Weird things your grandparents ate

Oh, I actually quite like halva. It's very popular amongst my Italian and Greek friends. I've never seen it with pistachi in it like in the photo. My paternal grandfather used to eat tripe. Blergh! My maternal grandmother did all the things you aren't meant to do - full cream, proper butter, lots of salt, and lived a very long life and was very thin. The weirdest I think she may have eaten would've been sago pudding perhaps?

Halva is actually an enjoyable sweet. But it REALLY gets stuck in your teeth.

I've only had store-bought halva candy bars, though. I've never seen it with pistachios stuck in it, as in the picture.

OP types old.

R3 I'm 30, so yes.

Just kidding, R4, but the fact you knew your great-grandmother is pretty neat. She must have lived a long life.

My dad is 92 and eats tripe.

I cook it for him two times a year as it smells terrible.

My father forbade goat/lamb because the smell reminded him of Depression-era mutton. And he said it came in a can. With chunks and cartilage and stuff. My friend Julie always brought Dad a Gyro when she visited. He didn’t like her.

We also weren’t allowed heart-healthy oils because margarine was a spread for poor people.

Speaking of pistachios, I used to be grossed out by mortadella when I was younger and and would insist my mom get "regular baloney". Now I love it, but no stores near where I currently live carry it.

R8, Blurgh!!! "When did I eat pistachios?!?"

My grandfather liked Limburger cheese & sliced onion sandwiches. I love a great many cheeses, but I won't touch that stuff with a ten foot pole.

What I DO like that he ate: liverwurst & thinly sliced onion sandwiches with yellow mustard. I prefer it on a grainy, seedy toast (rye is a delight, but it doesn't have to be). I'm the ONLY one I know that likes it. And it's not even that strange an item.

But most of the same people who turn their noses up at liverwurst, will eat that Oscar Mayer bologna garbage.

I also love Lebanon & Sweet Lebanon Bologna. But the sweet version is harder to find where I am for some reason, despite both of them being Pennsylvania Dutch traditions. In fact most folks where I live have no idea what Sweet Lebanon Bologna is!

R8 I don't mind Mortadella. But for me, it's the color that is a turnoff. But I eat liverwurst, so...there's that.

My grandmother flavored her distilled water (which she kept in an office-style cooler) with black English mint and dandelion wine.

She also ate caviar sandwiches and shrimp paste, which we found revolting. Her attempt to introduce us to escargot was a resounding failure (though I love it now).

When we were out she would order a daquiri, which she pronounced as "dyke-a-ree".

My grandfather was a lead tenor at the opera. He would make fish head soup, omelettes with 4 eggs and bacon, bread with lard and onions and drink a shot of vinegar next to it every morning. Regardless, he was super handsome, had an athletic body until he died, dressed and did his hair like a true 19th century dandy, smoked non-filters through a ivory filter and put on cologne that worked well with the smell of tobacco and had the most affected walk and mannerism I ever saw. A sort of straight Oscar Wilde who married the prima ballerina who died young and he even got away with crying into his silk handkerchiefs without looking ridiculous. Granted, he was European and spoke 4 languages.

My grandmother ate pickled watermelon rind and boiled goat head,

[quote]What I DO like that he ate: liverwurst & thinly sliced onion sandwiches with yellow mustard. I prefer it on a grainy, seedy toast (rye is a delight, but it doesn't have to be). I'm the ONLY one I know that likes it. And it's not even that strange an item.

My grandparents loved this R10! Every now & then I’ll buy this and eat it (but with spicy mustard.) It reminds me of them. It was the only thing they ate that I thought was weird that I didn’t mind eating.

We always had braunschweiger and Limburger cheese in our refrigerator when I was growing up. So did my grandparents. When I wanted a quick protein snack, I cut off a piece of braunsweiger. Limburger cheese is great on hamburgers.

Halva is delicious, OP! It’s a million times better than Snickers or the other store bought crap out there.

