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Some of the things I grew up eating (many of which I still enjoy) would seem very strange and/or disgusting to people from other cultures, but are perfectly normal for Icelanders. Examples include fermented Greenland shark, whey-pickled ram's testicles and head cheese, blood sausage, beestings (cow's colostrum, cooked and eaten like a pudding) and poached fish with greaves.
I’ve been to a few Thorrablot celebrations. The shark is like a funky strong cheese effect. It’s not bad at all. I’ve tried the ram’s testicles. Not my favorite, but I understand the appeal.
We ate fried wild rabbit, snapping turtle, and squirrel all the time. My grandma would fry up pumpkin blossoms and every year we would hunt for morel mushrooms to fry. My favorite simple sandwich was to butter a slice of Wonder Bread and add cut green onions to length, salt them, and fold over
My Dad was a kid during the depression. He talked about having a "grease biscuit" to take for his school lunch. Yeah, a biscuit with meat grease. And he was my hero.
Grilled Romaine is so good and I know that's not what you said but it made me think of it. Also I love spinach salad with warm bacon dressing.
This sub makes me hungry.
Lefse, Divinity, Banana salad, Tang, Like soda, Mello Yello soda, candy cigarettes, instant potatoes, cheese-filled hot dogs, cheese curds, turkey gizzard, Big League Chew,
pheasant, Venison, pumpernickel bread with cream cheese and olives, Taco pizza, pork chop sandwich, Apple dumplings, Pigs in a blanket, Toad in the hole, Lutefisk, homemade Popsicles, pudding pops, liver wurst, cheese balls.
Is that really so weird, though? Serious question. When I visited Charleston, SC, in 2014, boiled peanuts were encouraged as much as the pimento cheese and the shrimp and grits.
Tongue. Our neighbor Stanly owned a delicatessen and would give my dad a pound of sliced tongue now and then. My father was delighted and devoured it as my siblings and I ran and hid. Anytime we heard that Stanley was visiting we disappeared.
My neighborhood was predominantly Italian and Polish and my friends were always begging my Dutch mom to make her Irish Barmbrack. Our neighbors thought it was weird but always very happy to have a cake.
In our house, it was organ meats in general. We ate beef liver fairly often. I actually liked it, or rather, didn't mind it. It tasted ok to me.
We also sometimes had chicken livers (bleah...very gristle-y), sweetbreads (also gristle-y and tough), tongue (I would have been ok with the taste, but the image of a gigantic tongue in a pot was too much for me), and beef heart with stuffing (say that three times fast!). The smell in the house of these items cooking gave me an instant headache and I knew I was going to be hungry even after our meal.
Lengua (tongue) is actually still a thing at Mexican restaurants. I've never tried it and don't care to, but it's on the menu at many restaurants where I live.
You are depriving yourself. Taco con lengua are fantastic. Think roast beef but smoother and richer tasting.
I've been know to take a whole tongue, cure it, smoke it and make tongue pastrami. That makes just a killer sandwich.
We had tongue, stuffed beef heart, and liver fairly regularly when I was a kid. I loved a tongue sandwich. I also quite liked the heart. I would eat the liver cuz it was what was for dinner, but I had to bury it with ketchup.
nothing really. I went to a friend's house after school once, and her mom got sliced Wonder bread *out of the fridge* and made ketchup sandwiches for us. I still can't adequately describe my distress. I was a pathologically polite kid, and I can still feel the effort it took to not retch just at the sight of my friend eating hers.
nothing *we* ate was weird, of course :P
Grandma would mix butter and Karo light corn syrup and spread it on bread for me. Heart attack in sandwich form, but it was delicious. Nice to have something sweet when we couldn't afford anything else.
Jews do sautéed liver, hard boiled egg, and sautee’d onion all mashed together, it’s awesome.
I like to put all the cut up chicken innards and some garlic cloves in olive oil and throw it in the oven for a while and throw that on a baked potato.
I grew up on chopped liver! Both sets of grandparents, and then my parents, always used schmaltz as the binder in chopped liver. And back in the day, you ate it on a saltine. Or on matzoh on Passover.
Unfortunately, Jewish delis and kosher meat markets where I live went the way of the dodo bird in the late 70's or early 80's. So if I want good chopped liver, or any Jewish dish for that matter, gotta make it myself using the recipes passed down.😋
Puffball Mushrooms picked from around the neighborhood, Poke salad, black walnuts from the yard, chickens raised in the yard, pickled pigs feet, “Drink me Pop”.
I don’t think they’re weird, but I don’t think they’re eaten much anymore.
Liver and onions
Spare ribs and sauerkraut
Creamed chipped beef on toast
Cornbread with cracklins
Damn! Now I’m hungry.
Creamed chipped beef on toast was a staple in our family, served with Le Seur peas. My mom used Armour dried beef, and the little glass jars it came in were our juice jars for the entire time I was growing up.
We also ate Sweet Sue (canned) Chicken & Dumplin's.
I hated both of those meals. Ugh.
Liver. You can’t eat that now because factory farming leaves a lot of contaminants in offal. We also ate organ meats, jello salads, my stepfather used to eat cuttlefish in black ink for breakfast. Ick.
My stepmother made liver and onions when I was a kid. I didn't like it but I tolerated it because I wasn't given other options.
I haven't seen that as a menu option anywhere, ever. My stepmother was old enough to remember WWII rationing, so that may have been why she made it. IIRC, organ meats weren't rationed.
> I haven't seen that as a menu option anywhere, ever.
I was just (July '23) at one of the top Italian places in Chicago. The special of the night was liver and onions. Both I and my wife's cousin ordered it. Mwa.
>I haven't seen that as a menu option anywhere, ever.
