I decided to do this thread about some foods that I ate back in northeastern Indiana, that my grandma ate. First: Pickled Pork Feet. Tried these, but really prefer the Pickled Pork Hocks. Much more meat on the hocks. Haven't had these in many years, but at one time, really liked them. Is this a Southern food? Another: Onion sandwich. Slice off a couple pieces of semi-thick onion and put on buttered bread. Just make sure the onion isn't that hot. If your eyes start watering, when slicing, just think how hot the onion could be in the sandwich. How about Rhubarb Pie? My folks grew rhubarb on their farm. Don't recommend eating rhubarb right from the stalk can give a person real "pucker power"...….very sour! But, the pie my mom made was terrific! Grits: Have tried, but don't like. Reminds me of Cream of Rice I ate for breakfast in Indiana during the winter months. Grits are extremely popular in the Southern states. Homemade Taffy: My dad use to pull taffy on our back porch. He'd make quite a bit for Christmas holidays. He had a hook, kind that would hold up a shelf, screwed into the wall. Taffy was made in pie pans, that he'd let cool, before taking out of the tin and placing on the hook to pull. The time he pulled it would depend on hard or soft taffy. For color, he'd add food coloring while pulling it. Sardines: Use to buy them in the can in either oil or mustard sauce. Would always eat with crackers due to any small bones I miss taking out. Instead of canned sardines, I now will buy a package of salmon strips and eat right out of the package. Can anyone think of any other foods that some, thru the U.S., would think "what???"?
I am okay with all but the onion sandwich. I have never intentionally purchased pickled pig's feet but my dad liked it, and I ate it from time to time. As long as I didn't look at it, or think too much about it, the taste was okay. I love rhubarb pie. My only complaint about that is that most people add way too much sugar to it. However, I also eat rhubarb freshly picked. Grits tastes like whatever you put on it, pretty much. I won't say that I love grits because they don't have much of a taste, but I generally order it when I have breakfast at a restaurant that serves it. Around here, that's Cracker Barrel, and our only Cracker Barrel is a few hundred miles south. How could anyone not like homemade taffy? I don't eat it anymore because I'm afraid all my teeth would fall out, but there's nothing wrong with the taste. I go through phases with sardines and kipper snacks. I will buy them often for a couple months, and then I get sick of them and don't eat them for a half a year.
A couple of other foods that I like that it seems most other people don't like are pickled eggs and pickled herring. Actually, I am not too crazy about the pickled herring that we have in the stores here. When I was a kid, my dad would get gaffelbiter, which is a type of pickled herring, and I liked that quite a lot. I can find it online in stores that sell Scandinavian foods but it's always in a can like sardines, and the stuff my dad had was in a bottle, and I don't think it was picked in wine sauce as most of it seems to be. Beets. Does anyone really like beets?
Pickled pigs' feet: I think they were originally German and came to the U.S. via the Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch). I ate them as a kid in Pennsylvania, but they were far from my favorite food. Pork rinds were much better. Onion Sandwich: I still enjoy an onion sandwich, but I usually put cheddar cheese on it as well, as that mellows the sharp taste of the long-day northern onions. If you get a Granex-type, like Vidalia, Texas Sweet, Walla Walla, or Maui Sweet, I can eat them almost like an apple. Rhubarb pie: I love rhubarb pie, sauce, and sticks, and once ate the stalks raw (although I usually dipped them in sugar) when I was young. I still eat rhubarb desserts, but not raw.... Grits: I love grits with eggs for breakfast, but not much otherwise. When I lived in Georgia, cheese grits were a big thing, but I never really enjoyed them. Taffy: We had taffy pulls as an activity at church youth group, but never did it otherwise. I have other candies I enjoy more. Sardines: I once enjoyed those as well. I introduced my twin sons to them as boys, and for a while those were their favorite food. One Christmas, they got cans of sardines in their stockings for Christmas, and they immediately went outside (wife didn't allow them to smell up the house) and sat on the porch eating their canned sardines. Neighbors thought they had been kicked out of the house for misbehavior and that the can of sardines was to be their Christmas Dinner. Beets: I LOVE beets--one of my favorite foods. Speaking of pickled eggs, the easiest way to pickle eggs is to put the hard-boiled eggs into the jar of pickled beets after the beets have been eaten and allow them to sit in the refrigerator for a while.