My grandfather used to eat lard sandwiches with onions and prosciutto on homemade bread. I hate lard.

R13 My maternal grandmother was the Maharani Sita Devi Sahib of Baroda. Spritzed Fracas or Rive Gauche, she nursed Ceylon iced tea or tiny coups of Lanson demi-sec, and teaspoons of Menton lemon sorbet, through the filtered sunny afternoons at her villa in Monte Carlo, fingering her jewels, including the Star of the South and the Empress Eugenie diamond.

My grandmother ate raw onions like an apple - I don't know how she could do that.

My great-grandfather was a butcher and ate every gross part of a cow. When everyone finished dinner, he would go around and take all that fat they cut off and eat it.

R20 1) some cow fat is delicious and 2) most working people did not waste any food.

My father grew up poor but safely poor - always a parent working. They had limited food for 10 kids (!) and they learned to eat quickly the small portions served so they could get a change of another portion before it ran out. They were all skinny in old pictures, even as young adults. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps so I grew up solidly middle class and in an era when food waste became both common and not a sin. My father and some of his brothers and sisters still ate too fast as adults and some got fat because they would eat all the leftovers by their picky spoiled kids (like me) because to them it was automatic and sinful to waste.

My Grans loved Bloater Paste, even in the morning on toast, or bagels. I loved the stuff too; sad it's not really a thing anymore. There are other pastes popular as cheap sandwich spreads, but none of them as good as Sainsbury's Bloater Paste. My Grandad also used saccharine tablets in his tea and coffee. I remember they looked like medicine, and came in an amber coloured glass vial.

These may be New England things rather than weird. I would love to have the first four, but the last one can go fuck itself.

Grapenut ice cream

Coffee milk

Coffee gelatin

Ginger ale with a glug of cream

I don't remember what the crackers were called but they were big, thick, puffy, and round and my grandmother used to break them up in a bowl and add milk and sugar.

I don’t even know what my foreign grandparents ate, except when my grandmother came to visit once, she made the most delicious potato salad with oil and vinegar and thinly ribboned new lettuce.

My grandmother from Boston made barely-sweetened coffee gelatin, served with very sweet under-whipped cream.

Head cheese, actually hog's head cheese. Calf brains.

Head cheese, actually hog's head cheese. Calf brains.

Capuzzelle

You know, sheep's head

And she used to get a kick out of horrifying us by eating the eyes first

My grandmother would eat squirrel brains, that would be the heads deep fried which she would crack open with the handle of a butter knife. She was from Arkansas.

The parsons nose off of a chicken.

My Nana would drink skim milk with ice cubes in it. You may think as a weight loss measure but she (we) also ate sandwiches with her homemade pumpernickel bread spread with cooled bacon grease and Bermuda onions.

She ate blood sausage she made herself, I did not partake of that.

All of my grandparents were Swedish, so I had the usual potato sausage, meatballs and rice pudding. But, they also had the pickled herring, jellied eel and, worst of all ~ Lutefisk! When cooked, lutefisk can only be described as a foul-smelling, salty, gelatinous substance that is hard for me to keep down. Yet, relatives wolf it down.

R14 Pickled watermelon rind is tasty!

Limburger cheese, because it smells like farts, was often featured in the Little Rascals comedies from the 1930s that were still being shown on TV in the 70s when I was a kid. I remember wanting to see what it smelled like so I found it in the cheese case at the grocery and smelled it through the packaging, which was just thin foil as I recall. I wonder if it is even carried in stores anymore, because it was probably still around for old people even by the 70s, and they’re all dead now.

All my grandparents were from Kentucky didn’t eat anything weird that I recall, just the basics of Southern cooking. No squirrels or anything since they were from the big city (Louisville). My dad had a taste for weird picked things though like pigs feet and hard boiled eggs, which he’d pickle himself in the leftover juice in the big jar the pigs feet had come in. Revolting to me then and now.

