabidscottsman]

#1 I was checking cookbooks out of our school library in 2nd and 3rd grade.

#2 i was taking my moms cookbooks and dragging them into the bedroom to read, everytime she needed a cookbook she said she would usually find it under my bed.

#3 around 9 or 10 years of age I developed a love for my grandmas sauerkraut, wich i still claim to this day that nobody else could ever match. I would eat plates full while my brother and sister would turn green just at the sight of it

[bleudauvergne]

A picture says a thousand words. Three family photos exist of me as a child. One, a Sears portrait. Two, a photo of me playing in the child size kitchen my father made for me. Three :

At about the same age, I wanted to make a cake, but my mother wouldn't let me. Therefore I went around to the neighbors and borrowed the ingredients one by one. Mrs. Web, the neighbor who lent me the sugar, sensed that something was awry and watched as instead of returning to my house, I took a beeline for the woods, where I was collecting the ingredients. She told on me and I got in big trouble.

[Pan]

Most of the posts in this thread are about early experiences in cooking (including baking). I had some of those too. I helped my mother prepare apple pies when I was 4 (cored and chopped apples) and then helped eat them all up. I cooked dinner for the first time at the age of 7. It was a Maryland Chicken recipe, I forget from where (the Times?). I prepared it and cooked it from beginning to end, and it was good. Much later, in college, I found that a fun way to fry eggs was to use extra-virgin olive oil and add a small amount of Sherry, cooking it just long enough for a bit of alcohol taste to remain, and eat it on toast. But most of my experiences were eating experiences. I found it very unsatisfying to have dinner at my girlfriend's place -- my girlfriend from ages 4-10 or so, that is -- because (may she be remembered for good) she just didn't cook things like my mother. Another childhood girlfriend lived with her struggling divorced mother, who regularly took us to chain restaurants. I found Kentucky Fried Chicken OK, but the only things I can remember finding palatable at Burger King or McDonalds were french fries and milkshakes. And it didn't take too long for me to reject Chef Boyardee Spaghettios in favor of my mother's homemade tomato sauce and meatballs with sausage. Later, I found it very hard to eat institutional food, especially when inferior canned or just plain substandard ingredients were used.

However, I'm not a foodie; I'm a gourmand.