Is there a food or recipe you are very familiar with (perhaps born and raised with it) that no one outside you or your family has ever heard of before? Please list it and describe it.
My contribution is Black John Pudding. It’s a coffee/molasses-based flat cake served with a butter/egg/sugar sauce. It is a family favorite. I don’t know anyone outside of my father’s side of the family who has ever heard of it. I find no mention of it by this name in any Web search nor in any cookbook. Of course, it’s quite possible one of my relatives just came up with it as a variation to another pudding recipe. Who knows?
So, do you have any foods/recipes that are second nature to you but almost no else has heard of?
A hearty Lima Bean Lamb soup of unknown origin, that I was raised on. My mother made it all the time. She was German but first tasted it when she had flu and one of her customers brought some to her. By the time I asked, decades later, she couldn’t recall the customer’s name/origins, and for all I know my mother tweaked it. She did not write it down; nor I mine.
I sear the largest lamb shank I can find, then sweat a comparable volume of chopped onion in with the lamb and its fond. Add garlic, 3 qts of water, and a pound of large dry lima beans, unsoaked. Simmer until lamb and beans are almost done, add 3 sliced carrots and 2 sliced celery stalks (or one stalk and all the leaves, chopped, from the bunch). Continue till veg is done. You want some of the beans to split so the soup thickens as it cools. Remove shank, pull meat when cool and return it to the pot. I add a splash of Kitchen Bouquet, Gravy Master, or soy sauce to improve the color. Sometimes I include mushrooms. Pepper to taste. Note that this type of bean is NOT the green lima found in succotash. Canned, it is called butter beans. Christmas lima beans can also be used for this soup.
I don’t know if I know any dish that no one else knows about. I guess I “invented” adding coca cola to my breakfast cereal at the dorm cafeteria. Still, I am pretty someone has done it as well.
For the winter holidays, my family makes a dinner roll called Tvaybach*. It’s the eggiest roll I’ve ever had, and it’s shaped using 2 pieces of cough, one about ¼ the size of the other. We make a round with the large piece, stick the knuckle of a thumb (it MUST be the knuckle, why I’ve no idea) into the center, then place the small roll on top of that, rise and bake.
Spelling is phonetic- neither my mother, her sisters, nor their aunts have ever had the first idea how to spell it.
Good thought, but no. This roll is nothing like brioche. It’s a dense, springy, firm roll. It’s the Swedish meatball of dinner rolls, but that comparison does a minor disservice to Swedish meatballs, which I really like.
I’m pretty sure it’s not nearly as popular within the family as my Mom thinks it is. How else to explain the fact it’s only made once a year?
Milk toast. You take day-old bread (a concept that has become obsolete over the past 50 years or so), toast it, tear it up, and pour heated milk-and-butter over the top. Eat it like it’s Wheaties.
I love it. Only once have I ever come across someone else who knew what it was. It’s old-timey pre-refrigeration farm food - because milk won’t keep, and bread doesn’t keep either, so you find ways to use it up anyway.
Scrapple. My uncle in Md used to make it every year to give at Christmas. Folks here in Fl. look at me like I have an eye in the middle of my forehead when I mention scrapple.
The only grocery that sells it here is Publix, and while serviceable, it doesn’t come close to what my uncle used to make.
Essentially it is everything but the squeek mixed with cornmeal and spices.
I just remembered. Cheese biscuits. Mother would take leftover buttered biscuits, put sliced cheese on and then put under the broiler. I refer to them as “toasted cheese bubbly biscuits.” The cheese MUST bubble
I always think of eating offal and scraps that way as “a German thing”, though it really isn’t - the Scottish have Haggis, the Norwegians, lutefisk, Iceland has its hakkarl, etc etc etc.
However Germans seem to have hung on to that sort of thing more even after coming to the USA. Or, maybe its because my Dad was only 2nd generation natural born US citizen so was closer to his German roots. Or, maybe its because he grew up in a tar paper shack with no electricity, no refrigeration and no running water so he was just used to eating whatever keeps the longest. Or some combination of all of the above.
Except turnips and all their ilk. He called them “Hoover apples”. Turnips and all turnip equivalents, and brains, were the only 2 things I know of that my father absolutely refused to eat. Anything else, he would eat, even if he didn’t like it. I was over 30 before I realized that my father hates coconut, because he would always eat the coconut candies that get left in the bottom of the candy box. We all thought he liked them (he didn’t wait until they were last left to eat them, after all) - so for decades we saved all the coconut candies for him specially, never realizing he didn’t like them, LOL!
I know…When I was a kid we ate scrapple for breakfast like most folks eat bacon. It was always in the freezer-fridge. My mouth is watering thinking about it…
Anyway, I have lived in Fl for 40 yrs now and Other than the handful of times I am able to score some home made from my uncle when I visit or talk my Dad out of some of his stash after he visits, I am sorely scrapple deprived.
To most, braciole is thinly rolled beef braised in tomato sauce.
In my family, braciole (cotenne) is rolled up pig skin braised in tomato sauce. I almost never see the pig skin version served outside my family’s table.
Brown one pound of ground beef, (I like 80/20)
When almost browned add half a chopped onion
Add half a pound of sliced mushrooms
Add a quarter cup of flour and brown all over,
Add water or stock to desired consistency and briefly simmer.
Season with S&P OR nutmeg OR paprika OR …
Stir in cream or sour cream or milk or not.
Serve over rice or noodles or mashed potatoes, etc. WITH green beans, OR broccoli, OR spinach, etc.
Zuckerei (= sugar egg). Not sure what got into my mom in the 70s, but she’d make me drink a glass of OJ with a whole raw egg and some sugar mixed into it fairly regularly.