Pickled pigs feet

R16 I'm definitely down for the braunschweiger, but I'll let you have all of the Limburger.

R30 My farm-raised uncle still uses ice cubes in his milk at meals, despite the fact that the milk is refrigerated. I'm told it's because they used to drink it straight from the cow in the mornings.

That would actually make sense r36- thanks!

R30 - mmm, mmm, I love me some pumpernickel bread! The lady at the deli where I usually bought loaves of it said she finally tried it just because she saw me always buying it. She said it was way too bitter, but I can't get enough of it.

Miss R18 has a rich fantasy life.

My dad said when he was in high school it was a thing for people to put a hunk of Limburger cheese somewhere on the engine block under the hood of a car of someone they hated, like a teacher, and when the driver drove long enough to heat up the engine and start to smell the Limburger, it was too late, it was melted and the car would forever smell like Limburger.

He said sometimes it was so bad the car was totally ruined and if anyone was caught they could be liable for the entire cost of the car, so it was a rare thing, but there were people who did it and got away with it.

My grandfather used to eat onions like an apple - he also chewed tobacco.

Here I am smoking a cigarette drinking a glass of port with someone who is going to Ceylon.

When I was a kid my late grandmother (born in the 1930s) told me that a popular treat amongst children & teens in the 40s was a dill pickle with a peppermint stick inside. She said they'd suck & dip the peppermint stick in and out of the pickle until it was hollow. I remember thinking that it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard in my life.

Fast forward to last year, I'm looking around YouTube and see that this is actually a thing. And still popular in some parts! I've never been brave enough to try it. Is anyone else familiar with this?

My grandparents had this canned Underwood deviled ham in their pantry. My grandpa opened up a can once when I was there. Not bad. They also had Cream of Wheat, which I got really excited about because of the word "cream." What a disappointment. Never again.

R44 - I loved Cream of Wheat as a kid (in the 70's). It also came in a chocolate variety, which was even better!

R45, it's a textural thing for me. I dislike that grainy or mealy texture: applesauce, ricotta cheese, etc.

R18 The weiner, and still champignon.

Lots of "I dreamed I lived in marble halls..." in this thread.

I remember my grandfather would take a slice of spongey white bread, load it with butter, sprinkle it with sugar, fold it in half and call it a sandwich. This must be poor people food.

R47, my dad made that butter & sugar sandwich, once, for us kids to eat. It was surprisingly good!

OP, of all the things you list that your grandmother ate, you single out halva as the one that made almost you puke? Halva is fantastic.

[quote]Sainsbury's Bloater Paste

What a crazy in world in which this phrase would be used for something (allegedly) edible.

My grandmother would crumble leftover cornbread into buttermilk, and eat it for dessert. She thought it was the best treat in the world, smacking her dentures with relish.

At the time, I thought it was the grossest, smelliest food. Now, after reading about lutefisk and Limburger and raw onions, I see it’s not nearly as weird as I first thought.

Homemade head cheese which my Mexican abuela made. I remember being at her house once when I was about 8 and peeking in a grocery bag on the kitchen table and staring back at me was a pig's head.

Cow brains and scrambled eggs.

Granny would eat century eggs with pink ginger or served atop congee.

Halva is a unique taste and not something most people will like the first time. It is sesame seeds butter and sugar.

Your friend Julie sounds like a real cunt, r7.

Halva is ground sesame seeds and sugar. It's basically the sesame version of peanut butter or almond butter. If you don't like sesame seeds you won't like it, but its texture and flavor aren't unusual. Then again OP's photo shows the kind of halva with pistachios embedded in it, which might turn kids off.

This thread.

Great aunt Harriett served Social Tea biscuits (no flavor), POSTUM! (It was like flax coffee I think), SANKA, scrapple, liver, tongue.

