What gave me this idea was a rereading of Nella Last's Peace, the diary of an English housewife that she kept both during and after World War II for the Mass Observation organisation. In some ways I find the peace-time entries more interesting than those of the war years (Nella Last's War) because Nella was obsessed with providing her husband Will with good meals although food (and other) rationing continued until 1954 in the UK. Evidently Will was appreciative of his wife's efforts, to a degree, because he said that he 'hardly knew there was rationing and food shortages'. If he had been my husband, I would've felt like clobbering him occasionally with my rolling pin!

I am amused that Nella described herself as a 'finicky eater and pernickety cook' yet some of the dishes she was most proud of and claimed 'good' sound terrible to me; e.g., a kidney casserole. Nella admitted that she was tired of casseroles and stews, that sometimes she dreamed of 'solid joints' and 'butter that wouldn't go off so soon'. I think Nella would have been aghast at some of the things my family ate!

I am interested in food from any era or decade. For instance, what did your family eat for Monday dinner/supper -- Sunday leftovers? Red beans 'n' rice because Monday was washday? Meatless, if your family were meat-eaters?

Do you remember having your first slice of pizza? your first burrito? your first sushi?

Do you recall reading descriptions of food in books -- diaries and novels, in particular -- that made your mouth water or you thought were particularly strange?

What about food fads that have faded, mourned or unmourned, or the fads that became 'classics'? An example of the latter is 'ranch' dressing. Salad dressings seem especially prone to faddishness, for some reason, but they also have peculiar lasting power; e.g. Thousand Island dressing.

Or anything else about food that comes to your mind!

We always had tea and toast at 8 PM. No matter what was going on in our often tumultuous household, that was a peaceful respite.

I never tasted pizza or spaghetti or lasagna until I went away to college. (Atlanta was very much "white bread.")I never had Indian pudding or lobster until I lived in New England. Nor had I ever tasted lox and bagels. Our food was rather bland, looking back.

My father was an avid fisherman. When he returned from one of his trips, he would bring trout, which we would eat with fishroe and grits for breakfast. At Xmas, my father would bestir the kitchen making a very potent eggnog....

After living a year in France, my tastes and choices in cuisine utterly changed.

Vee, Nella's kidney casserole didn't revolt me because of the kidneys. I'm not especially fond of offal; but I've eaten plenty, though usually disguised in wurst. Rather it was how she put it together, seemingly without any seasonings (perhaps too scarce or expensive to acquire at the time). Maybe she did use some but only forgot to mention them; I don't know. However, I have run across some English and Scottish cooks (particularly older ones) who don't include much seasoning at all in any dish -- maybe Nella was one of those. I'm afraid I would have insulted Nella, if I ate some of her kidney casserole at her table, by reaching rudely and unthinkingly for the salt and pepper shakers -- anything to deliver a little flavor to my admittedly jaded tastebuds.

Siobhan, your grandmother's pizza pie sounds very similar to the first I tasted. But mine was at school and didn't have the benefit of having grandma's hands to make it taste good. (Ever notice how some cook's food cannot be duplicated no matter hard you try. I've tried to make my late mother-in-law's Waldorf salad, a very simple recipe that she wrote out for me, but mine's just not right. I think it's her fingers making it that is what's missing.)

I learned to like calves liver when I was employed at a Polish college in PA. Liver and onions were served regularly.

My first taste of sushi was at the Captain's Dinner aboard a troop ship filled with 5,000 G.I.s and their dependents (including my husband, me, and our two-month-old baby daughter) coming home from his stint of duty in Hawaii. It's the only thing I ever spit out into my napkin. Raw fish--ugh! I was 19.

One thing we had regularly at home we called tomato pie made with home canned tomatoes, torn-up leftover biscuits--southern style, not cookies--and sugar. (City folks call it scalloped tomatoes.) One of my brothers once took a group of men to a local restaurant that serves home style food. One of them asked what the scalloped tomato dish was, and my brother said, "You never ate tomato pie? You all must have been rich!"

Siobhan's mention of tea and toast and Kath's beautifully crunchy fairy bread reminds me of my husband's grandmother who saved every scrap of bread to turn into 'rusks'. Unlike Kath's, however, and what I imagine is the similar Italian biscotti, grandmother's were so thoroughly dried out they were more like hockey pucks and brickbats...and then she put 'em in the oven to TOAST! (turning them into something akin to charcoal is more accurate to my mind, but that's what she wanted).

The only thing I ever knew her to do with the 'rusks' was placing them on a saucer and pouring strong hot tea over, to soften, I suppose, but I was perplexed as to why she went to all that trouble to harden her bread scraps just to turn them into mush. She lived to be ninety-six and had good teeth her whole life...some older generations' ways are just mystifying to younger ones, I guess.

Mary, I think the southern way with vegetables is the best! I didn't know I was eating 'soul food' when I stayed with my Alabama cousins every summer, but I knew black-eyed peas, collards, and okra were something I wanted more of. Iowans didn't usually eat 'em, so I had to remember and dream for ten months between visits for these fetching foods. I was surprised to learn, years later, that okra and black-eyed beans (an alternate name) are also used extensively in Indian (of India) cooking.

Another southern habit I picked up was drinking a bottled Coca-Cola (7- or 8-ounce size) with a packet of Planter's salted peanuts poured into the neck of the bottle to float atop the cola. The salty-sweet combination is something I love. My daddy liked it, too, so every afternoon when I worked for him in his drug store, we'd take a break to have a 'Co-Cola' with peanuts. He bought the bottled Cokes especially for this because otherwise we had a soda fountain for carbonated drinks.

Carolyn, my first reaction to sushi was about like yours. Have you learned to like it since? I have; so much so that when I'm some place where there's no sushi I have withdrawal pains.

I have a story about my son getting used to his Kentucky wife's cooking, but I'll save it for another post. :-)

Frieda, did you ever sample the southern style "country Ham"? It mainly came from Smithfield VA and Smithfield, NC and was extremely salty. (Quite different from Danish ham, which I prefer). I have a vivid memory of 2 New England friends who had moved to VA years ago and wanted to serve a Southern style Thanksgiving dinner. They bought one of those tough salty hams and made it the center piece of the meal. Unfortunately, they did not think to drain or soak some of the salt out beforehand and it was inedible. I remember we drank a lot of wine that night....

The waitress in her best the-customer-is-always-right demeanor apologized profusely and said she would take it away and bring him something else. On impulse I reached over to his plate and cut off a piece for me to taste. I recognized that it was salt-cured and not the sugar-cured, glistening pink ham that DH was expecting. I told the waitress that I would swap whatever it was that I ordered for his plate. I had had country ham before.

DH was astonished and a bit sheepish when he realized that he had exposed his ignorance. We still laugh about it. I don't know if it was authentic Smithfield ham from Virginia or North Carolina, but it was definitely in that style and very salty! It's perfect with grits...I adore grits.

Growing up in Southeast Asia in the 70s was interesting. The country was, culturally, still very much a Spanish colony. I remember lengua (ox tongue) with tomato sauce and ox tail with a peanut-based sauce and shrimp fry. I haven't had that style of lengua in years. I can find the peanut-based sauce dish but not with ox tail. (And whole roast pig. With an authentic sauce made from the pig's liver. Mmmmm.....)

I also quite vividly remember the preparations for one of our hometown's fiestsa. There was this goat my grandparents had bought -- nice goat but it did try to bite me. Watching it get butchered (and I won't go into the details -- it might be seen to be a bit.... barbaric?) and then cooked into 3 different dishes was ... interesting. And no, I never got to get close to the goat. Darned delicious though. (Today's generation, I think, is too remote from their food. They don't get to see the work that goes into preparing food from scratch -- everything from butchering the animal to preparing the sauces from scratch to cooking using a wood fired stove or oven.)

I also LOVED to play at or with the wood fired stove/oven. My grandparents didn't always use wood for it -- a lot of times they used dried out coconut husks instead of wood. The coconut husks gave a nice even heat and they didn't tend to flare up like wood pieces. And firecrackers thrown in the wood stove .... got my butt spanked.

Oh, and I can't forget sugar cane -- raw sugar cane chopped into bite-sized pieces and then chilled is to die for. Apparently it's not so good for your teeth.... darned delicious though! (Same thing for watermelon -- the only watermelon we had is the variety they call "sugar baby" watermelons.)

Sushi -- first had sushi back in the early to mid-80s at a restaurant. It wasn't bad. My mom took hers home and cooked it! I've tried my hand at preparing pseudo-sushi and it's not that hard! (Pseudo-sushi: instead of using raw fish, I use smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, smoked oysters, and smoked tuna. The oysters was an inspired choice. Not very good, but still inspired!)

Pizza -- pizza to me was Shakey's pizza (it's a chain but it's not so widespread in the US). Thin crust, crunchy.... and with lots of herbs. I remember my dad bringing home a pizza that had whole slices of tomato on it. My first impression was .... what business do tomatoes have being on pizzas?!

I also vividly remember my grandma's sister's "pizza". White bread (flattened), with ketchup, some local cheez-whiz type cheese thingy, and sliced hot dogs. And then you bake it a bit in the over. It was .... interesting. I kept coming back for more though!

Oh, and the coffee and the hot chocolate. We would get fresh coffee beans from one of the plantations. My grandmother would dry them, roast them, and grind them herself. Nothing like FRESH roasted and ground coffee. The hot chocolate was the same. We had a cacao tree near the gate and my grandmother would dry the beans, roast them, and grind them into this interesting looking paste that, when dried, were small tablet-like things. You used one tablet per cup of hot chocolate. You only needed to add hot milk to the tablet, sugar to taste and you were in heaven! That was part of breakfast .... fresh coffee, fresh chocolate ... and fresh eggs.

And fresh pork rinds. Mmmmmm..... pork skin with a bit of fat and a small layer of meat. You dry it out in the sun (I think you might salt it up a bit), chop into small pieces, and then deep fry. Best pork rinds EVER. Lovely for breakfast with garlic dry fried rice and farm fresh eggs (fried).

Ok, I'm getting hungry now....

And no, Frieda, I don't like sushi. Traumatized, perhaps? Or a child of well-done country cooking. I do manage to eat my steak cooked medium-well.