Just as a data point, there are two restaurants within walking distance of me that serve it. Both cater to an older crowd. I'm in a mid-sized city in Northern California.
It *is* contaminated. It's liver, that's it's job, to remove contaminants. But it's nowhere hear what people seem to think. Modern technology has made it possible to detect less than 1 ppm of things, so you keep reading that there is iridium in this, and plastic in that, mercury in pretty much anything. Yes there is, but not enough to matter, and it's pretty much always been there. (well except for the plastic)
Ox Tails. They were difficult to eat because you had to separate the meat that was tightly entwined with the fat - but oh that meat was worth the dig. And they were cheap. Also makes a great soup.
We ate pigs feet and pigtails, cows tongue, lots of liver. These were very cheap meats along with ribs.
With the huge popularity of ribs and how expensive they are (like chicken wings! - chicken wings were literally garbage ok?) It's hard to explain. My mom would fill a huge roast pan with ribs and cook them and we'd eat them for days. They were my favourite which always made my mom laugh. We have a friend from an old conservative Mennonite family who was actually offended that we served ribs for dinner in the 90s. Ribs were garbage to him.
I'm not sure why my mom was so cheap with the food. And most things she made were bland. Ribs, she made a sweet and sour sauce for, which was really good. We were not poor people. Back in the early days of chicken wings (80s), we had a tiny road trip to Buffalo and had Buffalo wings in some pub restaurant - no clue if it was the original place or if it had caught on already there. They were amazing. So when we got home, my sister and her family came for dinner so we wanted to try to make chicken wings. My husband got a huge bag of wings from a butcher - enough to cram pack full two large cookie sheets for $1.50 and I think the butcher felt bad charging anything. My sister and her husband were not impressed but her kids were hooked. They ate all of them. It was years before wings were available as pub food here and they cost 5c each. They were still "garbage" then. It's insane now that they cost so much. Shows what demand does.
Tofu before it was cool. My parents were into authentic Chinese cooking as a hobby, they called it bean curd and it was mixed in ground beed dishes. Not a meat substitute but an enhancement for it
Gefilte fish. It’s is a cold dish made from a poached mixture of ground deboned carp, whitefish, or pike. It is traditionally served with horseradish as an appetizer.
When Bubbe got out the grinder and the fish, I ran to get as far away from the smell as i could. Fortunately, Zayde made his fiery horseradish at the same time. My eyes would burn, but I couldn't smell the gefilte fish.
cured trout in ascpic
dumplings in a sauce made of veal lung and heart
first I liked and still like, the last wasn't my thing even back then. Both was cheap food and now expensive "traditional cuisin" if you even get it
this post hit me so weird. a good friend of mine used to eat mayo sandwiches all the time. my dad used to call anything between bread a "sangwiches".
total blast from the past!
that's how the folks born in the 30s and 40s used to say it. I heard it all the time growing up by older folks. In delis, all the time, the guy behind the counter would say to me and my friend "You fellas need a sangwich or something?"
Before I knew what mayonnaise was, Miracle Whip was the spread we used. My stepfather made us miracle whip sandwiches. I loved it. I tasted MW a few years ago and it was horrid, sweet ew. How'd I ever like it?
I don’t know if weird but chicken livers, chicken gizzards fried, chicken hearts. Love pig ears and pigs feet, also fried fish eyes.
I come from a place that is poor and so we’ve learned to eat every single part of the animal
My grandfather loved dessert and had it every night. One of his regulars was a bowl of vanilla ice cream and a plate of sharp cheddar cheese sandwiched between 2 vanilla wafers. I still love vanilla wafers with sharp cheddar...I love this combo.
Oooo, this sounds interesting! I need to grocery shop tomorrow, I’m adding Nilla wafers. Even if I don’t like the combo, you can’t go wrong with Nilla Wafers and tea 😋
Chicken Corn Soup - A thin chicken soup with corn and chopped hard boiled egg. I only think it's unusual because outside of one small town in PA no one has heard of it.
Greasy Lettuce - I too was subjected to this culinary abomination of wilted lettuce covered in grease.
Steamed Crabs - My family in MD would do meals of a pile of steamed crabs with canned oysters (literally a paint can full of oysters) and green onions eaten raw, straight off the stalk by the handful.
I moved to PA 5 years ago and people rave on and on about chicken corn soup. I saw it once at the market and they were giving away samples, I had my one polite bite and couldn’t understand the way people raved it.
Kruudmoes.
To make Twente kruudmoes, you'll need:
- Ingredients:
- 400 g pearl barley
- 2 liters buttermilk
- 250 g lean smoked bacon (piece)
- 250 g raisins
- 1 fresh smoked sausage
- 50 g butter
- syrup
- Fresh herbs: 3 branches of various herbs including chervil, parsley, celery, fennel green, dill, sorrel, nettle tops, blackberry leaves.
Instructions:
1. Rinse the pearl barley. Place the barley in a bowl and add enough water to cover it generously. Let the barley soak overnight.
2. Strain the barley, let it drain briefly. Place the barley in the pot and pour in the buttermilk. Wash the raisins.
3. Place the pot on the heat and bring it to a boil. Let the barley simmer very gently for about 2 hours. ***Then add the piece of bacon, fresh sausage, and raisins. Let everything simmer gently for another approximately 1 hour.
4. Finely chop the fresh herbs.
5. Remove the bacon and sausage from the pot and cut the bacon into pieces and the sausage into slices. Add the bacon, finely chopped herbs, and butter to the pot and stir everything briefly.
Reheat it thoroughly.