I never ate any of those again after I left for college.

r18 my grandfather was the chief eunuch in the court of Maharani Sita Devi Sahib of Baroda (now it would be Vadodara).

r39 I totally know what you mean!! 🙄🙄

My grandparents (French Canadian) ate blood sausage, pig's feet, head cheese, but I don't remember seeing them eat lard straight up. Lard was used for baked beans. They also ate tourtiere (pork, beef minced pie) in pastry. I never ate any of that except for the tourtiere.

On the other hand, my other set of grandparents (English Canadian, one from UK), loved Limburger cheese, oysters. I can eat Limburger cheese no problem. I also remember my mother eating picked eggs all the time 24/7 which was disgusting to see all the time in the frig. She also ate liverwurst which I like as well. I haven't had liverwurst with mustard on bread or Limburger since the 70s and but this thread is giving me ideas when I shop tomorrow.

The only thing odd about OP's great-grandmother having halva is that it's a Middle Eastern dessert, not Russian, though plenty of people eat it.

It's actually quite tasty and nowhere near as vile as all of the other stuff mentioned here-- head cheese, liverwurst, limberger cheese, etc.

Once we were at my grandparents and for some reason my grandfather was watching us alone.

He opened up a can of tamales (he was a DC-area WASP, not Mexican, so no idea where he developed a taste for them.)

The smell was so awful even the dogs ran down to the basement with us to escape it.

My grandfather ate my grandmother's pussy - and ate his ass.

The halva most of you are thinking of is the sesame seed paste version. But there's also a gelatinous dessert of the same name made with semolina flour cooked with sugar syrup, originating in other areas than the sesame kind. It may be the version the OP's grandmother made, as it sounds like something that could make a kid retch more than the sesame seed version.

Why do so many DLers still find middle school humor to be funny?

You're right, R64, I forgot about the semolina version, which is repugnantly granular and mucilaginous. It does not deserve to share the name of halva with the sesame stuff.

Damn some of the things you all mention here are pretty common in Romania and even young and trendy women eat lard (they spread it on bread with paprika and salt on top) and a whole onion, headcheese and definitely liverwurst with spicy mustard. Pre-pandemic my roommate would have her girlfriends over and they would mention they had already eaten something that nasty when she offered them some of her super-good California cuisine. One even said that she puts mustard and garlic in the guacamole recipe she got from her! Just crazy to stay so skinny and eat so much. Nevermind raw bacon.

Halva (Middle East) and halwa (South Asia) are two different things.

I bet all of your grandparents were also slender despite that diet. To the Swedish grandparents poster...I hate you for making me crave Swedish meatballs like crazy right now ha ha.

[quote]My maternal grandmother did all the things you aren't meant to do - full cream, proper butter, lots of salt, and lived a very long life and was very thin

Of course she was. She was eating a proper diet. Our grandparents all knew instinctively what to eat to be healthy. None of them ate the SAD (Standard American Diet) of today. If you look at photos from 100 years ago you will see very few fat people. They didn't jog an hour a day or watch their fat intake. They were just naturally thin because they were not consuming vast amounts of unhealthy carbs while avoiding healthy animal fats.

[quote]We also weren’t allowed heart-healthy oils because margarine was a spread for poor people.

Margarine? Heart healthy? Oh my sides. I really hope you're joking, R7. Your grandma was right, margarine was, and still is, for "poor people". That shit is poison. Where have you been the last 30 years of nutrition awareness?

R70 - you are right but there are a few things I bake that simply taste better if I add margarine...but I do it like 2 times a year max.

R50 I suppose you're right, but it's the name of the small fish used.

Toasted peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

^ sorry, meant for R50

Halva can be lovely as a sweet or savory, but it can just be a sweet bit of nastiness, too. I never heard of anyone attempting to eat fish brains alone, cooked or raw - hard to get at and silly to consider. Cooking a fried whitefish involves eating everything left in it.

