This topic was posted on my local NextDoor, and I thought it would be fun to post it here.
I spent a lot of time with my Eastern European Jewish grandparents as a kid and loved what they ate. Now I have a daughter who became a vegetarian as a child and a vegan as an adult. So you can imagine my list of what I ate/eat and she won’t touch would be very long. It includes:
liver and onions
chopped liver
tongue
any kind of smoked fish
gefilte fish
herring
cream cheese
cottage cheese
sour cream
basically any kind of cheese including bleu
tuna casserole
hot dogs
mayonnaise
mustard
I’d love to hear other HOs answers and stories. Thanks.
Our problem is living in a “proper deli” desert. (The ongoing pastrami fad (and sanctimoniously claiming it is all the Jewish cooking necessary) isn’t enough of a desert lush oasis.) No pickled tongue to be seen in the meat case; decent chopped liver can’t be had unless we make it, and gefilte fish from a jar is, well . . . , and Second Avenue Deli is a long ways away (and no longer on Second, for that matter). At least there’s reliably scrumptious lengua about for enticing the youngers to get beyond hotdogs ? And Costco sells a tasty smoked whitefish salad, Costco-sized of course – good thing it’s that good. Everything on your list, save casserole and salt bomb hot dogs, is often on our plate. P.S. As for herring, boquerones are big here too.
My all-time favorite cookies that my grandmothers made were kmish (jelly roll) from mom’s mom and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from dad’s mom. My kid won’t touch either: he hates jelly (well, most fruits and fruit-flavored stuff) and doesn’t trust pumpkin.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I am reminded of a line someone wrote on the late Chowhound when it was still a place to be. He referred I think also to his daughter who had become vegan - which he then called the Hezbollah of vegetarians. I got a great laugh from that.
For my kids, unlike me they have had an opportunity to travel and eat things beyond what I could have imagined when I was young so there’s hardly anything they won’t try. In fact, its a bit scary how the tastes of NYC kids can grow and their expectations. The things they think are normal and want and expect blow my mind. I still recall one New Year’s Eve many years ago when we were hosting a small get together. This was when Russian caviar was still somewhat reasonably priced. My son who must have been 5 or so goes up to the table, gets a bit of toast and scoops a big mound of the gleaming black fish eggs onto it. Pops it into his mouth and happily wanders off. My sister-in-law who had never had caviar before watches this and then does the same thing. The look on her face when that salty fishiness hit was priceless. I thought she was going to puke.
There are few things I won’t eat, and our kids are much the same way. The only thing that comes to mind that our spawn won’t eat is chicken and duck feet. More for me!
It’s not just NYC kids. When I was a school librarian in southern Marin county (Northern California), I was surprised by how many of the kids loved sushi. It took a lot for me as an adult to even try it. The idea of eating raw fish really put me off. Of course now I love it too.
Sushi made sense once it’s understood that it’s all about the rice. In Japan you don’t get to be a serious sushi chef until you’ve done your time cleaning the kitchen and mastering rice cooking and vinegar seasoning. It’s really about the rice, not the fish seasoning it. After all, “sushi” means sour rice. Sashimi is a different kettle, of course.
That’s a bit hyperbolic. Good shari is important but to say that its all about the rice does not give justice to what goes on with the neta. If the shari was so important, no reason to do an omakase meal. Just serve up 15 mounds of rice and be done. The rice is the background, the bass of the band. You notice it if it is off but it won’t lead the band. YMMV.
Eh, no. I’m not going to argue that the quality of the shari plays no role, because IMO, it definitely does. But it’s not the main player. Crappy rice will make for crappy sushi, for sure, but when the sushi joint specializes in Monster Truck rolls, you’re not there for quality sushi, anyway, are you? It takes good fish AND good rice to make good sushi, but at least in the US, you rarely find good rice.
You do make an excellent point, though, that hits in my pedantic wheelhouse: sushi =/= raw fish. The vast majority of sushi I ate as a kid had NO raw fish in it. The fish was too expensive for us!
Molasses cookies
Gravy of any kind
Mayo
Tomatoes (even the finest garden fresh ones)
Mushrooms (breaks my heart)
Chocolate malts (they hate malt)
'Bout all I can think of.
Oh, stuffing. They hate frickin’ stuffing. I live for TG stuffing.