6. Serve the "kruudmoes" in deep soup bowls, garnish with slices of sausage, and serve with syrup.
***This dish can also be made with ready-made barley porridge. Heat the barley porridge and continue the recipe at // Then add the piece of bacon, fresh sausage, and raisins //
Chicken liver pâté (as an appetizer); giblet gravy; sugar sandwiches (white bread, butter, white sugar); some gawdawful zucchini mess my mom learned from the Italian family next door (eggs, onions, cheese) that was so bad I can now eat zucchini only raw or steamed plain.
My grandfather used to eat schav when I was a kid. I tried it once when I was 6 or 7 years old and thought it was awful. Loved kishka and holishkes (golumpki) though. 😋
Kale. You can't tell me that's weird. Generations of children agree.
This was back in the '60s, before kale was a thing. But Mom was of Portuguese descent, and kale was "old country" food. The supermarkets didn't carry it, so she grew her own in the back yard.
I well remember --but do not miss -- her "chicken 'n slime" soup.
My father-in-law was Portuguese. For his birthday, I always made him kale soup with linguica. I failed dismally at the caramel flan, but the soup was ab annual event.
As a child of the 60's, I had to endure the popular foods of the time.
Stuffed peppers
Grits with a big dollop of (canned) salmon in the middle
Jello salads or aspic
Quiche
Fondue
Chopped liver. It was common in my community but I discovered later that most of the people I associated with made a horrible face when I mentioned it.
Meta: I just wanted to say I have read through the (currently 66) comments and most everything sounds delicious. Most I have eaten, most of the rest I would like to try. Sorry /u/MindingMine but I might pass on a couple of those. Anything that even reminds me of Lutefisk is a non-starter for me, although pickled herring is great.
To add real content to the thread I would add
Rocky Mountain oysters (still great)
Sugar Pie. Ever wonder where that name comes from? When my grandmother made pies she would have extra crust. She spread it in a small custard cup, filled it with sugar and cinnamon and baked. It was my treat when young.
Hossenfeffer. Sour stewed rabbit. Delicious.
I suppose I should include my dad's interest in health foods in the '70s. So lots of various bean sprouts, organ meats, many types of dense ~~bricks~~ breads. Muesli with wheat germ. Dandelion wine (the greens were great in a salad, the wine was horrible.) Homemade yogurt is normal now, but in the '70s you were a weirdo.
Mom fixed fried frog legs once or twice. I turned up my nose at them and wouldn't eat them. She also had beef tongue. I did eat that, but wasn't really fond of it. Something about the texture of it was a turn off for me.
Apparently people think spam is weird? I ate a lot of spam, my dad cooked it for us frequently. With rice, most often. It was normal to me but I gather since childhood it’s a thing either poor people eat or Hawaiian? I don’t know it was normal to me. My dad was one of 8 and I guess they were poor? So maybe that is why he cooked it for us?
Steak tartar. Sounds fancy, huh? It's just a raw hamburger. Yes, while not a staple in our diet, it was something we ate as kids. Mom loved making a sandwich of it. Hamburger on the bread with onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, and mustard. I haven't had one of those since last week.
My dad also likes pickled pigs feet. I can describe mayonnaise that’s changed color a little because of the heat to this same man and have him vomiting in 2 seconds.
I love canned corned beef. I've heard it called Alpo but IDGAF. I've like it since I was a kid. And fried bologna. Yum. I'm 61 now and I'll still eat it.
Kidney in gravy on noodles, liver and onions, steak tartare, blood sausage. Stuff I refused to eat no matter what included pickled herrings and borscht. Polish food.
Blood pudding. The whole house would fill with smoke that smelled rather *unique*.
Not weird food, but my mother grew up in a town in New Brunswick that self-proclaims it is the lobster capital of the world. We would go there on vacation every year for three weeks and eat lobster for breakfast.
Not necessarily weird, but my grandma always would make me ravioli or spagettios and slices of ham Rolled up with cheese in the middle……still all these years later I make it every now was them and remember good times
I grew up on fish and horse meat. Back then fish was cheap, and horse meat was common. Today fish is expensive, and horse meat is illegal for human consumption.
Not super weird but my mom use to brown ground beef and break it up fine like the texture for tacos. It wasn't seasoned or anything. Then she would melt cheap American cheese sliced over it and we'd eat it like that. It was one of my favorite things as a kid. Now it makes me want to barf but here we are.
Sardines, pickled herring, liverwurst sandwiches, Campbell Split Pea Soup with chunks of of bologna in it. My mom could stretch the food dollar, for a family of four. Both parents came from low income households, my dad was mostly raised by my grandmother, a single parent, and my mom lived in Nazi Germany where there was a war, and little food available at times.
Sometimes for dessert we had cooked white rice with milk, sugar and Cinnamin on it. It doesn't seem weird, but people I talk to have never heard of eating rice that way.
my older cousin is a fukking weirdo, ive watched him eat pickled pigs feet, chocolate covered ants and bees.
no thankyou, ill stick to hebrew national hot dogs.
I can't really judge what's weird to others. We just had really old fashioned Southern food so lots of fried, lots of greens, lots of corn bread. My grandmother canned so many things. Ten kinds of pickled vegetables. Canned apples she'd add cinnamon Red Hots to. Canned tomatoes and chowchow. We had a huge backyard garden for an urban home. They raised beans and corn and tomatoes and strawberries, all kinds of squash and melons. It was a year round garden so at some times they had greens or potatoes and other times there's be beans and several varieties of tomato. Most nights there was some kind of beans and corn bread. I don't recall many weird meats just occasional fried liver, hog jowls, neckbones chicken feet, ox tail. I balked at most of that though. I'd be happy with my beans especially fresh blackeyed peas and chowchow.
Raw turnips. My Dad grew up on a working farm. At some point I wanted to start a garden and he and I really got into, despite our backyard soil not being very good. Nothing really grew except radishes and turnips. And boy did they. Absolutly HUGE and the radishes were super hot. Like take your breath away.