We used to have a nice rhubarb patch when I was growing up in Idaho, and I think almost every home had room for a small backyard garden and usually a fruit tree and a rhubarb patch. I enjoyed eating it fresh, but my favorite way was when Grandma Bailey would make a rhubarb pie. Rhubarb is one of the things that I miss, living here in the south. It is apparently just too hot for it to grow down here. I have tried several times, and even in the shadiest area, it never makes it through the summer, or if it does manage to do that, then it hasn’t established enough to overwinter. Then , I read that someplaces they grow rhubarb as a seasonal plant, so I bought rhubarb seeds, sprouted them in the aerogarden, and put them outside early in the spring when it was still cool. The idea is to grow them enough to harvest the rhubarb before it gets too hot for it to live. This method worked (to some extent), but they didn’t produce those huge stems and leaves that a real rhubarb patch has. It always amazes me how much food is fried (usually deep-fried) down here in the south. Except for french fries, I don’t really remember eating much of anything that was deep-fried when I was growing up. Everything that was fried was pan fried, both at home , and at the local restaurants. I remember being shocked that anyone would even consider battering and deep-frying a dill pickle, but it is a real “thing” down here. The other day, someone had posted a recipe on facebook for deep-fried deviled eggs ! I am serious ! Maybe some of you have heard of this before, but to me that would totally RUIN a perfectly delicious food. In case (like me) you haven’t heard of this before, the gist of the idea is to cook the eggs, slice them in half like usual, but then you coat the whites with a batter and deep fry them to a golden brown. After that, once you have them in the dish, you add the yolk mixture, just like you would do with a regular deviled egg.
Years ago I had pickled eggs and...…...not to bad. In fact, in the movie Dances With Wolves, the guy who take Dunbar (Kevin Costner) out to the Fort, is eating a pickled egg while Dunbar is unloading his stuff at the vacated Fort. Later, the three Crow Indians (as a War Party) are seen eating the eggs out of the jar after killing the man that took Dunbar to the Fort. Guess, back in those days, pickled eggs were darn good.
I think Ive eaten my share of weird foods, nothing shocks me or even makes me sick but I absolutely can't drink a glass of milk.....UGH. And that has always been the case. Even as a child in school, I chose the orange juice...thankfully that was an option at my school. While I don't drink alcohol now, mainly because I don't care for the taste that much and don't like the feeling I get, I did drink in the past. Never liked the taste though...the reason was just to relax or get drunk, lol....and now after not drinking for probably around 10+ years, one sip hits me hard...so I just pretend to take a sip of champagne at celebrations. But milk...it makes me gag just thinking about it. I do like other dairy though.
"What" foods? Beef kidneys. My Dad asked often, my Mother quietly declining, substituting something more acceptable to all three of us. Finally, once, she yielded, to surprise him. As she cooked them, gradually the whole house stank worse than an outhouse! When he came home from work, he sniffed the air, exclaiming, "I get my kidneys!" He alone ate them. We sat and gagged. Frank
My grandfather loved them. I don't think I've ever had them...but do remember the smell when my grandmother made them. PU!
Fried chicken gizzards and livers. Buy a package with both in and fry them up. Problem is, gizzards are hard to eat, as in, tough. Don't eat anymore. When I was single/divorced, would fry up a cube steak, with some sliced potatoes (fried potatoes) in an electric skillet. I will still order chicken fried steak when I go to Cracker Barrel.
I’ll try just about everything but like others posting here, there are some things I would rather not eat. Raw ground beef for instance. When I was a young lad, my dad would sometimes take me with him to the butcher shop. His journey of picking meat included procuring a couple of crackers, some salt and pepper and about an ounce of raw ground beef from the butcher. It was like a wine tasting and quite the ceremony for dad would put a small bit of the grind on a cracker, salt and pepper it and then taste it. He would chew a couple of times, let it sit in his mouth for a moment and then chew a couple more times before swallowing it. He then repeated the whole process with the rest of his portion and then offered his opinion as to whether it was one of the better or lesser grinds he had tasted before. No matter what the verdict, he always bought a couple of pounds or more with a little bit separated so he could munch on his way home. There was one addition to the ceremony once we got to the car for it would seem that ground beef and crackers went much better with beer, another traveling favorite my dad seemed to enjoy.
My mom used to do a similar thing, only she used round steak (which was pretty cheap back then, under $1 per lb). She would scrape the steak with a butter knife, and spread that on a slice of buttered bread, and then she added salt and pepper, and I think sometimes she had a few bits of diced onion on it, too. It was actually pretty good, and I always enjoyed having a bit of it along with my mom. Once she was done scraping it, we put it in the electric skillet with onions and tomato sauce and made it into Swiss steak, which even my father would eat.
I make Garlic Sandwiches: I dice up 5 or 6 cloves of fresh Garlic, spread 'em evenly on a slice of robust bread, like Rye or Pumpernickle then enclose it with another slice and chug away! Hal