I grew up with raw onion and garlic - both on bread with butter. Good to ward off a cold, supposedly. Raw onion on a small round sandwich of pumpernickel, black bread or kommisbrot is a take on James Beard's most popular appetizer.

My German family loved raw beef and ate it with onion, parsley, plenty of salt and black pepper and, often, a raw egg. They'd mince or grind it themselves, picking it out at the butcher for "qvality." Actually, they ate everything. I skipped the calf and pork brains (which were cooked "scrambled" or in slices and fried with a light batter).

And my Appalachian family ate onions like apples. My grandmother was taken to the ER until she burped and the doc realized it was indigestion at 88.

My grandparents gardened big time, but I could never get past the fact that they used horse manure to fertilize the soil. We grew up near a horse farm, and I was mortified helping my dad bring bags of it over to their house to help them plant their garden.

Are you kidding R76 ? That makes the best fertilizer on the planet. For years my parents had a big garden and always used horse manure,and Im not kidding when I say we gave tons away and still had more than enough for a family of 5 .

R77, nope I'm not kidding, lol. It was just really unnerving eating things like fresh tomatoes from their garden that I knew grew out of horse poop. That was taking the whole "farm to table" thing a little too much for me at the time as a kid.

What did you want as fertilizer? Dow chemicals? I grew up in the 70s and manure was the gold standard.

Hot cross buns around Easter. Ribbon candy at Christmas which looked pretty but tasted terrible.

Ribbon candy is basic but not "terrible".

Posting a second time in this thread: floating things in jello. Canned pears floating in lime jello with a dollop of mayo on the top. Cottage cheese mixed up jello. Walnuts and celery floating in jello. Inexplicable.

R82 - had an eccentric friend in NYC who cooked a whole fish in aspic ...head, eyes, tail. Eel.

R80, R81, Ribbon candy is only tasty if it's jelly filled. Otherwise it's bland but looks very pretty in the candy dish.

Miss old-fashioned Christmas candy that really was naturally flavorful.

Do NOT disparage aspic on Datalounge!

R85 - given the demographic of this place...you all probably still cook with aspic.

Halva can be delicious with strong black tea. I think it’s rich in calcium from the sesame. But it’s also very high in calories and fat. But damn I want some. I discovered it in college, in a really cool old deli near campus. I also had my first taste of the apple juice that comes in an apple-shaped bottle (Martinelli’s I think) from this same store, and also smoked turkey for the first time, all very deliciously treats for a broke college kid.

Cak.

Graxy.

Another halva lover here. And pistachio halva is delicious. But I cannot find it locally, so I order online from a Bulgarian market someplace back east. My Ralph's carries cocoa, vanilla, and almond, which are good.

My great grandmother died when she was 102, so I knew her for the first 30 years of my life. She ate some weird shit, almost all homemade. Well into her 90's, she still planted a garden every spring.

Lardons spread on home-baked bread. I hated this when I was a kid, but grew to like it. Head cheese, pig's head, homemade. Scrapple. Chicken livers dipped in cornmeal and fried. The local provision saved them for her, and my dad drove her once a week there. Doughnuts made from mashed potatoes.

Liver and onions, still bloody. That woman would use offal to make some interesting meals. But she survived the Great Depression as a married woman with children, so she was very tight with spending money. She believed that you should grow you own and no more than you need. She was an inveterate canner, so there were always jars in her basement. She reused paraffin from year to year to can with.

A can of frosting.

Red Dragon Cheese

Non-event ground toast

[quote] That makes the best fertilizer on the planet. For years my parents had a big garden and always used horse manure

Compost makes the best fertilizer.

R85 Pork jelly. Horrendous. Criminal.

My college roommate was from Turkey, and I visited her family for a week in the summer. I had never had halva before, and it was my favorite thing on earth. His mom said that she has never seen anyone eat that much halva in her life. I literally ate a pound and a half of halva in a week. I thought that it was healthy (at that age it didn’t really matter anyway).