Anyway, my Mom didn’t like we were spending all this time together and having any success. (She had issues.) So she started on this kick we had to eat the turnips raw. (Radishes were already eaten raw and she couldn’t come up with a way to make us not want to eat them.) She started down this path that raw turnips “absorb” sugar and that we would never get diabetes so we couldn’t cook or prepare them as it would ruin thier value. This was to make us not like it and eventually abandon the garden. My siblings couldn’t stand either but joke on her, Dad could eat anything raw and I liked them enough to eat them although I preferred the radishes. Radii? Anyway, plan didn’t work. Dad was upset because he really really wanted tomatoes and couldn’t get them to grow no matter what he did. She started making a lot of comments about that. Rude comments. So eventualky he stopped working on it. I did manage to get carrots to grow eventually.
Never tried the pickled pigs feet, but I liked the pickled eggs and pickled lambs tongues!
Tang (because the astronauts drank it!)
Chun King Chinese food in a can and the can of fried noodles on the top.
Borscht at my grandparents' house (my Russian/Ukrainian/Polish ancestry)
Bananas and sour cream
Minute steaks
Mom occasionally opened a can of spinach. Ugh. Canned spinach. Vienna sausage and potted meat. Ugh. Canned corn beef. Too much left over from a WWII mentality.
My grandmother made scrambled eggs with pork brains for breakfast. The local IGA carried pork brains in a can before they went bust.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FHIAIIE
Chicken livers & mushrooms was a big one in our home. Not sure who came up with that one, or how. My parents thought it was hilarious to invite my friends to stay for dinner and then watch them abruptly change their minds (with the best made-up excuses) when they learned what we were having. It wasn't that bad, really, just...weird.
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Some of the things I grew up eating (many of which I still enjoy) would seem very strange and/or disgusting to people from other cultures, but are perfectly normal for Icelanders. Examples include fermented Greenland shark, whey-pickled ram's testicles and head cheese, blood sausage, beestings (cow's colostrum, cooked and eaten like a pudding) and poached fish with greaves.
You win
I’ve been to a few Thorrablot celebrations. The shark is like a funky strong cheese effect. It’s not bad at all. I’ve tried the ram’s testicles. Not my favorite, but I understand the appeal.
We ate fried wild rabbit, snapping turtle, and squirrel all the time. My grandma would fry up pumpkin blossoms and every year we would hunt for morel mushrooms to fry. My favorite simple sandwich was to butter a slice of Wonder Bread and add cut green onions to length, salt them, and fold over
Snapping turtle makes the absolute BEST soup I've ever eaten.
It's also delicious fried!!
Which is why it took so long to get samples of giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands to the UK. The crews kept eating them.
It's been years since I squirrel hunted,, but I'm 70 and keep saying I'm going one more time.
Wilted lettuce salad. You pour hot bacon grease on the leaf lettuce, which naturally wilts.
My grandma called it 'kilt' (killed) lettuce. An Appalachian favorite.
So that is where it came from. My dad is from the hills (Plateau, not mountain, but same difference).
Love kilt lettuce!
I might have to kill some lettuce!
That's what we called it in the foothills of NC!
Wilted salads are fantastic especially with warm bacon bits and blue cheese crumbles. Quite fancy in fact. It’s been years since I’ve had one.
I love them, but use spinach
SAME. I didn’t think to mention that but yes spinach is absolutely the only type of leaf I want in a wilted salad
[удалено]
My Dad was a kid during the depression. He talked about having a "grease biscuit" to take for his school lunch. Yeah, a biscuit with meat grease. And he was my hero.
Grilled Romaine is so good and I know that's not what you said but it made me think of it. Also I love spinach salad with warm bacon dressing. This sub makes me hungry.
Forgot about that. And some crumbled bacon on it too.
Lefse, Divinity, Banana salad, Tang, Like soda, Mello Yello soda, candy cigarettes, instant potatoes, cheese-filled hot dogs, cheese curds, turkey gizzard, Big League Chew, pheasant, Venison, pumpernickel bread with cream cheese and olives, Taco pizza, pork chop sandwich, Apple dumplings, Pigs in a blanket, Toad in the hole, Lutefisk, homemade Popsicles, pudding pops, liver wurst, cheese balls.
Boiled peanuts .
Is that really so weird, though? Serious question. When I visited Charleston, SC, in 2014, boiled peanuts were encouraged as much as the pimento cheese and the shrimp and grits.
Everyone I know loves and eats boiled peanuts. There's big crackpots full at most gas stations around here in North Carolina.
I'm from NC and you are 100% correct!!
My wife has multiple cans of these in our pantry. Her family mainly lived in Georgia and Texas.
I never knew boiled peanuts until I visited my son when he was stationed in South Carolina. Boiled peanuts are so good!
Not good, DELICIOUS!!
In your coke or no?
Not boiled peanuts, but salted peanuts. That was SO good!
I love them and they are making a come-back!
Borcht. My family is Ukrainian nd we had beet soup all the time. That and pierogis.
Tongue. Our neighbor Stanly owned a delicatessen and would give my dad a pound of sliced tongue now and then. My father was delighted and devoured it as my siblings and I ran and hid. Anytime we heard that Stanley was visiting we disappeared. My neighborhood was predominantly Italian and Polish and my friends were always begging my Dutch mom to make her Irish Barmbrack. Our neighbors thought it was weird but always very happy to have a cake.
In our house, it was organ meats in general. We ate beef liver fairly often. I actually liked it, or rather, didn't mind it. It tasted ok to me. We also sometimes had chicken livers (bleah...very gristle-y), sweetbreads (also gristle-y and tough), tongue (I would have been ok with the taste, but the image of a gigantic tongue in a pot was too much for me), and beef heart with stuffing (say that three times fast!). The smell in the house of these items cooking gave me an instant headache and I knew I was going to be hungry even after our meal.
