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My grandmother made some good pulled pork when I was a teen, and I complimented it. She whispers to me, “the secret is a little paprika, isa little spicy”
I have a whole two nice memories with that lady. This one makes me chuckle as I load up ghost pepper sauce onto my rice.
Lol I might adopt that. Add a little bit of heat to a recipe and just whisper “isa little spicy”.
There’s comfort food, then there’s food that makes you uncomfortable.
Cumfart food.
Is it magotty?
It’s cooked using a seitan.
Uncomfort food
Discomfort food
I’ve read somewhere once that serving jello was a flex, because it meant you were wealthy enough to own a refrigerator. I don’t know if it’s true, but I choose to believe it because there has to be a reason for serving hot dogs in jello.
IIRC it wasn’t the fridge, it was the gelatin.
They came up with a much cheaper way of making it, so for a while jelly was cheap and readily available but people still thought of it as fancy food.
The hot dogs in jello thing sounds like a bastardized version of some actual foods from way back. I know the dish as “sült”, but I’m sure it exists in many forms. It’s basically made by boiling bones (think the ones with all the nooks and crannies, like the skull) until all the meat and gelatin come out. Then cool until it solidifies.
Growing up in the US midwest, ‘bastardized version of actual food’ describes a lot of what I grew up with. Common substitutes: cream of mushroom soup for bechamel; mayonnaise for creme fraiche; hot dogs for literally any sausage or charcuterie; thyme for any herb.
You’re talking about aspic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspic
Which people have been making and still do make all over the world.
Aka head cheese
I also choose to believe this
Grandma made great food. Sharing my favorite:
“False crayfish stew”
500 g butter (the real shit)
1000 ml fish stock
800 g potatoes
800 g of white fish, any kind. This is poor people food
Copius amounts of dill, sprigs and all. She never measured
500 ml of canned crushed tomatoes
Melt butter, add fish stock and tomatoes. Boil potatoes in the mix, add water if to much evaporates. Add fish and dill at the same time when the potatoes are nearly done. Taste with salt and pepper when the fish is done.
Serve. Fucking incredible.
Saving this to try, sounds right up my alley.
A fish dixie?
The 70s were truly a foreign country
Jello was mostly a 50s trend, due to the new commercialization of refrigeration and the ending of wartime rations
We are talking about Aspic. Which was popular through the 70s.
I haven’t heard of aspic, interesting.
In its simplest form, aspic is essentially a gelatinous version of conventional soup.
gag no longer interesting
*cold * gelatinous soup
Grandma on my dad’s side can cook. Whenever we visit(she’s super out of state), my dad and I gain some weight.
Puddings, pies, casseroles, flat enchiladas, pulled pork, bbq beef, mac n cheese, steaks— You name it. Fuckin’ slaps! Unfortunately, grandpa died last year at 91, and there seems to be a historical tread among grandparents to dip out once the love of their life is gone. I should call her.
One grandma thought cooking from scratch was old fashioned, so everything came from a box or can, and the other grandma cooked 99% from a 1950 betty crocker cookbook and a USDA home canning/pressure cooker bulletin. The chain of heirloom recipes being passed down was broken a generation or two earlier.
For those especially interested in this type of cuisine, I present for your review- The Gallery of Regrettable Food. https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html
Some of that seems a little mean though.
like- https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/menucards/13family/7.html
Is ‘pudding’ only allowed to mean American slop that’s really… CUSTARD!
What, you want it to be the British definition which is literally bread?
Pudding is goop!
My gran thought putting mint in peas was the height of fancy cooking (while serving a full roast for dinner in the height of summer).
I’m an American who grew up with an English Nan in a part of the country filled with Italian Nonnas.
My jealousy of their food compared to a roast that could not be more dry… my other grandma was American and couldn’t cook either.
Luckily, my mom was self taught so good food at home.
My abuela might have left my entire family with deep seated generational trauma, but she also left us with some killer recipes. That’s the average Latino experience
Mamaw made bacon. That’s all she taught us, how to make ‘pop-pop’, our toddler name for bacon.
Omah couldn’t cook and was very proud of that lol.
Mother could cook but thought she couldn’t. Dad was a line cook (for a short time) so mom compared herself to him. She was fine.
Mother and grandmother were so proud of my being a good baker. Sometimes. Sometimes mother was jealous.
Reminded me of this guy who makes these “vintage recipes” on YouTube. He comes so close to throwing up every time:
I could not watch more than one of his videos.
I see why.
My grandma on my father’s side was a great cook (or so I heard), but she died too soon for me to remember much.
My grandma on my mother’s side was a health nut, and I don’t remember anything that I would classify as tasty from her. No sugar and very little fat make food taste sad.
You can actually make food with very little sugar or fat not taste sad. But that’s more of a recent kitchen thing.
When I was a kid no one cared about any of this health stuff. I remember an advert for Nutella claiming it was good for you because it contained one picogram of calcium.
From what I can tell of history cooking was a job that all cultures shared nearly equally between men and women - except for a short time in the 1950s when Americans called it a woman only task.
Note that individual families didn’t always share equally. Often one partner was better than the other, or the realities of how their family situation worked made one partner the better choice. However there was not gender/sex linked reason for any choice. (even the 1950s you could argue it was a primarily a woman only task because the reality of men expected to work outside the house while woman stayed home meant the reality of the situation - Men often would cook for parties held in the backyard)
Nearly all cultures had a concept of the men (and sometimes woman) going off alone for long enough that they would need to cook without the other sex. Most common this was war, but there were also religious gatherings that were sex segregated in some cultures.
Men’s work and Women’s work did exist in most cultures. However cooking never seems to be part of that.
A man o’ war sailing the high seas in pursuit of pirates and the king’s enemies involved a whole lot of dudes cooking meals, sewing up their clothes, and braiding each others hair.
A lot of America’s peculiar gender ideas come from the puritans who were wacko enough to get kicked out of Europe and have to move to a whole different continent so they could keep burning witches and degrading their wives.
My mom did all the cooking, and she made it clear she didn’t enjoy it.
One of my favorites was “beans and hamburger”, basically what it says, but whatever else she put in it was lost to time and Alzheimer’s. I gave up trying to replicate it.
Probably, tuna casserole was the closest we got to hot dog jell-o. I liked tuna casserole. I liked pretty much everything my mom made for dinner. We often had canned peaches or pears over cottage cheese as a side.
However, she overcooked meat, and I thought I didn’t like meat until I was an adult. My poor dad just put up with it, because the only alternative was cooking it himself, and that wasn’t going to happen. But, even if he had, she would have complained, so the only time he got decent meat was at a restaurant.
The only thing I remember my dad making was rice pudding. he made it with raisins and it was delicious.