You're right about people today being so far removed from their food. When I married a Texan (my first husband) and went to live in Texas, I was told that we would be having a cabrito barbecue. Sounded all right to me, but in the meantime I got acquainted with a very personable goat named Theodore. You guessed it: Theodore was the designated cabrito. I came unglued when I found Theodore's hide (with luxurious brown & white hair) hanging over a barbed-wire fence. It took me a while to get over that and to enjoy eating cabrito. Chickens on the other hand...I have always been rather callous about their dispatch. I admired my grandmother's efficiency at neck wringing and head lopping.

Dynomutt, I chortled over the 'hot dog' pizza and the pizza with freshly sliced tomatoes -- the latter 'Pizza Margherita' is my all-time favorite.

Heh! Carolyn, so well-done (as in thoroughly cooked) must be a Kentucky preference. :-) That is my son's main peeve about his wife's cooking: she cooks 'everything to death' is his description. I told him to give themselves time: she will learn to cook some things the way he likes them, and he will learn to like the way she wants to cook things. Unless dear DIL follows Kath's mum's rule of 'cook's choice'...ha! Which brings my Norwegian great-grandmother and French great-grandfather to mind -- an incompatible pair of cook and eater as ever could be. Yet they were married for decades and produced seven children, so cooking is obviously not everything.

Funny thing about cooking -- some people like to follow recipes to the letter while others like to fly by the seat of their pants.

My mom (a chemist by training) ALWAYS followed recipes as if they were Holy Writ. I've always used recipes as guidelines. She was HORRIFIED when I would adjust a recipe, add a pinch of this, a dash of that, etc., etc. That being said, she always thought the food that resulted was good. (Of course this also meant that .... I could rarely replicate the dishes I cooked!)

So .... who here follows recipes to the letter and who uses them as mere guidelines (suggestions, really)?

My sister makes it up as she goes along, and she is a far better cook that I am.

Most of my food memories are connected to my hungarian grandmother, who hardly ever used recipes. Every Christmas we sat at the kitchen table shelling bags and bags of walnuts, so we could have lots of kiflis and kalach. Same thing at birthdays, so we could have walnut torte, and how we always saved all the perfectly shelled walnuts for the decoration on top.

Donnamira, yours are wonderful-sounding memories. I have heard of kiflis and may even have eaten some, but I'm not sure.

Carolyn, I forgot to ask if you had any advice for me to relay to my son re his dilemma. His wife is a lovely young woman -- very smart and a great mother -- but she is sensitive about her cooking. I don't think it should be any big deal, but sometimes things seem all out of proportion to what they should be. I think she makes superb deviled eggs and fried green tomatoes. Dear son agrees on those!

Frieda, above I mentioned some of my very early memories of US food. I know you first came to the UK a few decades ago(!) and wonder what your impressions of English food were. Were you blown away (or sunk) by Yorkshire pudding, did you enjoy over-boiled brussel sprouts? What about our local cheeses (so different from those in the US) or anything 'non-factory' produced . . . not so easy to find when you were first over here, but better now.
Have any other RP'ers lived to tell the tale of food from GB?

We had fish five times a week in summer, never in winter when the sea was frozen, except burbot that is fished through holes in the ice. Herring was common for lunch, served in many ways. Lavaret, whitefish, was eaten for dinner, usually oven fried and served with spinach. Salmon was expensive but eaten occasionally and always for holidays. My mother cured it herself with salt, sugar and dill and I still do. I think the habit of eating cured salmon "gravlax" has paved the way for sushi in Sweden. Two of my five young grandchildren are crazy about sushi and the 13-year-old can make it herself.

On Saturdays we had white bread for breakfast that I used to buy from the baker next door, too early for him to have opened his shop so I would sneak in at the back. The ordinary bread was crisp rye bread. There were no rules for Sunday dinner but we usually had roast lamb in autumn, chicken in spring, or veal. My grandfather always grew vegetables so my mother served vegetables more often than most women in the far north of Sweden in the 50ies. We always had dessert/pudding at dinner, simple things like rice pudding and jam or fruit soup.

My mother never taught me to cook but I was interested from an early age and when I was 14 she fell ill and had to spend several weeks in hospital before Christmas. My father left the cooking to me as the eldest. The first thing I had to do was to salt a 12-pound ham my father had bought cheaply from a farmer. The Christmas ham is a must but we usually bought it already salted. Salting was very easy, I looked up the recipe in a cookbook, made a brine and put the ham in a stainless steel bucket. Mother cooked it when she was home again and it turned out perfect. After that I lost any fear of cooking.

Salting/pickling is an interesting process. I've had salted ham (and I love it even though my doctor says it doesn't love me back) and I've always found fascinating all the different ways different cultures have devised to preserve food. I love duck confit and was quite surprised that it's basically a way to preserve food during the cold winter months in France. (Submerging cooked duck in its own fat and preserving it makes sense. Cooking it to a lovely crisp brown consistency is .... darn it, I'm getting hungry again.)

Back home I don't remember any traditional salting/pickling methods. Stuff had to be cooked every day since it tended to spoil quite quickly (a definite drawback of living in the hot and humid tropics). I think we had hams but those traditions were imported from the Spanish. And Spanish hams are quite tasty!

Ok -- I lied. Fish gets salted back home. Salted fish can then be deep fried and then consumed with local vinegar which has been liberally infused with garlic, peppers, and onions. Oh and let's not forget the ubiquitous dry fried rice with garlic.

veer -- I once hosted a dinner party while in university where I prepared roast beef. A friend from Newfoundland told me that you can't have roast beef without Yorkshire pudding. Never having heard of this concoction, I asked her to give me the recipe so I could make some. After I made some ..... I was confused? Flour? And water? That's it? And then you smother it in gravy? It was simple, yummy but darned puzzling.

I talked to a Chinese friend of mine and asked about her food memories. She gave me one that sounded darned familiar. Apparently in Chinese culture, whenever you're sick, they feed you congee. Congee is, essentially, a rice gruel made from putting rice in lots of water and then boiling the living tar out of it over a slow heat. You can add garlic, ginger, meat, etc., etc. The rice breaks down to a gooey thick soup-like consistency. It's fed to sick people, young babies (apparently this is one of the first foods fed to babies), and older people who have trouble chewing.

Interestingly enough, back home we have a version of congee that (surprisingly!) seems to have originated from (or was heavily influenced by) the Spanish. It's called arroz caldo or rice soup. After some research this turns out to have been a version of congee that's been adapted to local tastes.

Anyway, I love congee. My Chinese friend? She doesn't like it at all -- she HATES this stuff since it reminds her of being sick.

Are there any foods that you hate/don't like because of an association with being sick/unpleasantness?

Swedish gravlax is divine! A lot of sushi really isn't raw; it's acid-cooked (by vinegar, etc). The jump from cured fish to sushi is entirely understandable to me.

Something I didn't know about some Swedes (and Finns) is their fondness of crayfish until I attended a fais do-do (rock the babies to sleep) in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. The Cajun party-throwers had boiled up huge pots of crawfish or mudbugs (as they call 'em) with whole onions, whole red potatoes, and corn on the cob in the spicy liquor. I was seated at a table with a group of Swedish and Finnish visitors when one of these pots of steaming crawfish and vegetables was dumped down the middle of the newspaper-covered table. My new acquaintances gasped and one asked: Is all of this for us? I assured them; yes, it was all right to eat as much as they wanted. And they did! They forgot to dance. I was told that typically in their countries a diner was lucky to get ten crayfish per person, at the most, so the 'mudbugs in Luzianna' would be a treat they would never forget. Mariannese, do you and your family and friends enjoy crayfish?

In Edinburgh, at little shops, I enjoyed the best pastries I'd ever had outside of France. I still remember how friendly the city residents were, amongst themselves and to me. Scots seem to really like to chat! Everything I ate in the city was fresh and delicious. My stepdaughter visited Ireland and raved about the fresh salmon.

I cook rather like Carolyn: I stick to the recipe strictly when making it the first time, then later on, add my own creative flourishes. My late husband was a far better cook than I and made it up as he went along. I collected all his original recipes in books, which will probably eventually go to his daughter.

Speaking of fusion, in terms of cuisines, one of my favorites is Viet Namese, as it is a marriage of foods of two cultures: French and oriental.

We did have a few traditions, though. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner were always served in the middle of the day (around 2 pm). My mother cooked a roast every Sunday. It was a mid-day meal, too, and Sunday night was fix-it-yourself leftover or sandwich night.

My parents always bought a cow at the state fair and that meat usually lasted us for most of the year. The butcher also sold cheese very similar to Colby that is the best I've ever had. Don't know what he did to it, other than it was nice and salty. I do also remember when my parents got their milk and eggs from a farm and not a general store. I was around four or five when they started buying from a store.

Occasionally, mother would buy a brisket from the store and her slow-cooked barbecue brisket was one of our favorite dishes. Grandma was famous for her homemade noodles, which she only fixed on holidays.

Unfortunately, my mother thought every piece of beef she cooked had to be well done. I was also in college before I discovered what a good steak tastes like (medium rare, for me). And I love carpaccio.

I'm also lucky in that my husband is an excellent cook. I do basics and quick meals during the week, but my husband does the rest of the cooking. He rarely follows a recipe, has very good instincts for making up his own.

My only food aversion happened after I had children. For some reason, grilled chicken (I think caused by the smoked-in-flavor) would make me gag and still doesn't taste the same.

Most of the English food was not really very different from the German-American cooking I grew up with. My parents' and grandparents' generations tended to overcook the vegetables in the same way that the English did. Overcooked is what they wanted, though. This always puzzled me until I read somewhere that people did this to make food safe in the day when food poisoning was a common hazard. Makes sense: when you turn the food into glue you kill the 'nasty stuff' and you can get accustomed to the gloppy texture.

One of the first things I remember noticing in England was Heinz salad cream, something I never knew to be sold in the US until years later as a featured import from the UK. Salad cream, in my opinion, is insipid goo. I hankered for a good French dressing -- the real thing (clear with floating herbs), not the Kraft-brand orangey-colored stuff (more goo) that was immensely popular in the US right before I left. A day trip to Boulogne was a particular delight because I had a salad with 'good' dressing. I learned to eat it, but I'll never have the nostalgic pleasure of salad cream that British expats seem to have.