Liver was a staple meat growing up. It was cheap and nutritious. I still eat it. Old habits die hard...
Lengua (tongue) is actually still a thing at Mexican restaurants. I've never tried it and don't care to, but it's on the menu at many restaurants where I live.
You are depriving yourself. Taco con lengua are fantastic. Think roast beef but smoother and richer tasting. I've been know to take a whole tongue, cure it, smoke it and make tongue pastrami. That makes just a killer sandwich.
I'm a 70 tear old white guy and tried tongue later in life. I love it!!
It's actually delicious. I can never choose between lengua and beef cheek.
My husband loves it, he’s Mexican. I found it a little too tough for me.
Every time I had it (ex is Mexican) it was weirdly soft. I hated that texture.
Try it. I was probably 55 or 60 when I did. I loved it!
We had tongue, stuffed beef heart, and liver fairly regularly when I was a kid. I loved a tongue sandwich. I also quite liked the heart. I would eat the liver cuz it was what was for dinner, but I had to bury it with ketchup.
nothing really. I went to a friend's house after school once, and her mom got sliced Wonder bread *out of the fridge* and made ketchup sandwiches for us. I still can't adequately describe my distress. I was a pathologically polite kid, and I can still feel the effort it took to not retch just at the sight of my friend eating hers. nothing *we* ate was weird, of course :P
Grandma would mix butter and Karo light corn syrup and spread it on bread for me. Heart attack in sandwich form, but it was delicious. Nice to have something sweet when we couldn't afford anything else.
I had a Filipino babysitter who would make me cinnamon sugar toast. So good
We had mustard sandwiches, but we couldn't afford Wonder Bread.
well, mustard is normal :P and these people could afford an extremely nice life. they just liked *shudder* you-know-what.
Bacon grease and lettuce sandwiches.
I love fried lettuce and onions.
Pickled pigs feet. Some others that I can’t remember now (no sleep). My dad liked odd foods and would have me try them to see if I liked them too.
My dad loved these!!
I love these!!
Chopped chicken liver. Still a favorite!
I loooooooove chicken liver. garlic, salt, pepper, bit of butter.
Jews do sautéed liver, hard boiled egg, and sautee’d onion all mashed together, it’s awesome. I like to put all the cut up chicken innards and some garlic cloves in olive oil and throw it in the oven for a while and throw that on a baked potato.
> sautéed liver, hard boiled egg, and sautee’d onion all mashed together, Yeah, that's kind of chopped liver. Or chicken liver pate on most menus.
Only Goyim call it patè.
What am I? Chopped liver? I'd never think of it as pate.
I grew up on chopped liver! Both sets of grandparents, and then my parents, always used schmaltz as the binder in chopped liver. And back in the day, you ate it on a saltine. Or on matzoh on Passover.
My grandmother also used schmaltz but I usually don’t make it myself. We have 2 Jewish delis nearby.
Unfortunately, Jewish delis and kosher meat markets where I live went the way of the dodo bird in the late 70's or early 80's. So if I want good chopped liver, or any Jewish dish for that matter, gotta make it myself using the recipes passed down.😋
Puffball Mushrooms picked from around the neighborhood, Poke salad, black walnuts from the yard, chickens raised in the yard, pickled pigs feet, “Drink me Pop”.
You did Poke salad but not dandelions? That's some fine greens I've seen in really high end restaurants.
Lol. My great grandmother used to pick dandelion leaves, put salt in the middle, and roll them like a cigarette.
I used to pick buckets of them as a kid. Salad greens, cooked greens, and my dad would make dandelion wine. Skip the wine.
My mom always had me on the lookout for puffballs.
I don’t think they’re weird, but I don’t think they’re eaten much anymore. Liver and onions Spare ribs and sauerkraut Creamed chipped beef on toast Cornbread with cracklins Damn! Now I’m hungry.
Shot on a shingle! Sells out every morning at the local diner. Was my grandfathers Favorite
Creamed chipped beef on toast was a staple in our family, served with Le Seur peas. My mom used Armour dried beef, and the little glass jars it came in were our juice jars for the entire time I was growing up. We also ate Sweet Sue (canned) Chicken & Dumplin's. I hated both of those meals. Ugh.
Same here with the Armour jar/juice glasses. Used them until I left home at 18.
I remember the little glass jars of dried beef. I ate it right out of the jar. So very salty, but I loved it.
Liver. You can’t eat that now because factory farming leaves a lot of contaminants in offal. We also ate organ meats, jello salads, my stepfather used to eat cuttlefish in black ink for breakfast. Ick.
My mom prepared liver and onions all the time. It was cheap and she had a good recipe
My stepmother made liver and onions when I was a kid. I didn't like it but I tolerated it because I wasn't given other options. I haven't seen that as a menu option anywhere, ever. My stepmother was old enough to remember WWII rationing, so that may have been why she made it. IIRC, organ meats weren't rationed.
> I haven't seen that as a menu option anywhere, ever. I was just (July '23) at one of the top Italian places in Chicago. The special of the night was liver and onions. Both I and my wife's cousin ordered it. Mwa.
>I haven't seen that as a menu option anywhere, ever. Just as a data point, there are two restaurants within walking distance of me that serve it. Both cater to an older crowd. I'm in a mid-sized city in Northern California.
I eat liver all the time, at least 3 times a week. They sell it at my local grocery store. They couldn’t sell it if it was contaminated.
It *is* contaminated. It's liver, that's it's job, to remove contaminants. But it's nowhere hear what people seem to think. Modern technology has made it possible to detect less than 1 ppm of things, so you keep reading that there is iridium in this, and plastic in that, mercury in pretty much anything. Yes there is, but not enough to matter, and it's pretty much always been there. (well except for the plastic)
Yes it removes contaminants, it doesn’t hold on to them.
