Insight: Wok this way

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Over the weekend, I noticed a social media post that sought comments about foods that were popular at dinner tables in the 1950s and 1960s but are greatly unknown these days.

It made me think about my own family and upbringing and meals or items we would consume then as compared to now. My mother did not work or drive when I was growing up and she took immense pride in planning and cooking family meals for each day of the week.

She was constantly looking for new ways to improve and add to her meal planning and once she sent for a box filled with handy new dinner recipes from a mail-order company in Pennsylvania.

One of those mail-order recipes was for something called “Porcupine Balls.” It was a kind of meatball rolled in white rice and baked.

Another of her culinary specialties was Hungarian goulash, a mix of tomato sauce, macaroni and hamburger. She served it at least once a week and I eventually came to loathe that meal when I arrived home from school and observed her preparing it on the kitchen stove.

My father’s contributions to our meals were usually canned fruit side dishes that were consumed after the entrée dish.

Some of his favorites as I can recall were small bowls of purple plums or mandarin oranges, each doused with a hearty helping of heavy syrup from the cans they came from.

If I balked at consuming the plums, I can still hear my mother proclaiming, “Just eat them, they will keep you regular young man.” I did enjoy plums, but I never liked piling up plum pits on my plate afterward.

When I asked my father if mandarin oranges were grown in Florida, he told me that he had a friend in high school who once received a box of them as a Christmas present that had been shipped to America from Japan. With his answer, I wondered if instead they should be called Japanese oranges and he told me that was a “ridiculous” proposition.

Other meals or food items my mother served us in the past that I’m glad seem to have disappeared include Campbell’s Green Pea Soup, tuna noodle casserole and Jell-O shaped in molds containing celery or onions. Sometimes her Jell-O molds would have fruit cocktail in them, but mostly she stuck to onions or celery, and I never cared for it.

Green Pea Soup didn’t taste bad, but I had to hold my nose to avoid the smell while eating it. Its odor resembled soiled diapers to me.

Try as I might, the dry, mushy disgusting lump on my dinner plate as a 7-year-old called tuna noodle casserole always turned my stomach. No matter what my mother would add to it including lemon juice, extra mayonnaise or bacon bits, it still tasted worse than cat food.

To my surprise, during my basic training in the U.S. Air Force years later, the dining hall served its own version of tuna noodle casserole, and it was the only menu option that night.

Some other foods that would come home from the grocery store in my parents’ shopping cart would be limburger cheese, liverwurst, canned creamed corn, marshmallow fluff, and sardines.

My father once showed me how he would make a sardine sandwich, but I never could get past looking at the fish heads before taking them out of the can to put them a slice of bread and take a bite.

When my mother would ask if I wanted a “Fluffernutter” for lunch, I would always pass on that too. It was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with marshmallow fluff spread on it. Back then I wasn’t much of a fan of peanut butter and would ask for just a jelly sandwich.

Limburger cheese and liverwurst never really appealed to me as a child. Like Green Pea Soup, it was hard to get past the smell of limburger cheese. No matter how often my mother would try to encourage me to eat liverwurst, which is a kind of spreadable sausage, I never could get past the taste or its aroma. She would put in on saltine crackers or on bread and it was utterly revolting to me.

If I saw her reach for a can of creamed corn from the cupboard to heat up for dinner, it would produce instant upset stomach symptoms in me. To this very day, the sight or smell of creamed corn gives me the chills mentally and makes me want to vomit physically.

I’m sure my mother felt the same way about foods I enjoyed too. Once she visited my home and was surprised to see my wife was fixing some Chinese food on the stove in a wok that we had been given as a wedding present. She told me that ever since she was a small girl, the sight of Chinese food made her ill and she couldn’t eat the meal we were preparing.

All this reminds me of how Mark Twain once described food aversion.

“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not," he said. <