Peas -- the most overused and abused vegetable. Americans call 'em English peas for a reason. Peas are quite wonderful when well-prepared but I've found that to be too seldom in England. Home-cooked ones are fine but the ones in restaurants are usually tasteless. Have they improved any, Vee?

I have plenty of good things to say about English cooking/food. Like American food, it doesn't always deserve the bad rap it often gets. :-)

Crayfish is a very popular seasonal delicacy in August but the native European species has almost died out because of a pest and an American species has replaced it in our lakes. Fresh crayfish is expensive, 45 USD for a kilo, but frozen Turkish, Spanish and Chinese crayfish are cheap but not the same quality as the fresh kind, whether Swedish or American. The crayfish parties are very ritualistic, people wear paper hats and bibs with crayfish pictures, paper napkins with more crayfish and hang paper lanterns with the man in the moon. One saying is that you have to take a schnapps with every claw but luckily people don't drink quite so much vodka.

Meatballs are still popular but frozen meatballs may be more common than the homemade kind. I think that the Swedish national dish now must be spaghetti bolognese. Young Swedes do cook at home but not the traditional dishes so much and more rice, cous-cous and pasta than potatoes. Making sourdough bread is a fad with young men in foodie circles and there are "sourdough hotels", bakeries where you can leave your sourdough "to be fed" if you have to go away. The latest trend is to make your own sausages, preferably Italian salsiccia.

I don't follow food trends (but who knows) but my husband and I travelled a lot before the children came and I cook Greek, Middle Eastern, Chinese and Indian dishes as often as traditional Swedish dishes. I don't eat as much fish as I used to as a child because I don't trust the fresh fish I can get here. When I was a child a man used to come a couple of times a week and sell fish at the door. He came early after having caught the fish.

I have eaten both good and bad food in England and as usual you get what you pay for. There are fabulous country inns all over and London is a Mecka for foodies nowadays. I like all food that is well-cooked and I've had the most perfect fish and chips at a restaurant in Islington, London, where you first had to choose what kind of fish you wanted. I like Lancashire hotpot, steak and kidney pie, shepherd's pie, pork pies like Melton Mowbray and much more. Real Stilton is a Christmas must in my house. There are two things I don't like, Welsh rabbit and the breakfast sausages you get in hotels. But there are many other sausages that I love. I am sorry to say that the food I've had in private houses has not been very good but my husband's English friends are all university professors and above such mundane pleasures as food! I've had raw chicken twice but in wonderful company.

Vee, I adore the Steak, Ale, and Mushroom Pie at Brown's Restaurant in London, and I really like Yorkshire Pudding and Cornish pasties. Sticky Toffee Pudding is one of my all-time favorite desserts.

dynomutt, I'm especially fond of fruit, but bananas are low on my list because of illness. My dad never wanted to take us anywhere we might be exposed to children's diseases. As a consequence, we never had them until I started to high school where I got the mumps. My three siblings and my mother (who taught elementary school and never got them until she slept with my baby brother while he was sick) all caught them. While they were all in bed, I came home with the measles, and the three little ones got them. My dad was the only one on his feet, so he was the chief cook and bottle washer as well as the grocer. He came home with a whole stalk of bananas, and we ate them for days; consequently, it took me quite a while afterwards to enjoy eating them, and I still don't like them when they get very ripe.

This is a good thread, Frieda.

We ate our rice with sugar. I never had rice any other way until I visited a friend's home and they looked at me oddly when I asked for sugar for my rice. Sharyn McCrumb, in one of her novels (or essays?) talks about how Scots of the Piedmont ate it savory while the Scots in the Appalachians ate it sweet.

Funny thing, Mom made her own pimento cheese when I was a kid and I loved it. Then she started buying it and I hated it. Guess I grew to like it because the next time she made it from scratch, I hated it. Fickle kid.

We would eat, as a treat, white bread, slathered in butter with molasses poured over it.

Weekend breakfast was eggs, bacon, tomato slices, angel biscuits, and fried apples.

Buttermilk pie is a family favorite, but we call it custard pie in front of the kids. I've a cousin who makes several extra for family events and sends one home with each of his aunts and uncles.

Christmases Mom always made Divinity and Buckeyes.

As for memories once I was on my own --

Weekends at the beach, my morning breakfast was croissants, cheese, strawberries and a split of Freixenet. Weekends at the slopes I always had Belgian waffles with vanilla ice cream covered with strawberries and a shot of amaretto for Sunday brunch. Yes, it was a rut.

I've had times when chicken tastes peculiar to me. Not spoiled but rather schmaltzy...I call it 'that chickeny tang' and sometimes I am completely turned off eating it.

Dynomutt, I like congee a lot, but I've never associated it with being ill. I understand why it's probably good for invalids, though. I do associate milkshakes with getting over stomach bugs. I don't want a milkshake ANY other time. Oh, and 7-UP and other fizzy lemon-lime drinks that are supposed to settle the stomach...they may work for some people but not for me.

Mariannese, "sourdough hotels" -- my word! What will they think of next? And who would've thought that 'wash day' could be so evocative. :-)

I've had raw chicken twice but in wonderful company.

Carolyn: Mahalo nui loa! I'll transmit your great suggestion to dear son that he should take his wife out to eat more.

I agree, Carolyn. This is very good thread; thanks to you all!!

friedag -- I completely agree about salad cream. I had a friend who was English, well, his parents were English even though he was born in Montreal. I once asked him, before a dinner party I was throwing, to pick up a bottle of mayonnaise. Of course, he picked up .... Miracle Whip. I don't know if you're familiar with this product but it's not mayo and it's NOT a substitute for it, even though people seem to think so. (Since then, I refuse to even contemplate Miracle Whip as a food product. Yes, that's a tad harsh.)

chris -- I remember eating white bread when I was a kid back home. White bread (not toasted) was slathered with margarine (yellow for best effect) and then abundantly dusted with white or brown sugar. I loved the crunch of the sugar!

This isn't a food memory but a friend mentioned to me something about marinating chicken in brine before cooking it. Apparently it really helps add awesome flavor the chicken. Anyone ever heard of this?

(As an aside .... anyone ever consider having a recipe thread or a food thread? Something along the lines of the game threads we have but relating to food? That way, instead of posting answers to games, we can post recipes and ideas for recipes or food advice? Also, instead of sharing food/recipe with just one or two people, we can share with the community!)

Pinto beans and cornbread are the mainstay meal of West Texans. Did y'all crumble the cornbread over the beans? My in-laws did this. They always had onion slices, pickled hot cherry peppers, and Tabasco peppers in vinegar as accompaniments. The Tabasco peppers themselves were not eaten but the permeated vinegar was sprinkled over the 'mess' of beans and cornbread. Some folk used Tabasco sauce (the original red stuff) instead for the sprinkling. I decided I liked this so much that I became a liberal douser not a sprinkler. It's good ole cowboy/southern food that I have craved in the oddest of places -- including Paris.

My oh my, I would like to have some divinity. I can't make it because of the humidity in this part of the world. I have the pecans. Is that what your mother used or was hers sans nuts?

Yeah, Chris, you were a fickle kid! If your mom made pimiento cheese from scratch, you didn't know how lucky you were. I've had the store-bought kind, but it's just NOT right. Ever had it with jalapenos? That stuff talks back!

All your food, Chris, sounds scrumptious to me except... maybe, the sugared rice? :-)

We crumbled the cornbread and ladled the pinto beans over it. Dad would always have spring onions to eat with 'em and add tobasco sauce. To hot for us kids.

Dad would also crumble cornbread in a big glass and pour buttermilk over it and eat with a spoon. Yuck!

Mom's divinity had pecans, but they weren't stirred in the way Paula Deene does them in the recipe I just looked up. They were stuck in the top of the candy. Dad's Mom would make butter brickle every Christmas.

These days I usually add jalapenos to everything, but never thought of adding it to pimento cheese. Thanks for the idea.

Remember iceberg lettuce wedges with thick dressing poured over it? Food police would faint at that today.

Tomato Aspic! The Women's Industrial Exchange in Baltimore served the best tomato aspic to accompany chicken salad and a roll.

Baltimore also had a wonderful French restaurant in a former speakeasy. It was in a rather deserted block with only a small sign in the transom over the front door and you still had to ring a buzzer to get in. They had the most marvelous mahogany bar, a wooden figurehead from a ship, one wall of riveted metal and another covered in snakeskin wallpaper. I loved the profiteroles they served. It was very much a secret restaurant. I just googled to remember the name of the place, Marticks and came across a two part article on the owner/chef, now gone,
Part 1 and
Part 2 that might amuse.

In no particular order:

Vicky, the 'Wimpy' chain of so-called eateries was probably one of the nastiest plastic places in which to eat; I think and hope they are long gone.

Peas. Yes Frieda, they seem to be the veggie of choice in the UK and served with everything from fish and chips to roast meat. All frozen (so technically very fresh) but just SO green and tasteless.

Mariannese and Kath, I wonder if your 'Welsh rabbit/rarebit' and 'Rat-bait' are in fact the same thing.
Nothing to do with the Welsh or rabbits but cheese on toast, sometimes poshed-up with a poached egg on the top or maybe a rasher of bacon. It is even grander if an egg is lightly beaten into the grated cheese with a sprinkle of Worcester Sauce, put on the toast, which has been cooked only on the under side, and put under a hot grill, 'til it bubbles.

'axle-grease' is used here when describing what very cheap eating places use to fry everything in.

Like you Frieda, lunch at mid-day was always the main meal and we came home from school for it. Mostly something hot chops, stew or shepherd's pie, always fish on a Friday, cold meat on a Monday (although washing day with a machine was almost every day). A pudding (dessert not a word used much over here unless it is for something 'fancy') always followed. Fruit pies, crumbles, spotted dicks, rice pud etc. Salad only eaten 'in season' during the summer. We never had 'dinner' at night, just bread and butter and maybe a slice of cake, washed down with tea or milk. Looking back I realise what a small amount of fresh fruit we ate. So much was poor quality imports (Italian apples in early summer; yuk) and oranges just in the winter . . but better than 'modern' ones that are all-year-round but dry and full of pith.