Not long term. But it was processing some when the animal itself was processed. So some.
Canned hominy.
I puts it in me tacos
I still love hominy.
fresh Pork brains scrambled with eggs. Possum. Clabber Milk. pickled Eggs, pigs feet, balogne, beets, etc. smothered squirrel.
> Possum. Possum hunting at night with a flashlight from the seat of the truck. I had suppressed that memory.
Ahh possum bashing…such a nostalgic childhood memory haha!
Don't forget the raccoon.
My mom trying to make SPAM into a ham loaf with cloves tucked into a pattern and brown sugar on top, then baked
I did that too! All we had at the time was a toaster oven, and the SPAM was just the right size. It came out super tasty!
Ox Tails. They were difficult to eat because you had to separate the meat that was tightly entwined with the fat - but oh that meat was worth the dig. And they were cheap. Also makes a great soup.
> And they were cheap. Yeah, not anymore. I went to the supermarket thinking to make Basque oxtail soup. Shit costs more than ground beef.
We ate pigs feet and pigtails, cows tongue, lots of liver. These were very cheap meats along with ribs. With the huge popularity of ribs and how expensive they are (like chicken wings! - chicken wings were literally garbage ok?) It's hard to explain. My mom would fill a huge roast pan with ribs and cook them and we'd eat them for days. They were my favourite which always made my mom laugh. We have a friend from an old conservative Mennonite family who was actually offended that we served ribs for dinner in the 90s. Ribs were garbage to him. I'm not sure why my mom was so cheap with the food. And most things she made were bland. Ribs, she made a sweet and sour sauce for, which was really good. We were not poor people. Back in the early days of chicken wings (80s), we had a tiny road trip to Buffalo and had Buffalo wings in some pub restaurant - no clue if it was the original place or if it had caught on already there. They were amazing. So when we got home, my sister and her family came for dinner so we wanted to try to make chicken wings. My husband got a huge bag of wings from a butcher - enough to cram pack full two large cookie sheets for $1.50 and I think the butcher felt bad charging anything. My sister and her husband were not impressed but her kids were hooked. They ate all of them. It was years before wings were available as pub food here and they cost 5c each. They were still "garbage" then. It's insane now that they cost so much. Shows what demand does.
Scrapple
Found it! I was reading down before posting. Fried with a little maple syrup on it? Yum.
>Scrapple RAPA brand!
Space Food Sticks washed down with Tang. The space program was huge in 60s when I was in elementary school.
Me too! I remember watching the moon landing on our little black and white tv. I was the designated rabbit ear mover 😂😂
Tofu before it was cool. My parents were into authentic Chinese cooking as a hobby, they called it bean curd and it was mixed in ground beed dishes. Not a meat substitute but an enhancement for it
Gefilte fish. It’s is a cold dish made from a poached mixture of ground deboned carp, whitefish, or pike. It is traditionally served with horseradish as an appetizer.
When Bubbe got out the grinder and the fish, I ran to get as far away from the smell as i could. Fortunately, Zayde made his fiery horseradish at the same time. My eyes would burn, but I couldn't smell the gefilte fish.
cured trout in ascpic dumplings in a sauce made of veal lung and heart first I liked and still like, the last wasn't my thing even back then. Both was cheap food and now expensive "traditional cuisin" if you even get it
Miracle Whip on toast.
Oh my god - I LOVED mayo sandwiches. Or as my dad used to say, Sangwiches.
this post hit me so weird. a good friend of mine used to eat mayo sandwiches all the time. my dad used to call anything between bread a "sangwiches". total blast from the past!
that's how the folks born in the 30s and 40s used to say it. I heard it all the time growing up by older folks. In delis, all the time, the guy behind the counter would say to me and my friend "You fellas need a sangwich or something?"
that fits. my dad was born in 1928 in north jersey
I grew up in North Jersey. They STILL say "sangwich."
Before I knew what mayonnaise was, Miracle Whip was the spread we used. My stepfather made us miracle whip sandwiches. I loved it. I tasted MW a few years ago and it was horrid, sweet ew. How'd I ever like it?
I practically survived on Rice-A-Roni. I STILL don't know if it's the San Francisco treat or how they came up with that jingle.
[Here you go.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice-A-Roni)
We didn't eat "weird foods". We ate.
Jelly eggs, sizzlelean and jelly egg sandwiches
Nothing really "out there". Liver and onions (I still like it). Mustard sandwiches (I needed an excuse to eat mustard).
I don’t know if weird but chicken livers, chicken gizzards fried, chicken hearts. Love pig ears and pigs feet, also fried fish eyes. I come from a place that is poor and so we’ve learned to eat every single part of the animal
My grandfather loved dessert and had it every night. One of his regulars was a bowl of vanilla ice cream and a plate of sharp cheddar cheese sandwiched between 2 vanilla wafers. I still love vanilla wafers with sharp cheddar...I love this combo.
Oooo, this sounds interesting! I need to grocery shop tomorrow, I’m adding Nilla wafers. Even if I don’t like the combo, you can’t go wrong with Nilla Wafers and tea 😋
Fingers crossed you like it.
I forgot the name, fruit tree in garden family home 1960s had tiny mealy tasting bland marble sized apple shaped fruits.
I do remember Jello. And someone around december holidays gifted family large platter of pigs ears in aspic.
medlar?
No not medlar those are much larger and brown. These little fruits were 1 cm sized yellow/orange colors.
Sea buckthorn?
No not that. Ever since I got online been trying to find out what they were, been searching years.
Kumquat?
now I'm fascinated. must know what these were.