My German granny ate Jewish lady fingers during the war. She would chip her teeth on the wedding rings.

My grandpa continues to eat out my grandma. She doesn’t mind, because she is out of her mind. Grandpa thinks he’s eating grandma’s famous tuna helper casserole- cuz he’s out of his mind too. It’s a sad win/win for everyone.

Each other.

The Joyva halvah I remember as a kid was either marbled in chocolate or covered in chocolate or both. It was a Jewish deli item and they used to cut off hunks and weigh them. Delicious in small quantities.

Braunschweiger and bologna were both popularized by Oscar Meyer but there are better varieties in German and Italian delis respectively.

Grandmother put strawberry jam in her tea and sometimes cream. Grandfather liked different kinds of smoked fish like sable and sturgeon. Borsht and schav, a sorrel soup, were summer favorites served with sour cream or plain yogurt. Another favorite was farmer's chop suey--chopped raw vegetables and dill in a sour cream base. White bread was non-existent. Rye bread, pumpernickel and challah were favored. Farmer cheese was also popular, along with knishes, kishke, kreplach and chopped liver.

I mostly had these foods while visiting my grandparents and was embarrassed by them because they weren't American. Now I really enjoy them on the rare occasions I have them. They're nostalgic and homey.

My Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother used to eat peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches.

You don't put fresh horse manure on a garden, this would burn and potentially kill, the plants. The horse manure is aged/composted and breaks down quite a bit. And yes, it is a good thing to help nourish the plants. Even better is goat or rabbit manure. All very high in nitrogen.

[quote] The weirdest I think she may have eaten would've been sago pudding perhaps?

The weirdest thing your grandma ate was tapioca pudding??

R101 - that was a Dutch fellow I hooked up with and dated for awhile here in Romania. Mayo on EVERYTHING. We went out for steak and he put mayo on it...granted Romanians serve mayo with garlic in it next to fries. They also put French fries inside the burger...open it up, stick in the fries and eat with garlic mayo, sweet or spicy ketchup or all three.

R90 - my roommate who grew up with pretty wealthy American and Romanian-American mom and dad uses lardon on salads, as a topping on omelettes...granted she sautees it but it really is just bacon at the end of the day and smells like bacon. I like it but rarely indulge. She said her grandmother would serve an aspic dish with pigs ears and other bits strongly scented with garlic and salt. It is called "piftie" and used to break the Christmastime fast.

R95 - I swear it isn't too different than cold, smoked ham and bacon with garlic. I hated the stuff when I got here but thought hey, let me try the local cuisine and some of it is good. What

R100 - I have seen all those things here in Romania under a different name. The one Jewish deli item is really miss is a good matzo ball soup. Amazing at small delis in the San Fernando Valley that still use the same recipes from decades ago...so poo poo to anyone who says the valley doesn't have good food. I always remember the roast beef and sauerkraut sandwiches on rye, the soups, the homemade tastes.

R44, my mother used to make me deviled ham (with Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread) sandwiches for my lunchbox when I was in grade school.

I still love deviled ham sandwiches (but with mayo, on good white or multigrain bread). Deviled ham is also good mixed with cream cheese.

My grandmother used to mix liverwurst with cream cheese for a sandwich spread. I ate it when I was a kid. Have pretty much lost my taste for liverwurst now though.

Olives soaked in a glass of gin and a drop of vermouth.

Based on shared memories here, hogshead cheese seems to be a universal dish. My Black, southern-born grandmother cooked, ground, seasoned and pickled a pig's head every year in time for her traditional Christmas/New Year's spreads. Sadly, I never developed a taste for the stuff.

I can still taste her rich, delicious fruitcake laden with nuts and candied fruit and aged in rum during the weeks leading up to the holidays.

Add me to the list of halvah fans; I love its flaky texture and sweet/smokey flavor. Marzipan is another favorite sweet.