Heinz salad cream: still very popular over here. Our older son used to love it.

I should just add that Chris' food memories are as exotic sounding to me as are those of Dyno's from S Asia. :-)

And in the south, we always had hush-puppies with our fresh caught fish. I think I mentioned we ate shad roe often for breakfast, and red-eye gravy over our grits.

The discussion of grease reminded me of a term that was used when I was growing up: a "greasy spoon" was a cheap restaurant where everything was fried.

Mention of tomato aspic: ah yes, so many salads back in the day were "aspics." And a salad in those bland days was often fruit jello over lettuce.

And in our schools, fish was inevitably served on Fridays.

I've never brined (as opposed to regular old marinating) a chicken myself but I've eaten some. I think they're quite good. I like the immerse-the-whole method better than injector-style (Cajun injection is currently popular in some parts -- Luzianna, of course; Texas where I've had it; and probably elsewhere). The whole brined ones have a more even absorption while the injected ones can be streaky -- in appearance (dark splotches along and at the ends of the punctures) and in startling bursts of flavor alternating with blandness. I've had brined turkey too. Both can be oven-roasted or grilled. 'Beer Can Chicken' seems to be a variation for the grill -- the beer can as a pedestal for the chicken carcass and the beer providing moisture.

Dyno, we've had many food threads wax and wane, come and go. I'm not clear on how one could correlate food topics to the game threads. I admit that I don't really understand the games or their appeal; but they are long-running so I'm obviously out of step.

I agree that Miracle Whip is nasty. Dad preferred it and I would sometimes blindly grab it from the refrigerator and use it. Yuck! Have any of you seen the new MW commercial? A woman in 17th Century garb with a scarlet MW on her blouse and MW in her basket is being run out of town when the Parson steps in to declare MW good while revealing his own scarlet MW. Couldn't find a link to it.

Veer, my grandmother always gave us an orange at Christmas time. As I grew older I wondered why it was such a tradition. I could only guess that oranges had been rare back in the hills and she had struggled to make sure she had them for her hemophiliac son. Does anyone use those tiny juice glasses today?

Miracle Whip haters unite! We REFUSE Miracle Whip on our sandwiches! (Uh-oh ... I can see this as the beginning of a schism, much like the Big Endian vs Little Endian thing from Gulliver's Travels! Actually, there's also a Big Endian and Little Endian debate in computer science as well!

Ok friedag and chris -- shall we form a subversive NMWF group? (NMWF - No Miracle Whip Front)

Chris -- the cinnamon toast souds good! Problem was, I had no idea what the heck was cinnamon when I was growing up. I don't remember EVER encountering it in any dishes back home. I think I have some cinnamon here though -- might make some as a snack!

Coming from a Catholic country and having gone to Catholic school for almost 2 decades, I guess it's a bit weird that fish wasn't served to us on Fridays. Then again, one of the schools was run by Jesuits and we know about how non-traditional they were! :-)

More food memories -- HOLIDAY FOOD MEMORIES

For Christmas, we had midnight mass and a FEAST was on hand after we got back from church. Traditional foods for the midnight mass feast: whole roast pork (you put the whole pig on a spit and roasted it -- takes HOURS to cook but the skin is so crunchy and yummy), hamonado (rolled pork loin stuffed with herbs and tomatoes and other stuff and then cooked kind of like a ham), rice (lots of rice), queso de bola (similar to edam cheese but saltier), fresh hot chocolate, a fruit salad made with sweet condensed milk, sometimes embutido (meat rolls similar to meat loaf but somewhat sweet with peas, minced carrots, and raisins -- steamed or, after steaming, fried. Goes well with banana ketchup), fresh deep fried spring rolls, and this weird version of spaghetti that's sweet.

The next day we'd all go visit different relatives (and they'd feed us, of course!) and, as kids, we'd all get cash -- brand spanking new crisp bills. Of course, once you reached a certain age, you'd stop getting cash.... but the food was good!

(Oh and they had this BBQ'd dish. Basically you took thin strips of pork, skewered them on bamboos sticks and marinated them overnight in a marinade that had 7-up (or Sprite), ketchup, garlic (lots of garlic), and pepper. Then you roasted the skewered meat over hot coals while slathering it with the marinade.... )

Have the UK food police cracked down on floury puddings yet? Duffs always landed with a thud in my stomach. They seemed to be stand bys with all my landladies, but I learned to dispense with pudding when they appeared. I can't think of an American equivalent although there probably are some.

Yep, Chris, I remember those iceberg wedges. What was your family's dressing of choice? We always had homemade Thousand Island. I still like homemade 1000, but the bottled stuff is abominable. You can probably tell that I have lots of problems with salad dressings.

I first had ranch dressing in the 1970s and thought it was good but I never found it thrilling. And now I am going to pick on my dear DIL again (and she really is dear). She is obsessed with ranch dressing. It's the only kind she will use. She carries around a small bottle or packets of it because she's afraid she will go somewhere (like a good Italian restaurant) that won't have it. She uses it as a dip for not only vegetables but chicken nuggets. I thought it was even stranger when I saw her dip her pizza slices in ranch dressing and then smother a chimichanga with it. But NO! She's not unique. I recently saw my niece do the same pizza-ranch thing, and then I saw another kid do it. I'm told that ranch is often the only dressing that many kids will eat. Does anybody besides me think this is odd?

On really cold winter days she would make us oatmeal for breakfast, which we loved. Normal breakfast was cold cereal and toast. If the temperature and wind chill were dipping down in the -20F territory, she greet us with homemade bread and butter when we came home from school. I can still remember the aroma as we walked in through the kitchen door, wonderful!

Rosefolly

My sister discovered that soaking chicken in salted water improved the taste when she put some in the refrigerator that way to keep it when she had thawed some frozen chicken and didn't use it the same day.

I trust you all speak of sorghum molasses with butter stirred in? We had that in the winter with hot biscuits.

I make Welsh Rarebit sometimes, but mine is mostly just a Cheddar cheese sauce poured over toast with sliced fresh tomato and a couple of bacon slices on top. I have eaten it in the Richoux chain of tearooms in London and really enjoyed it.

And, yes, Chris, I like small juice glasses. I'm trying hard not to break any more of mine. They are hard to find.

The next time I'm in New Orleans I will insist on going to the Girod St. place. Antoine's, Commander's Palace...nah, I've done 'em.

Do you (all of you) have any more 'collectible' restaurants/cafes/dives? They can even be defunct if you can describe their food. :-)

My mother used to make me interesting sandwiches (refer to pronunciation thread "samwidges") to take to school. Cheese and home made apricot jam, Vegemite and celery (nice) and Vegemite and walnut (surprisingly nice). We also have a kind of sandwich meat here in South Australia called bung fritz, as it was originally made by the German butchers who settled here in the 1800s. Something similar is sold in other states as Devon, but it isn't the same. Mum often gave me fritz and homemade pickled onion sandwiches which are truly delicious. If you Google 'bung fritz' in images you will see it, and the picture of the woman holding some will show the size. Notice that nowadays you can also get 'smiley fritz'.

1. hand-cranked ice cream with chunks of fresh peaches in it.
2. real old fashioned lemonade.
3. sweet potato pudding served in orange cups with their edges scalloped.
4. home-made spinach souffle.

I've not tasted any of the above in many years.

Yes, I still use those tiny glasses -- for orange juice, right?

My husband also introduced my youngest daughter to peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I don't like them, but they both do. He likes boiled peanuts, too. Where we live, street vendors selling fresh produce often sell them. I never developed a taste for them.

You all write about so many interesting things that if I responded to everything I wanted to, I would be typing all day.

Kath, the 'bung fritz'...ahem, I've eaten lots of disgusting-looking wurst so I know looks and taste don't always correspond, but the photos I viewed of your state's signature lunch meat don't really make me want to rush out and get me some for samwidges. I read many of the outsiders' comments about the taste. The range: "It tastes like polony" (from a Brit) to "It's no worse than baloney" (an American). Funny! Glad you mentioned your fritz.

Mary, your sweet potato pudding-filled oranges reminded me of 'Chantilly Oranges' which also have scalloped edges. I never could make up my mind about Chantilly oranges: they are beautiful but after eating I wondered if I had eaten anything at all!

Do you southerners know of 'Spinach Madeleine'? I'm assuming it orginated in Louisiana but I've eaten it in Mobile and Charleston. I know some families whose Christmas dinners must include Spinach Madeleine. I like it a lot.

Peanut butter on white bread...as TKAM's Miss Maudie Atkinson said about chewing gum: "It cleaves to my palate and renders me speechless." I don't like having to pry it with my finger from the roof of my mouth. I like peanut butter just about any way except on bread, though.

This thread is a collage with so much in it!

I do not remember my first pizza, burrito or sushi. Are these things supposed to be memorable? ;) I doubt that most people who grew up in California after 1970 would think so.

Pinto beans and corn bread were the main sustenance of my family. Like Chris we crumbled the bread into bowls and spooned the beans and soup over it. We still do. We have the peppers, sliced white onion and Tabasco vinegar like the Texans. The beans in the cooking pot eventually get mushier and mushier so they are turned into "refritos." We no longer use lard for the frijoles refritos. It is a pity because the flavor of lardless refritos is pallid in comparison.

Re organ meats - have you eaten menudo? It is a traditional Hispanic dish. First timers will try it and like it until they find out tripe is the main ingredient. I have seen people faint when told.

Friedag, the ranch dressing craze continues unabated among my daughter's age group. I see pizza dipping all the time. I do not know when it started. I have done it myself, but I think the flavors clash. It IS odd because buttermilk is the main flavor. Most kids would not knowingly eat anything else with buttermilk. My family's favorite salad dressing is an old standard: Catalina. California foodies disdain it but we peons do not care.