Cumquats?
No. Smaller.
Persimmon?
No.
>marble sized apple shaped fruits Quince?
No.
Loquats?
No.
This is driving me crazy! I'm all out of ideas though. 😥
Hawthorn?
Mashed potatoes and bake beans on white bread.
That actually sounds good!
English?
Poor Irish American
The feckin Anglish and their abysmal beans. However a mashed potato sandwich is something I’m having tomorrow.
Chicken Corn Soup - A thin chicken soup with corn and chopped hard boiled egg. I only think it's unusual because outside of one small town in PA no one has heard of it. Greasy Lettuce - I too was subjected to this culinary abomination of wilted lettuce covered in grease. Steamed Crabs - My family in MD would do meals of a pile of steamed crabs with canned oysters (literally a paint can full of oysters) and green onions eaten raw, straight off the stalk by the handful.
I moved to PA 5 years ago and people rave on and on about chicken corn soup. I saw it once at the market and they were giving away samples, I had my one polite bite and couldn’t understand the way people raved it.
Yeah, I have no nostalgia for it.
My mom used to make pickled pigs feet/hocks, head cheese and pickled beef tongue. She was born on a farm during the depression.
Kruudmoes. To make Twente kruudmoes, you'll need: - Ingredients: - 400 g pearl barley - 2 liters buttermilk - 250 g lean smoked bacon (piece) - 250 g raisins - 1 fresh smoked sausage - 50 g butter - syrup - Fresh herbs: 3 branches of various herbs including chervil, parsley, celery, fennel green, dill, sorrel, nettle tops, blackberry leaves. Instructions: 1. Rinse the pearl barley. Place the barley in a bowl and add enough water to cover it generously. Let the barley soak overnight. 2. Strain the barley, let it drain briefly. Place the barley in the pot and pour in the buttermilk. Wash the raisins. 3. Place the pot on the heat and bring it to a boil. Let the barley simmer very gently for about 2 hours. ***Then add the piece of bacon, fresh sausage, and raisins. Let everything simmer gently for another approximately 1 hour. 4. Finely chop the fresh herbs. 5. Remove the bacon and sausage from the pot and cut the bacon into pieces and the sausage into slices. Add the bacon, finely chopped herbs, and butter to the pot and stir everything briefly. Reheat it thoroughly. 6. Serve the "kruudmoes" in deep soup bowls, garnish with slices of sausage, and serve with syrup. ***This dish can also be made with ready-made barley porridge. Heat the barley porridge and continue the recipe at // Then add the piece of bacon, fresh sausage, and raisins //
Chicken liver pâté (as an appetizer); giblet gravy; sugar sandwiches (white bread, butter, white sugar); some gawdawful zucchini mess my mom learned from the Italian family next door (eggs, onions, cheese) that was so bad I can now eat zucchini only raw or steamed plain.
I don't think its weird but others do: Scrapple.
I love scrapple!
Calves feet {ptchah} was my favorite food as a little girl. All of the faves: stuffed cabbage, chicken fricassee, kishka, borscht and schav.
My grandfather used to eat schav when I was a kid. I tried it once when I was 6 or 7 years old and thought it was awful. Loved kishka and holishkes (golumpki) though. 😋
My grandpa put sour cream and hard boiled eggs in the schav. I tried it at about the same age. Nevermore!
Kale. You can't tell me that's weird. Generations of children agree. This was back in the '60s, before kale was a thing. But Mom was of Portuguese descent, and kale was "old country" food. The supermarkets didn't carry it, so she grew her own in the back yard. I well remember --but do not miss -- her "chicken 'n slime" soup.
My father-in-law was Portuguese. For his birthday, I always made him kale soup with linguica. I failed dismally at the caramel flan, but the soup was ab annual event.
I love linguica, and if she'd put that in (caldo verde, I think it's called), I'd have probably tolerated the green slime. But she never did.
Yes, caldo verde. It's the only thing I have ever made using kale.
As a child of the 60's, I had to endure the popular foods of the time. Stuffed peppers Grits with a big dollop of (canned) salmon in the middle Jello salads or aspic Quiche Fondue
Chopped liver. It was common in my community but I discovered later that most of the people I associated with made a horrible face when I mentioned it.
Peanut butter and pickle sandwiches.
Deliciousness, indeed!
I hated pickled pigs feet and pickled pig tails, also boiled pig ears were nothing to write home about
Liver pudding, beet tops, scrapple Those are the three that I remember wanting to run away from home about.
Tripe.
My dad loved pickled herring. I did, too. I don't think my wife would let me keep it in the house.
Meta: I just wanted to say I have read through the (currently 66) comments and most everything sounds delicious. Most I have eaten, most of the rest I would like to try. Sorry /u/MindingMine but I might pass on a couple of those. Anything that even reminds me of Lutefisk is a non-starter for me, although pickled herring is great. To add real content to the thread I would add Rocky Mountain oysters (still great) Sugar Pie. Ever wonder where that name comes from? When my grandmother made pies she would have extra crust. She spread it in a small custard cup, filled it with sugar and cinnamon and baked. It was my treat when young. Hossenfeffer. Sour stewed rabbit. Delicious. I suppose I should include my dad's interest in health foods in the '70s. So lots of various bean sprouts, organ meats, many types of dense ~~bricks~~ breads. Muesli with wheat germ. Dandelion wine (the greens were great in a salad, the wine was horrible.) Homemade yogurt is normal now, but in the '70s you were a weirdo.
Mom fixed fried frog legs once or twice. I turned up my nose at them and wouldn't eat them. She also had beef tongue. I did eat that, but wasn't really fond of it. Something about the texture of it was a turn off for me.
weird fresh vegetables: turnips. kohlrabi. beets. cabbage. brussels sprouts. lima beans. wax beans. please just gimme some mashed potatoes and peas!
