Food Fashions
Written By Ann Hodgman
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Sometimes, the new retro is the old retro.
Recipes
- Crunchy Pea Salad
- Cream of Tomato Soup
- Hearty Hamburger Soup
- Teriyaki Pork Chops
- Ambrosia
- Pecan Crispies
Like most children, my mother was allowed to choose the supper menu on her birthday. Unlike most children, she always chose calf's liver and beets. Not because it was her favorite meal — although she could choke it down — but because liver and beets were the two foods her brother Chuck hated most.
Instead of worrying about the psychodynamics here, let's consider the menu itself. Liver and beets? When was the last time you ate that particular combination? And can you imagine any circumstances under which you'd serve your children two such reddish, softish, strange-ish foods at the same meal?
No, you can't. Liver and beets belong to another era. We shall not see their like again, which I'm sure makes my Uncle Chuck very happy. Likewise, if I served my kids some of the foods I ate routinely as a child, they'd run out of the room screaming.
Foods have their own fashions, and some of what seemed edible — even delicious! — to my generation would seem like straight-up barf to my children. I'm not sure either of my kids would even recognize baloney (you'll never get me to say "bologna," no matter how hard you try). I've never bought it in my life. And yet as a kid I ate baloney practically every day. My favorite presentation was what my family called "baloney/cream cheese roll-ups." We thought baloney was healthy because it was a meat. We thought cream cheese made it even healthier because it was cheese. Now, of course, some people don't let their kids swallow all those nitrates and fat on a regular basis. And what about My-T-Fine chocolate pudding, which my family had for dessert at least once a week? (My dad once pushed my sister's face into hers because she'd been running her mouth over the pudding's skin. "I was just stroking it with my lips!" she explained indignantly.) Or the childhood dessert that my friend John Paul ate without shame: Wonder Bread slathered with butter and topped with sugar? Compared to that, my own favorite childhood dessert — ambrosia, made with mini marshmallows, canned fruit, and sour cream — seems fresh, hip, and healthy.
Other friends recently reminded me of disgusting foods they considered normal back in the day:
"For a treat we'd have Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail in those glass jars that you could rinse and reuse." (Don't you wish foods still had names like Sau-Sea and My-T-Fine?) "I loved everything about them except the three tiny shrimp. They were more like sea monkeys." "My mom's old standby was Chinese Tuna: canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup, and Worcestershire sauce, served over crispy Chung King noodles."
"Instant mashed potatoes. I think they were called Potato Buds, in fact."
"Monday night dinner was always 'Welsh rarebit,' a.k.a. melted Velveeta poured over white toast."
"Spam, shamelessly straight out of the can and sliced."
"What about green beans with marshmallows? Maybe that was a southern thing." I hope it was. At least it never made its way to my home in Rochester, New York. (On the other hand, Rochester's most famous local food is white hot dogs, so it's not as if I have anything to brag about here.)
Of course, our moms — and it was usually moms back then; that's why I'm not saying "parents" — weren't trying to gross out our future adult selves. They were just trying to get food into our stomachs. Hearty hamburger soup is a good example of a dish that "scanned" like chili to us kids but managed to sneak a few fresh vegetables past us. True, it had canned soup and canned chili beans — but canned beans have a better texture than dried anyway, and when I was a girl, convenience foods still seemed "modern." They weren't considered overprocessed mounds of chemicals. They were science at its best.
Sometimes I wonder which of today's foods will seem weird to our children's children. Tofu has to be one of them. "It tastes like nothing!" our future grandchildren will complain.
"But it's so good for you!" their parents will argue. "I ate it all the time when I was a kid." "I don't care," I hope our grandchildren will answer. "I want something I can chew." But it's hard for me to think of anything besides tofu, simply because it's hard for me to believe that anything I choose to serve my family could ever be out of style. My recipe for crunchy pea salad is old-fashioned, but I've never seen a child over 3, including my own, who didn't love it. That makes it timeless, not dated.
After all, my generation knows everything about healthy, delicious eating. That's why my friend Patty's "disgusting" food memory was so shocking. "We used to have grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch when I was a kid," Patty said.
Wait a minute. Grilled cheese sandwiches? They're not disgusting! They're just — you know — food! I ate one last week! I was quite bothered about this until I remembered Patty's favorite birthday meal when she was a little girl. She always chose to sit at the dinner table eating nothing at all.
Is that better or worse than liver and beets? I can't decide.