I fondly remember the frosty mugs at the A&W Root Beer drive-in. The drive-in is gone and no place near me frosts mugs anymore. I also miss the ice cream parlor that had only three flavors - vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, or you could buy it "Neopolitan" with all three. Baskin-Robbins with its 31 flavors put it out of business in spite of the fact that B-R did not sell bricks of chili, tamales and cartons of shredded BBQ beef alongside the ice cream freezers. I would like to "collect" restaurants and all those bygone eateries and have a time machine so I could visit them again.

Lydia, for those of us who grew up in a White Bread South with no ethnic restaurants, our first pizza, sushi, etc. WAS indeed a memorable experience!

I remember local ice cream ..... cheese flavored local ice cream. It was sweet and salty at the same time with chunks of ... well, they said it was cheese.

As for "collectible" restaurants, there was a place here in Ottawa called Cafe Henry Burger. A pricey place but you couldn't fault them for that -- the service and the food were EXCELLENT! After being in business since the 1930s (I think that's what they claimed), they went our out of business, getting caught in a mini-scandal here. (Apparently a lot of high gov't officials LOVED to eat here and then expense the whole meal to the gov't. Once THAT cat got out of the bag, their clientele (mostly gov't) dropped off)

There's another French restaurant here that was also amazing, especially with their duck confit. I just can't remember the darned name .....

I still remember the one foreign restaurant that opened up in the city of Atlanta in the "olden days". It was called Henri's and caused quite a stir, as almost everyone in the city was either of Jewish, Greek, or Anglo-Saxon descent.

Another new experience for me when I went north to College was my first "deli." I still remember the red-checked tablecloths and candle in an Italian, straw- wrapped Chianti wine bottle.

One of my favorite 'food books' is Betty MacD's The Egg and I, about her days chicken ranching on the Olympic Peninsula in the late 1920s. Vee, do you remember Betty's food descriptions? I was a kid when I first read Egg so I wasn't sure whether she was pulling my leg about those giant clams, Geoducks (pronounced gooey-ducks). She wasn't. They really exist but were elusive back in Betty's day. I understand they are commercially raised (farmed) today.

Si, I've eaten menudo with tripe. However, I try not to think about it while doing so. It is tasty. There's a similar Chilean dish that I thought was 'Cazuela' but I Googled cazuela and didn't find any recipes with tripe so I don't know what the Chilean version is called. I am getting acquainted with more South American cooking through my lovely friend from Buenos Aires.

Leel, I find chicken schmaltz overpowering sometimes; other times I can gobble it. Noodle kugel is good for the soul. My favorite one is topped with cherry preserves. For potato kugel: I, too, know those old-fashioned, knuckle-damaging graters well!

Mary, I probably have several recipes for 'Spinach Madeleine' at home in one of my many recipe boxes and files, but I'm not at home and can't go looking for one for you. I searched the Internet and found several versions but I can't tell which ones are authentic. I do recall that one of the recipes I was given called for a Kraft product that I can't find easily in my part of the world: a chub (roll) of garlic-flavored cheese, the spreadable type. A Louisiana friend prefers the jalapeno-flavored chubs. It can probably be made without using the 'convenience products' but, so far, I haven't been able to locate a good-sounding one without, although I've liked every spinach Madeleine dish I've had. The cheese chub things must be a modern adaptation of an older recipe, perhaps a Creole one.

A time machine is exactly what I need!

I used to tell people my secret ingredient in my (very good) cole slaw was grated fingernail. Now I have a food processor and can make slaw in two minutes, but somehow it just isn't the same.

Frieda, you asked about cheese in the UK. I think we are truly spoiled for choice over the many varieties produced here from the 'reds' of Lancashire and Leicestershire, to the crumbly Cheshire and the many types of Cheddar (mousetrap up to strong 'farmhouse'). The world-famous Stilton, as Mariannese mentioned, is popular at Christmas and now lots of small-scale producers are out there using goat and ewe milk. Narry a cranberry, nut or radish needs to be added to enhance the flavour. I find cheese 'spreads' and 'slices' abhorrent! And strong cheddar is usually used in Welsh Rarebit, add some English mustard to it.
Yes I enjoyed Betty MacD's description of food, but from her last book Onions in the Stew where she has a rant at the 'Amercian cooks' of the 40's-50's and the (to her) dreadful stuff they served at parties. She describes what was on offer at a 'Baby Shower' . . . cold macaroni, sweet rolls, lettuce in sweet jello (is this true . .is salad stuff really served covered in Jello/what we call jelly?) . . . and weak coffee.

Frieda' you also asked about the old-fashioned English puddings. They are having something of a revival as are all-things baking related, partly due to the work of various 'TV chefs' and a hugely popular TV show The Great British Bake Off a weekly knock-out competition where contestants are challenged over a wide range of cookery skills. This week they are attempting Beef Wellington and American Pie.
Do RP'ers have many cookery related TV shows where you live?

I recall vividly when the first "submarines" or "po' boy" sandwiches first made their appearance on the Atlanta scene. It was when I was in high school and we were still in diplomatic relations with Baptista's Cuba. (We exchanged swim teams). These large, delicious sandwiches were called "Cuban sandwiches."

And Vee, yes, there is quite a proliferation of cooking shows on American TV. They are popular with both men and women.

Spreadable cheese is not unique to North America, of course -- the French have their soft-ripened and smear-ripened (Brie, Port du Salut/Entrammes, Camembert) and certain regions of Germany/Belgium/Holland have their 'hand cheeses', some with notorious reputations for stinkiness (e.g., Limburger). The Austrians and eastern Europeans go for spreadable combinations (usually using quark, cream cheese, or cottage cheese as a base; e.g., Liptauer).

I suspect, though, that what you mean by 'spreads' and 'slices' is the so-called processed cheese food -- stuff that Americans and Canadians first used for convenience and as nutritional bulk in diets lacking in calcium due to lactose intolerance (the case of many immigrants and city dwellers). People acquired a taste for it, so much so that it has became synonymous with 'American' cheese in many people's minds. Processed cheese is rather a misnomer since ALL cheese is processed, but it's a term used to differentiate (often snobbishly) between old-style cheesemaking (infinitely variable) and the newfangled creation that offers few surprises but whose consistency is valued by folk who don't want surprises anyway.

I am not a cheese connoisseur so I often don't appreciate the subtleties of different varieties of cheese, but I seem to like the French and Italian ones best, of the Europeans. I like Mexican cheeses a lot -- they tend to be lighter in color (almost white in some cases) and softer. The Mexicans learned their cheesemaking primarily from the Spanish missionary priests. Some California cheese, too, developed in the missions.

Vee, I couldn't view your link (it's the particular computer I'm on), but I will try it again later. I am wondering: What the heck is 'American Pie'? Which American pie are they attempting? :-)

The restaurants here can, for the most part, hold their own against other cities. That being said, I think the dim sum in Toronto is better but then again, they have quite a few more people there than we have.

Woodnymph -- yes, I think duck confit is French. After all, one would argue that only the French could come up with boiling the crap out of a duck, leaving it floating in its grease for weeks if not months on end, scooping the duck out and then broiling it to perfection! (All of the above with nary a thought to health. They have their red wine after all!) Oh and duck confit is quite.... divinely yummy.

As for food related TV shows .... there's the Food Network here. A whole CHANNEL with nothing but cooking shows, restaurant review shows, EVERYTHING about food. It's quite a dangerous channel.... very dangerous to your waistline!

And if any of you guys are ever in Ottawa, try a place called Jak's Kitchen. It's a small place (about 10 tables, maybe less) with some really good food. Relatively inexpensive too! (I'm off to go have brunch there now.) And yes, their duck confit is very good.

I think of cheese spreads as the "processed cheese product" - things like Cheez Whiz - but also Philadelphia cream cheese. There are spreads that are made from exotic (to me) cheeses, like Gruyere. I discovered that real Gruyere is not spreadable at all! The best spread I ever had was made from Port Salut that came in a gift box I got from France.

Friedag, we have many Californians of Asian descent, like my neighbors and my Filipina sister in law, who do not like cheese and will not cook with it or eat it. Except they WILL eat "American cheese" slices on hamburgers and sandwiches because they say it is mild and does not cause "tummy problems."

Mary 'bland' would well describe all my young food memories.
As Annpan says salt and pepper where among the few seasonings used. The only herbs were parsley, added to white sauce, and mint for new potatoes and 'mint sauce' sprinkled on roast lamb. White bread was eaten with relish after WWII and the demise of the 'National Loaf'. I can't remember it but apparently it was grey, gritty and chewy, but a far healthier option than the soggy cardboard sliced variety.
Is fried chicken still popular in the Southern US. When I was last in VA it was served in almost every 'eatery'. Any sort of chicken was quite a luxury in the UK until well into the '60's, when 'factory farming' came into its own.

Donnamira, we had shredded carrots in Jell-O, too. It was called 'Golden Glow Salad' and was featured often in school cafeterias where, I suppose, the nutritionists and food preparers hoped to fool kids into eating 'healthy' raw carrots. Also, it was cheap. The weirdest Jell-O concoction I remember was called 'Wales Salad' that had crushed pineapple and sliced pimiento-stuffed green olives (maybe shredded cabbage, but I'm not sure) in lemon gelatin. Why the 'Wales' in the name? I don't know.

I never noticed southern US cooking as being especially bland, but I came to it in the 1960s instead of the 1940s/50s. I thought it tasty, in fact, because many of the vegetables were seasoned with bacon drippings. Louisiana, of course, is part of the South but it has a style different from the rest with its liberal use of herbs, spices, flavorings, and fiery condiments. And the South Carolina cooking I've had seemed anything but bland to me. It's where I first had 'Country Captain'. Charleston had access to exotic curries, etc. because it was a port, so I imagine the food along the coasts was quite different from that inland, seasoning-wise. Is that the way you would reckon it, Mary?

Vee, Louisiana has a famous fried chicken franchise called Popeye's. The go-withs for the cayenne-seasoned crusty chicken are red beans 'n' rice or dirty rice (made with the giblets) and baking powder biscuits for sopping in the beans -- southerners are great soppers, something that I love to do too!

Rosefolly

A true Southern Chicken tale/tail. My brother was in the US visiting our cousin who has become something of a Hill Billy (in location only) having moved to the mountains of VA where she grows veggies and communes with Nature. He was driving around the area and crossed the State line via a back road into West VA. As he trundled along the dirt track he came to a run-down farm where a small boys was sitting at the gate with a shotgun across his lap, holding a sign which read "You steel chickuns you get kilt."