Chocolate malts are a dream from my childhood growing up in the Midwest. They’ve never heard of them in New England. But they do have this weird thing called coffee syrup that they put in milk. False equivalence if you want my opinion, It took me a long time to adapt when I moved here - many things are different.
A world without gravy is a world without love.
One of the building blocks of my youth.
I can’t imagine
No biscuits and gravy, no hot roast beef or turkey sandwiches, no pork chops and rice with yellow gravy and so on.
Oh my.
You have to learn the lingo. Sodas are floats here…sacks are bags…regular coffee has cream and sugar in it…pop is soda…they drop their "R"s so you can’t understand what they’re saying. When I come back from visiting my family in Ohio, my husband comments on my rejuvenated use of “R”. He worked with his father who was a builder and has told me that he was well into college before he realized that when his dad said “it must have been a shot circuit” that it actually meant “short circuit”.
Fun topic! My nearly 9-year old Spring Onion kept laughing at me as I’m crying while making this list, most things I also ate while he was in utero so I was mainlining many of these — he should like them!
-Kimchee
-All manner of miyuk/gim/gimbap (seaweed/dried&roasted seaweed/seaweed rolls similar to maki rolls but different)
-myeolchi (dried anchovies that I used to pop like chips when I was his age)
-pajeon (savory pancake, usually with kimchee or scallions)
-kong namul guk (bean sprout soup; still one of my faves)
-kimchee chigae (kimchee stew/soup)
-tofu
-vegetables
-loads of garlic
-miso/danjeong anything
-japchae (Korean glass noodles; he won’t eat because of the veggies)
Things he reminds me that he will eat that we have in common from when I was a kid:
-maki with salmon
-ramen
-dumplings
-dduk guk (rice cake soup)
-Fluffernutters
-pizza
-any type of pasta
-long noodles (soba, udon, rice noodle)
-blueberries
To turn the tables on myself…things he’ll eat that I don’t eat:
-scrambled eggs (or egg dishes of any kind)
-hot dogs
-burgers (although I could eat 1 burger/year)
-bacon
Things my family would eat that I couldn’t abide:
-beef/pork/chicken in any form; I would sit at the dinner table, watching my parents and brother gnawing on bones, skin, and cartilage and wondered if I was an alien who ended up with this earth family
-mushrooms (which ironically I adore now)
-most seafood (my earth family ate a lot of seafood…the packages of dried squid befuddled me; again, ironically, I am a pescatarian now)
-egg dishes (couldn’t even sit at the table when they ate the Korean version of chawanmushi
-anything creamy or with cheese (as Asians, we didn’t eat a lot of creamy dishes but my brother loved cream of mushroom soup, which combined 2 of my strongest dislikes)
We were lucky that we were able to grow up in a culturally rich food region, however the kids didn’t appreciate our attempts at introducing little tidbits into their cuisine. ‘No thank you bites’ didn’t exist. What I liked from my childhood and they didn’t, to name just a few…
• oatmeal, cream of wheat
• bolonga sandwiches, the standard lunchbox fare in the early 60’s
• oysters anything, squid, anchovies, mussels, sardines, most fish;
canned tuna and fried calamari were okay
• Manhattan style clam chowder
• Scandinavian style pickled herring and Swedish hardtack
• Peanut butter and mayo or chip steak sandwiches
• Artichokes, asparagus,y beets
• Most Middle and Near Eastern dishes, rice pilaf was okay
• Almost all soups, my soup meat soup was okay
• My turkey parmigiana and my chicken or veal schnitzels (my
mother’s recipes)
• most cheeses
It was difficult being working parents getting a sit down dinner where we could all eat together with lots of variety. I didn’t want to create two different meals or eating times, one for the kids then one for us adults. We adults splurged on adult food when we dined out as a couple (like once a month—not often enough!) but now in their 30’s they have aquired such sophisticated tastes and eat everything. Except mayo.
My NE born and bred wife recalls how when she left Boston people didn’t understand her when she asked for things like elastics and trolleys in a store. She also was not a fan of coffee milk. Milk in coffee yes, coffee milk no. She’s gotten over the preservation of “r”. Drop r here and insert it over there. But most of her family drop r’s from some words and insert them in others where they don’t belong. My favorite is a tuner fish.