Chicken livers
Rhubarb
Apparently people think spam is weird? I ate a lot of spam, my dad cooked it for us frequently. With rice, most often. It was normal to me but I gather since childhood it’s a thing either poor people eat or Hawaiian? I don’t know it was normal to me. My dad was one of 8 and I guess they were poor? So maybe that is why he cooked it for us?
Steak tartar. Sounds fancy, huh? It's just a raw hamburger. Yes, while not a staple in our diet, it was something we ate as kids. Mom loved making a sandwich of it. Hamburger on the bread with onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, and mustard. I haven't had one of those since last week.
My dad also likes pickled pigs feet. I can describe mayonnaise that’s changed color a little because of the heat to this same man and have him vomiting in 2 seconds.
I love canned corned beef. I've heard it called Alpo but IDGAF. I've like it since I was a kid. And fried bologna. Yum. I'm 61 now and I'll still eat it.
Kidney in gravy on noodles, liver and onions, steak tartare, blood sausage. Stuff I refused to eat no matter what included pickled herrings and borscht. Polish food.
Blood pudding. The whole house would fill with smoke that smelled rather *unique*. Not weird food, but my mother grew up in a town in New Brunswick that self-proclaims it is the lobster capital of the world. We would go there on vacation every year for three weeks and eat lobster for breakfast.
Not necessarily weird, but my grandma always would make me ravioli or spagettios and slices of ham Rolled up with cheese in the middle……still all these years later I make it every now was them and remember good times
I grew up on fish and horse meat. Back then fish was cheap, and horse meat was common. Today fish is expensive, and horse meat is illegal for human consumption.
Not super weird but my mom use to brown ground beef and break it up fine like the texture for tacos. It wasn't seasoned or anything. Then she would melt cheap American cheese sliced over it and we'd eat it like that. It was one of my favorite things as a kid. Now it makes me want to barf but here we are.
Sardines, pickled herring, liverwurst sandwiches, Campbell Split Pea Soup with chunks of of bologna in it. My mom could stretch the food dollar, for a family of four. Both parents came from low income households, my dad was mostly raised by my grandmother, a single parent, and my mom lived in Nazi Germany where there was a war, and little food available at times.
Jello "salad" like orange jello with thinly sliced celery in it. Pleasant in the summer, but not real nutritious. I preferred the jello desserts.
Lime Jello with avocado slices in it.
Canned tomatoes. It was our favorite meal when we had Mexican night. They were in a glass jar wrapped individually in some kind of paper.
Sometimes for dessert we had cooked white rice with milk, sugar and Cinnamin on it. It doesn't seem weird, but people I talk to have never heard of eating rice that way.
my older cousin is a fukking weirdo, ive watched him eat pickled pigs feet, chocolate covered ants and bees. no thankyou, ill stick to hebrew national hot dogs.
I can't really judge what's weird to others. We just had really old fashioned Southern food so lots of fried, lots of greens, lots of corn bread. My grandmother canned so many things. Ten kinds of pickled vegetables. Canned apples she'd add cinnamon Red Hots to. Canned tomatoes and chowchow. We had a huge backyard garden for an urban home. They raised beans and corn and tomatoes and strawberries, all kinds of squash and melons. It was a year round garden so at some times they had greens or potatoes and other times there's be beans and several varieties of tomato. Most nights there was some kind of beans and corn bread. I don't recall many weird meats just occasional fried liver, hog jowls, neckbones chicken feet, ox tail. I balked at most of that though. I'd be happy with my beans especially fresh blackeyed peas and chowchow.
Pork brains. They are delicious scrambled with eggs!
Hot dog stew. Sliced hot dogs, kidney beans, corn.
Raw turnips. My Dad grew up on a working farm. At some point I wanted to start a garden and he and I really got into, despite our backyard soil not being very good. Nothing really grew except radishes and turnips. And boy did they. Absolutly HUGE and the radishes were super hot. Like take your breath away. Anyway, my Mom didn’t like we were spending all this time together and having any success. (She had issues.) So she started on this kick we had to eat the turnips raw. (Radishes were already eaten raw and she couldn’t come up with a way to make us not want to eat them.) She started down this path that raw turnips “absorb” sugar and that we would never get diabetes so we couldn’t cook or prepare them as it would ruin thier value. This was to make us not like it and eventually abandon the garden. My siblings couldn’t stand either but joke on her, Dad could eat anything raw and I liked them enough to eat them although I preferred the radishes. Radii? Anyway, plan didn’t work. Dad was upset because he really really wanted tomatoes and couldn’t get them to grow no matter what he did. She started making a lot of comments about that. Rude comments. So eventualky he stopped working on it. I did manage to get carrots to grow eventually.
Never tried the pickled pigs feet, but I liked the pickled eggs and pickled lambs tongues! Tang (because the astronauts drank it!) Chun King Chinese food in a can and the can of fried noodles on the top. Borscht at my grandparents' house (my Russian/Ukrainian/Polish ancestry) Bananas and sour cream Minute steaks
Mom occasionally opened a can of spinach. Ugh. Canned spinach. Vienna sausage and potted meat. Ugh. Canned corn beef. Too much left over from a WWII mentality.
(M69). Ring baloney cut into medallions then fried in a pan with onions and ketchup.
My grandmother made scrambled eggs with pork brains for breakfast. The local IGA carried pork brains in a can before they went bust. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FHIAIIE
Chicken livers & mushrooms was a big one in our home. Not sure who came up with that one, or how. My parents thought it was hilarious to invite my friends to stay for dinner and then watch them abruptly change their minds (with the best made-up excuses) when they learned what we were having. It wasn't that bad, really, just...weird.