After I posted my 'American Pie' sally, I wondered whether it was too obscure. Of course it wasn't to the sharp tacks in this group -- Vee and Rosefolly!

I've been to the Popeye's chain. Darned good eatin'. Not exactly healthy but DARNED good eatin' ....

The family potato casserole is a favorite. I've served it to highfalutin friends who loved it, but never do I ever confess what is in it. Frozen hash browns, cream of chicken soup, sour cream, grated cheese - every no-no on the food police list. Of course, everyone realizes it is off the charts bad for us, but it is so good no one wants to know the details.

I grew up in the 60's/70's so certainly have my share of bland fish sticks/meatloaf/chicken nixon casserole memories...but my mom's extended family still ate a good deal of Polish/Russian cuisine and we lived a town heavily influenced by the PA Dutch. Pierogi fried in onions, kielbasa, halupki (nasty stuffed cabbage, hated it,)poppyseed and walnut rolls, potato pancakes, scrapple, chicken corn soup with rivels or chicken pot pie, whoopie pies, shoofly pie,and lebanon bologna all made regular appearances. My mom was/is a good cook, and cooked mostly from scratch. Our town also had plenty of small, family-run restaurants, so pizza and hoagies weren't unfamiliar either. We did eat banana sandwiches and various sandwich spreads made with cream cheese, olives, and nuts.

I moved to Colorado and immediately developed a love for tex-mex food; married a Virginian and developed a love for some southern foods, especially chess pie,fried okra,and all forms of sweet potatoes.

My favorite food memory involves my grandfather who worked for Hershey's ice cream. He would come to visit toting a "freezer box" which had to be at least three feet tall and 18 inches across; it would be filled with half gallon boxes of ice cream and ice cream treats. The excitement of watching that box being unloaded into the freezer (ice cream sandwiches? coffee ice cream?) never diminished, though I do remember my father looking grouchy about it as he was always on a diet.

Boy, was I surprised when I tasted the wurst! We sat in the car while DH used his pocketknife to cut chunks of the sausage and cheese and I tore the bread. We finished everything and I sent DH back inside the grocery for more of the meat and for him to ask what it was. The answer: Sweet bologna. Well, it looked like bologna but it sure didn't taste like any bologna I had ever had before. I dreamed about it for years, but it wasn't until I posted a query here at Reader's Paradise that someone (was it you, Bookmom?) identified it for me as Lebanon bologna and there are actually two versions: the sweet (that I had) and a savory. When a friend told me that he was taking a trip to PA, I requested that, if he could find it, I would like for him to get me some Lebanon bologna, preferably the sweet. He did find it and he brought me a whole one AND a whole savory one. I was really stingy about sharing them because I wanted them to last. Alas, I haven't had any since. If only all baloney was Lebanon bologna!

From your list, Bookmom, Pennsylvania sure has some interesting-sounding food. I'm familiar with some but not all.

Love your ice cream memory, but I don't blame your father for being grouchy!

Frieda, yes, I think the coastal population in the Charleston area was far more diverse than the more inland areas, such at Atlanta, where I grew up. I know that early on, Charleston had many French Huguenot settlers, as well as German. Both of these groups led to diversity in city cuisine, historically speaking. Also, there is the Geechee/Gullah influence in cooking from Africa. As you point out, ships came and went from many places, and there were specific links to Barbados and to the Caribbean.All these influenced not only the cuisine but the architecture, as well. And Charleston has its own "French Quarter."

In strong contrast, Georgia was settled mostly by Scotch-Irish.

Vee, what a funny story from West Virginia. I lived there 3 years and found the culture interesting.

As for Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, when we visited my stepdaughter in the Reading/Lancaster area, we were amazed by the huge portions served in the restaurants. Delicious food, but enough to feed an army of farmers, and such....

Frieda, I have yet to find an American who can give me their name for what we call 'broad beans' . .. maybe they are just fed to the cattle rather than used for human consumption? Did you ever eat them when staying with your Yorkshire friends? Over here they are/were always served with parsley sauce and eaten with boiled ham/bacon and are a useful early summer veggie.

I tried to introduce fava to my sons and hubby, but they were put off by the toughness of the skin of the bean and what they perceive as excessive starchiness. The nearest equivalent I know that Americans do commonly eat is the large, mature lima beans often called 'butter beans'. Broad beans and limas are not the same, of course, but similar. I think some folk are also put off by the size of broad beans. They look like beetles.

Vee's boiled fat belly reminds me of James Herriot's story of being offered breakfast at a farmer's house and the "meat" was slices of pork fat, breaded and fried.

Now I'm off to badger my husband into making grits for breakfast tomorrow; I'm too "northern" to make them properly, which I think means I'm too impatient.

I have never had the Pennsylvania bologna but after reading your story I would like to try it. My sisters and I grew up eating fried boloney which our mom would do only when money was tight because she hated it. We girls liked it and thought it was a treat.

You asked about Nanaimo bars. I had ONE and it was in Nanaimo itself. I OD'd after about three bites. I am a chocolate fiend so that tells you how incredibly rich they are.

Re the 'Bake Off' TV show. The contestants were asked to do an American Pie of their choice, using the traditional sweet crust 'buttery' pastry baked blind. An interesting selection of fillings, all made using fresh ingredients.
A section of the show was given over to the history and tradition of pies in America and how the ingredients changed as the new settlers moved West. You probably knew that an old law in VA required every landowner over a certain acreage to plant an apple orchard.
Give a pink carnation to the winner who did a key lime pie . . probably not sweet enough for US tastes, but we over here don't have quite your sweet teeth.

I've never been a fan of Key lime pie. Most I've had was made using tinned sweetened condensed milk, a product so cloyingly sweet I tend to gag over anything made with it. I know you all have the same tinned stuff in the UK, Vee, but I am guessing the Bake Off contestants did not use any 'convenience products'. Also, authentic Key lime pie must be made with real Key lime juice. Key limes are not commonly available in most parts of the US outside Florida so I figure they aren't common in the UK either. Regular old lime juice is substituted by most cooks, though. Also, a lot of key lime pie makers dispense with the baked pastry crust and make (certainly a Bake Off no no) a sweetened crushed graham cracker crust instead -- yeeee! talk about sweet.

Vee, Americans got their 'sweet teeth' primarily from you Britons. :-)

Lydia, I have a recipe for Nanaimo bars but after reading it, I decided it was too involved for me to attempt. I can imagine the richness and probably don't need to experience it anyway. However, if I ever get to Nanaimo or some near place in BC, I'll have to sample a bar.

I don't mind fried baloney or fried hot dogs (frankfurters). It removes some of the rubberiness of the usual cold specimen.

Nanaimo bars ARE good but if you're on a calorie-reduced diet or a sugar-free diet, you may want to avoid it.

I've occasionally eaten my way through a region when traveling. In Paris in the late 70s I tried Peach Melba at every patisserie I found. I tried olives throughout the south of Spain, trying to find any I liked. Still haven't.

Friedag, I always liked old fashioned macaroni salad but at a church social I spooned a too large serving onto my plate only to find out it was not what I was expecting. When I tasted it I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from spewing. Around me other eaters were praising the taste of the "different mac salad." I thought, are they kidding? It was sweet! The maker of the salad "generously" shared her recipe. The main ingredient besides the elbow macaroni was a can of sweetened condensed milk and some vinegar! The vinegar did not cut the sweet very much. You would have loved it...not.

Evidently cold macaroni salad came before most (or all) other cold pasta salads. Do you remember when you first had a pasta salad that was not elbow macaroni? I am thinking it must have been in the 1970's when cold pasta became acceptable, even chic to eat. It took my family two or three more decades to accept and some still do not.

Before corn syrup there was hysteria about cane sugar, over refined sugar of any origin, salt, animal fats, 'fake' fats, eggs, food dyes, white flour, etc. There HAS to be one food, one something to indict for all America's eating and health woes. Next I expect to hear that it's bananas causing all the problems.

Those dastards of the food industry and advertisers!

Lydia, yeah, I think I've had some of that sweet macaroni salad. I think the first pasta salad I had that wasn't elbow macaroni was in the 1970s, as you say. Actually, I don't remember it specifically, but I realized one day that there was an awful lot of experimentation with pasta salads going on. Some are about as bad as the Jell-O concoctions. It's a food fad that settled down and came to stay, but I figure many older folk never did and never will fully accept it. Of course the foodies who embraced it as the thing have now moved on to disdain it as prole food.

I am startled by the number of people who do not like olives. I grew up with olive orchards nearby so olives have always been a given. Do people who do not grow up eating olives ever learn to love them?

Friedag, I had a friend in high school who once told me that she would rather eat things without any nutritive value than have 1 gram of fat pass her lips. She is still alive so she must have gotten over that craziness. People want the one and only, instant solution.

>"Puritans not puritanical enough..." LOL!

So poor old Sir Walter gets it for sugar, though I don't think he ever went to the West Indies. I thought it was tobacco that he is now blamed for. First your teeth go then your lungs. No wonder he lost his head. ;-(

Sir Walter didn't have to physically go to the sites of his 'adventures'. He was the paper planner (the adventures being what has been shortened to 'ventures', moneymaking enterprises) and he sent his proxies. It was Thomas Haricot, the polymath and Sir Walter's good friend and employee, whom Ralegh sent to Roanoke. Haricot brought back tobacco, on which he hooked himself, his employer, and eventually millions of previously 'pure' Englishmen. Haricot was the first (known) Englishman with the dubious distinction of succumbing to tobacco-related cancer. The cancer ate away his nose.

Old Walter seems to have had a finger in every pie. Poor Thomas Harriot.

Tobacco may seem out of the scope of a food thread, but there is a relationship between tobacco and food. Old menus for fancy dinners and restaurants often include cigars and cigarettes as the last thing - for gentlemen. Years after my mom quit smoking she said that she did not crave a cigarette except sometimes after a particularly good and satisfying meal.

I have inherited a very elegant oval cup in white and blue china for serving cigarettes. I use it as bud vase or for other small flowers.