Beef liver was pushed as healthy. My grandmother claimed her husband thought liver & onions tasted like steak.

My Ukrainian grandparents ate studenetz-jellied pigs’ feet with garlic. They also ate whole garlic cloves, sometimes raw, sometimes fried in butter. They ate blood sausage which my grandfather made on the farm.

My Scots grandparents ate mincemeat pies at Christmas.

Pork feet cooked in a veggie soup

Fried blood sausage with mashed potatoes and sour-sweet carrots

Tounge

I knew some farmers family who ate brain

Chicken feet at a traditional Chinese dinner

I never had brain and I tried the chicken feet, which were disgusting, but the other 3 are really nice.

[quote]My dad is 92 and eats tripe.

Vietnamese Pho often has tripe in it, it's not that bad.

My grandparents would grate bologna with pickles for a sandwich spread. There were probably a few other ingredients, too, but I wouldn't eat it because I've always hated pickles, and the spread's texture was revolting.

R100 The Eastern European fare you describe is "American" in NYC. For example I ate more knishes than Dollar Pizza slices when I was a poor young man.

That sounds like Simply Sara’s bologna salad, r113.

(I feel like I should include a trigger warning for both the sights and the sounds.)

Yep, that's about right, although they never put cheese in theirs. They used a box grater, so it was a finer texture, which really just made it more slimy.

I believe they would sometimes use liverwurst instead of bologna. Both of my grandparents came from German backgrounds, so maybe the liverwurst was more true to the Old Country.

Liverwurst is pretty much the poor man's version of the French pate.

These foods have been mentioned above but my paternal grandparents idea of a hearty breakfast was grits with red eye gravy, scrambled eggs and canned pig brains. They really loved themselves some good pig brains.

Grand daddy loved to snack on pickled pigs feet.

I honestly can't remember much of what my grandmas ate, other than both loved onions.

Mom loved braunschweiger, and would eat it on Wonder Bread with a ton of mayonnaise.

It was OK but I never really liked it that much. I did some odd things when we were really poor to stretch meals, including making spaghetti sandwiches and throwing a dab of mayo and whatever little bit or turkey or ham from the fridge into drained ramen noodles, mixing it all together.

And R33 Limberger isn't usually in most stores but it is in specialty cheese stores and some German delis.

Scrapple

people were tough back then. They weren’t pussies. Men were men, they went to the bar and had their whiskey and a liver wurst and onion sandwich and a pickled egg. They didn’t need sweet things or “comfort food”, they worked hard and needed man food to keep them going. They were surprisingly healthy, usually having a single robust bowel movement in the morning and being able to work 10-12 hour days. Plus, waking early on Sunday for church.

[quote]R12 When we were out she would order a daquiri, which she pronounced as "dyke-a-ree".

My mother does that, too!

I wonder what it can be traced back to.

R114 - that is because a lot of American food is an influence of the immigrant population that settled in that area. Pizza in NYC and, as you said knishes...but really knishes are "pogache" in Romania and sorrell soup is made by my roommate all spring from her grandmother's recipe. It is amazing, tart and smoked pork ribs can be served as a side so the smokiness counteracts the tartness of the soup.

Is Puny Cocklet Troll posting in one-paragraph installments now? Because I thought I knew where R121 was heading, but then it didn't.

R121 That was no man, that was Aunt Butchie

In the mists of time past my grandmother's mother's mother served the Cixi Empress, who passed down a love of virgin boy eggs--as well as certain fellatio secrets and a love of emeralds, both of which she would pass on to Wallis Simpson (of which r18's grandmother could probably tell some tales).

Liver Wurst is still very popular in Germany. Where I live in Bavaria most parts of pig and cow are eaten. Calf liver is a deli and quite expensive. It is served with onions, apple slices, green beens and mashed potatoes.

R127 I have discovered gelbwurst in recent years and love it.