I first came across grated carrots in a sickly green jello in the canteen in Yosemite National Park in 1981. We didn't try it. The next time was at Thanksgiving at my Wisconsin cousin's house but that jello was yellow and looked more appetizing. I had some, ate it after the turkey and treated it secretly as a dessert.

Reminds me, Frieda, I hadn't yet answered your question about the wedges of iceberg lettuce. We never had that at home, but always out at catered dinners and I'm remebering blue cheese dressing - which I still don't like. Oddly enough I love gorgonzola but hate blue cheese.

Mariannesei, your experience with carrots in salad drove me to my "Dining with Pioneers" cookbook where I found an entire page of lime salad. You'll be glad to know it is usally mixed with pineapple, variations include grated american cheese, cottage cheese,

Sunshine salad is pineapple, orange jello, cream cheese, whipped evaporated milk, nuts, and celery. Out of this World salad is lemon jello, lime jello, finely chopped cucumbers, onion, mayo, vinegar, cottage cheese, and pecans.

Like Woodnymph, I want to know about the smorgasbord (I hate that this site will not accept diacritical marks). I have a cookbook entitled Swedish Food, printed in Gothenburg, Swedish/English edition, 1961, that has some of the most mouthwatering photos of a smorgasbord. I am struck by the aspics which all seem to be savory (e.g., Sillsallad, fisk i gele, Inkokt stromming i gele) unlike most American aspics/molds that we have been discussing that are usually sweet or semi-sweet.

To my Norwegian great-grandmother the koldtbord was a bowl full of hard-boiled eggs, peeled; lutfisk which only the bravest of souls would venture to taste; some nondescript bread (although she could make fine lefse when she wanted to); a plate of butter; various tins of sardines and such; and her own pickled gherkins. So you can see why the smorgasbord is so vivid and appealing to me in comparison!

Lydia, nope, I still can't make the link work, but thanks for letting me know I was on the right track. It's such a funny line that it's stuck with me after decades.

I sympathize with your mom on the longing for a cigarette after dinner. I began smoking at nineteen and quit when I was thirty-four (so I could have babies). It's been over twenty-eight years and I still get twinges. I have to admit that smoking was too damned pleasurable in the company of other smokers, like at sidewalk cafes in Paris. I know that most of Europe, like the US and elsewhere, have now banned smoking in eating establishments (rightly so), but in my fondest memories there's still a cloud of Gauloises or the aroma of Turkish.

Chris, is 'Out of the World' the salad recipe's name or your estimation of it? I don't mind a cucumber mousse or an 'Emerald Salad' as I've heard it called.

The layered salads have been run into the ground, in my opinion. Of course they're edible, but... I'd do the broccoli/grape tomatoes/feta salad with ya, Chris. :-)

What other (perhaps) unusual service items do you know or maybe even use? I inherited a set of egg cups that amuse my family and various friends for, unlike the English, many Americans have never used them -- or eat soft-cooked eggs very often, for that matter. I had several toast racks that have migrated from the table to be used as letter holders. My fanciest china dinner service has finger bowls which have been used as dessert dishes. I have about as much use for fancy china as I do for the lovely damask tablecloths that I inherited with it, but they belonged to a dear relative so I've kept all.

Smorgasbord is now primarily served in restaurants before Christmas for the office party dinners. It requires 7 different plates because you don't mix the salt dishes, or the cold meat and the hot dishes, or the cheese, the nuts, the fruit and the desserts. I serve a smaller smorgasbord for my now large family, with 10-15 dishes and we use only three, or four plates at the most. Easter and Midsummer are other smorgasbord occasions but not so lavish as at Christmas.

I am burdened with 8 large white damask table cloths and dozens of damask napkins that I never use, all beautifully crafted. One is entirely home made from the flax to the woven material. My children don't want them either but I can't get rid of them as they are heirlooms, and besides, they are impossible to sell. Nobody wants white table cloths now. Somebody (in the 70ies of course) told me to dye them but I couldn't do that. Perhaps they will be back in fashion.

Other useless possessions are the fish knives, the sugar tongs (several) and a contraption for snuffing candles.

I, too, inherited damask tablecloths and napkins, as well as fish forks, egg cups, candle snuffers,and a complete set of sterling silver in the Louis XIV pattern. Oh, and a sterling formal tea service, de rigeur in many old southern dining rooms on the hunt board.

Chris, I read cook books, too, sometimes for hours. I find them fascinating.

I have a small pair of unusual (to me) scissors. They are for cutting stems and removing grape seeds. I was told that they could be used to skin the grapes. It must be an acquired skill through lots of practice. When I tried it, I only made a pulpy mess. Grapes sure were a lot of trouble to eat before the seedless varieties were developed.

At a garage sale I found a small silverplate box (about 2 inches square) with a latched flip top over a compartment and a tiny latched drawer beneath. On the side is a slot with a miniature spoon. I thought it was a fancy snuffbox, but the drawer puzzled me. My brother in law suggested it was for coke! - you know, the tiny spoon. I told him I was shocked! ;) I learned that the box is actually a personal salt cellar, the salt going in the top compartment and pepper going in the drawer. Evidently people carried salt cellars around with them not wanting to get caught somewhere without these favorite seasonings.

Mariannese, damask is worth an enormous amount of money and specialist shops over here will pay several pounds a foot/metre for it. I have one good damask table cloth 'inherited' with our house. When we moved in we found a parcel from the laundry left by the family of the old boy who had been the home-owner and had died several years before! There were napkins, table clothes, white shirts etc all full of starch (does anyone use starch these days?)

We don't have any grape scissors but have old nut crackers with 'Hudson Bay Co.' on them, also a thick HBC blanket. My US Grandfather's Philippine company had a ship previously owned by the HBC; so very far from home.

Deviled egg plates are supposed to be de rigueur for Southern women, but the nice ones only hold 10 or 12 deviled eggs and I have never in my life brought so few to a gathering.

When I was but a little girl my aunt told me an awful joke with mayonnaise and a frog in a blender. I don't think I knowingly ate mayonnaise till I was 30.

My grandfather ate a soft-boiled egg every morning for breakfast so in my family they are known as "Papap" eggs. Still eaten regularly at my house, we have Polish pottery egg cups.. but before I bought those, we used shot glasses. Crack the egg with a spoon, remove top shell and scoop out the egg.

Lydia, sounds like you have a little treasure with that salt cellar, especially because yours still has the little spoon.

I am an egghead, in more ways than one, but in this sense I am crazy for eggs (from fowl, not fish or reptiles). I like most any way they can be prepared. The French, of course, work magic with eggs, but the English are good too. Occasionally, I hanker for a fried egg sandwich in the English style, just a fried egg (the yolk still runny) between two slices of toast. Very messy but that's just part of the pleasure, in my opinion. I think Americans tend to overcook eggs because they actually prefer them that way -- fried eggs with solid yolks, scrambled eggs either dry and crumbly or rubbery, and omelettes with the consistency of plastic placemats.

My DH says this about me: Frieda has never met a vegetable or an egg she didn't like. I am uncertain whether he's complimenting me... Actually it's not quite true that I like all, but close enough. One thing I don't like is wasabi which I think is the most vile something that is supposed to be edible. It reams out my sinuses in the same way that Chinese mustard does. I can enjoy a bit of Chinese mustard but not wasabi.

Some people don't like garlic or onions or hot peppers (capsicum) in much the same way I don't like wasabi. Do any of you have similar reactions to 'loud' foods? Which ones?

I like a little wasabi with sushi, very little mixed with the soy sauce dip. I don't think it tastes very different from horseradish that way.

I love fish eggs and can still remember a flight from Moscow to Stockholm where they served lots of caviare as the first course. I was sitting next to a young girl who gave me hers because she couldn't eat it. Never again will I be able to stuff myself with Russian caviare so much that I couldn't eat the chicken that came after it. We have a few local varieties of roe, much cheaper and quite tasty, but nothing like real caviare.

Brown Rice Salad
2 cups cooked brown rice
6 shallots, chopped
1 red capsicum, diced
50g cashew nuts, chopped
3 tablespoons parsley, chopped
1/3 cup sultanas

Dressing
1/4 cup sunflower oil (I use a bit less)
4 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2-3 teaspns crushed garlic

Mix together and pour over the rest. Note that Aussie tablespoons are 20ml, yours are only 15ml.
The capsicum is not hot at all. The one thing I can't eat is chilli. An amount that seems unnoticeable to others makes my mouth burn in a truly horrible way. People often say to me 'oh, you don't like spicy food' but that's not true. I love curries as long as there isn't any chilli in it. Spicy shouldn't be a synonym for hot. Wasabi isn't for me *VBG*

I love all mildly curried dishes with cumin, so long as they are not too hot and spicey. Mild is the key word for me. I stay away from chili peppers.

Vee, how would you describe the ham you are used to eating in the UK? Would you say it is similar to Danish ham?

I was force-fed scrambled eggs for breakfast as a child, and it took decades before I could even look at an egg. Now, I adore omelets and hard-boiled eggs.

She'd always insist on sending a big square of it home with you too.
It was a staple in her kitchen.

Today I continue to bake sheet apple pies to the delight of family and friends.
Of course the apple filling is the key....it has to be closer to natural tasting, rather than over-sugared.
If I can get Northern Spy apples it is the best of all.

I loved going to Baba's house.
The greeting was always the same: "Eat ! Eat !"

As to strong tastes, a garlic switch flipped over in me when I was in my late 30s. I remember returning a beautiful steak out in Dillon, Colorado because it was slathered in garlic and the menu had said nothing and I couldn't eat it. Just a few years later, I walked into a reception room and the smell of garlic shrimp was divine! And I don't like shrimp.

Friedag, I think onions are essential for good cooking, but raw white and some yellow onions are very painful for me to handle. I cannot chop them without tearing up to the point that I cannot see what I am doing, and my nose runs. My husband though can chop the other halves of the same onions without being affected a bit. It is unfair! However, I can de-seed and slice jalapenos without wearing gloves when my husband cannot.

I love to mince garlic because of the aroma. I even like how the smell lingers on my hands.

On Christmas Eve all the men would gather in the kitchen while my grandfather, Gigi, would brew vodka , honey and butter.
He'd pour it hot into tiny shot glasses and they'd drink it.
Nazdrovia !!!

My friend tried drying her own apples by a method someone told her about--putting them on kitchen towels on the shelf above the back seat in her car and leaving them. The heat of the sun on the car window did dry them, but they drew wasps into her car. She didn't try that again!

Mary Danish ham/bacon production is big business and is sold widely in the UK. Luckily we can get locally reared stuff and like to support our small-scale farmers where possible, even though it costs more. Meat from the 'rare breed' Gloucester Old Spot pig is becoming very popular, some super sausages come from them!

May I ask an eating related question?
Why do Americans eat using primarily a fork, rather than a knife and fork? It has always puzzled me.

We use our knife to cut with our right hand and then switch the fork back to the right to eat.

Lots of back and forth going on....unless you opt to try to use the side of the fork to cut through less dense foods.

Because of how we are taught to use our utensils, it feels slightly less 'proper' to have that knife off the table unless it being used for cutting.

When I was teaching Home Ec. it always surprised me how many kids had no idea how to set a table and where to put the various pieces of silverware. When there were more than the standard three pieces they were really in a bind !
I enjoyed sharing this knowledge with them and always hoped that somehow I'd helped to civilize them !! lol.

Perhaps it not the most important skill in the world but it seems to me that so many of the small civilities are lost that it might be worth trying to salvage a few.

The capsicum shown in your link (hooray, I could see it!) is what we call 'bell pepper' or sometimes 'sweet pepper'. I like all bell peppers, especially the red, yellow, and orange ones -- those being more mellow than the green, although the green are certainly not hot. Chopped green bell pepper, chopped onion, and sliced (or chopped) celery form "The Holy Trinity" of Cajun/Creole cooking. Add chopped tomatoes, let stew for a while, and you have Sauce Creole which should be flavorful but not tastebud numbing. I agree that 'hot' and 'spicy' are NOT synonyms, contrary to the way lots of people use 'em. Something can be hot AND spicy, of course, but just spicy could mean seasoned with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg as many cakes and cookies are. I started to include ginger, but ginger root can be hot as well as spicy.

As for curries: I adore the hot ones! But then I'm a chile head (as well as an egghead).

Lydia, you should designate your DH as Chief of onion chopping and slicing. I have come across screaming onions that have made me weep, but not as badly as what you experience. The physiology of taste and smell (and other manifestations and reactions to food) is endlessly fascinating to me. I volunteered to have my tongue 'mapped' for a university study. I found out that I have a higher-than-average number of bitter receptors (tastebuds). It's probably the reason I am sensitive to some olives (kalamata are especially acrid) and I don't like beer, wine, hard liquor, coffee, tea, and unsweetened chocolate, all of which have a bitter component. Of course it's the bitterness that many, many people love.

Re the knife & fork thing: Vee, as Yvonne says, it's just the way Americans were taught to eat, if we are using our best manners. We eat too damn quickly most of the time, so anything that will slow us down -- such as putting our knives across our plates when we are not actively using them to cut and switching hands for our forks -- is a good thing! :-)

I've always thought the British way of hanging on to both knife and fork is more efficient than the American way, especially when using the fork to load up the blade of the knife. The first time I saw it, I thought it must've been peculiar to that person but I quickly learned that it was a rather widespread habit in the UK, but mostly in comfortable situations -- at home, among friends, etc. Friends tell me that they were admonished at school for eating from their knife blades. Are students still? Or do the educators not worry about such things these days?

But either way, I've noticed (even in some very up-market restaurants) the proper use of eating utensils is a disappearing skill.

I'm still intrigued to know why or how US fork-only eating came about, especially if you consider that the fork is something of a 'new-comer' to the eating scene.

I never heard of anyone eating off a knife. However, I do not change hands: I hold my knife in my left hand while I am cutting, and my right hand always holds the fork.

" I eat my peas with peanut butter,
I've done it all my life.
It doesn't make the peas taste better,
but it keeps them on my knife ! "

Peel and slice the onion and place the slices in a bowl of cold water....then gently squeeze them a few times, change the water and squeeze again, change the water and let them sit in the water for about 15 minutes.
Drain and add to your salad or dish requiring raw onions.
The offending element ( I can't recall at the moment what it is) is dissolved and washed out of them thus making them gentle and rather pleasant.

Try it.

Far from being considered uncouth, eating from the blade of a knife was acceptable, as was eating with one's fingers. King Louis XIV of France continued to do both. It was the eating with a fork that was considered 'devilish'.

In neither England nor North America was there yet a settled way to use forks. The two-pronged fork wasn't conducive to scooping food, so three-, four-, and even five-pronged models were made to go along with the innovation of making them slightly curved. North Americans were slow at acquiring the multi-prong forks, as were poorer people in the British Isles. As late as the 19th century, etiquette books instructed how to use forks, but by this time the British and American ways were already different. Why? Historians don't seem to know for sure. It's probably just a case of parallel development where small changes accrued and became different acceptable forms.

I have wondered whether the American disinclination to have both hands in use (except when cutting) has anything to do with the taboo of using the left hand in some cultures (in Middle Eastern ones, for instance). I don't know why it should, but it's an interesting feature shared by those cultures and some Americans who are taught to kept one hand in the lap, not having two above the edge of the table (except in aforementioned special circumstances), and to NEVER put your elbows on the table. Being left handed, I have had to wedge my left hand in the crook of my left knee to prevent myself from using it impolitely. Like Mary, I cut with my left hand and keep my fork in the right most of the time. The customary positioning of flatware is always bass-ackwards to me and other lefties.

So...when in Rome etc, etc.

The physiology is fascinating to me too! It can explain a lot about personal likes and dislikes.

I was taught the "American Way" of using a knife and fork in home economics class. I am American but my family's style was not the same. Many foods in the hispanic repertoire do not require a knife so one is not always included in a place setting. It is not improper in my culture to use a rolled up tortilla instead of a knife to push food on to your fork. I think it is good to know the ways of other cultures and follow their example when visiting. It is fun.

The current thinking (from what I understand) is that all taste buds are capable of detecting all the sensations; but according to the interaction between food chemistry and a person's chemistry, some sensations will vary in intensity from person to person, even from time to time in the same person (illness can cause changes in the sense of taste which everyone who suffers a head cold already knows). Those more knowledgeable about chemistry can explain it better, I'm sure.

What the physiologists told me about my own sensitivity: For whatever chemical reason, my taste buds do a bang-up job of detecting bitterness. It's both a good and bad thing for me -- 1) the bad: it makes me a hell of a hard-to-please attendee of social events since I don't like most of the beverages that most socializers imbibe; 2) the good: I'm likely to spit something poisonous out before it can harm me, and I'll never be an alcoholic.

It reminds me of some thug hunkering down at a diner counter for his grub.

"Elbows off the table, Mable !!"

I never heard before of umami, the "meaty" sense. I think I am sensitive to sweetness and saltiness, but not bitterness so much. I do notice when cucumbers are bitter, but I like all those stimulant beverages you mentioned, Friedag. I like faint sourness, though not the kind of sourness that makes my neck glands ache. The combination tastes - bittersweet, sweet/sour, salty/sweet - are interesting, but those that do not combine with sweetness do not seem to be very popular.

Something that would get my siblings and me removed from the table was gesturing with our eating utensils when we talked. This irritated our father more than when we accidentally spoke with our mouths full.

It's really quite remarkable that people have developed a liking for bitter foods and how they've learned techniques to deal with bitterness. The olive is a good example: the fruit has to be 'processed' to make it edible, yet the process was invented so long ago that we don't think of it as 'unnatural' as people often do with more recent innovations.

Deliberately eating 'rotten' food, and preferring it, is another food development that boggles my mind. All aged and fermented foods and drinks fall in this category. Of course rotting is natural, so it must have been from necessity that people adapted their tastes to it. Europeans at first turned up their noses at the rotten fish sauces from Asia, conveniently forgetting their own inheritance from the Romans of garum.

Ethnocentricities abound: Naturally the French think the French way is the 'right' one. Visiting members of a French delegation to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette were shocked and appalled that the favored drink among Cajuns is beer, not wine. How could the Louisianians have strayed so far off the 'righteous' path?

Table manners are always a minefield. A friend told me that her father nixed a boyfriend of hers because said BF's manners were atrocious. BF's sin: when he cut his meat, his knife rasped and screeched against the plate. As painful as that must have been for papa to endure, I figure he was just looking for an excuse to put BF down.

Below is a website run by a Junior school (children up to 11 years) in Kent. An amazing amount of information about All Things British.

However, dipping the soup spoon first towards the far rim of the bowl instead of the near rim, before bringing to the mouth, makes complete sense to me. A lot fewer dribbles on the tablecloth and on the bosom would happen.

Vee, can you explain it to us? :-)

Vee, we eat tabouli regularly, but it isn't much like the rice salad above. I make tabouli with cracked wheat, lots of parsley, tomatoes and some mint, and just lemon juice for dressing. It has much more parsley than the rice one.

Yoyobon, I know that poem too, but mine is

I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife'

*VBG*

It could be the meal we had - roast chicken, yellow squash dressing, gravy, green peas with diced carrots, and cranberry sauce - was not the best choice for me to experiment with. I followed the advice of Veer's linked website and mashed the peas and carrots against the back of my fork. It looked gross but worked. However, I got tired and went back to "scooping" because I prefer whole peas and discrete carrot bits. The cranberry sauce (it is really jelly, not sauce) immediately slid off the backside so I had to retrieve it with the tines pointing up. Friedag, I do not understand the antipathy toward scooping either.

Frieda, you mention the 'boy-friend' and his knife scraping, it reminds me of friends who went off the daughter's b-friend because, when he was invited for supper/dinner he failed to put his dirty plate, cutlery, glass etc into the sink after he had finished eating. The way I had been brought up, as a guest in someone's house, we would sit round the table until everyone had finished and maybe offer to help clear away, depending on circumstances . . . it's never easy when in a different place. Even in parts of the UK eating habits/customs are quite varied and that dreadful English word class rears its ugly head. ;-(