what was the ickiest thing your mom made for dinner?

...liver!

Liver was shoe leather at our house. Weird but sort of edible. Didn't know I liked it until I tried a bite of my brother in law's liver and onions at some cafe when we were all going to visit my mother and father in law. It was . . . pretty good! I still have never ordered it, much less cooked it on my own, but I suspect I'd now like it.
Plus, ya know, it's good for ya..

There were a couple of years after the oil crisis where standard beef was not affordable at my house...we began to see a lot more organ meat such a liver, kidney and beef tongue. I was not a big fan of tongue, and thankfully my mom only tried tripe once.

secretly osso...you took the words right out of my mouth.

But I must say. My Mom who is Australian was a great cook. Australian-Polynesian stuff with curry but also Wiener Schnitzels to die for.
And her roasted potatoes...well...I've been trying for years to cook them as crisp on the outside and steamy on the inside.

mags, I grew up in one of those families (eastern European) where, no matter what your mother put on your plate, you ate it.
No ifs or buts.
No complaining about the ick factor, either! (Though I might have thought that! )
That said, I'm trying to recall what food I might have found icky.
Damn, I can't recall a single thing!
(See how well I was brainwashed? )

But, on the credit side, this was great training to become an adventurous "experimenter " with new & different foods. I'll try just about anything (within reason!) at least once.

There was only one time where my mom made a meal that she agreed to not make us eat, and ended up throwing it away. It was a bit of family folklore in our house where she would kid us about making it again if we were not good, are telling "remember the time" stories. I wish I could remember what that was, but it was one of her newspaper recipes. It was some kind of a baked vegetable intended to be the main course.

I've memories of seeing a stand in Rome's Campo di Fiori with a series of beef tongues all lined up hanging from the 'roof'.. serious ick though I could eat the corned tongue with sugar syrup my mother made all those years before.

I ordered a bowl of tripe soup (startling Diane and Roberta who were with me) when trying to order something different in a french bistro type restaurant in New York. I didn't exactly hate it, but 1/3 of the bowl was enough. So I ate some bread and looked forward to dessert.

One of the funnier food articles I've ever read was in the New Yorker years ago, Calvin Trillin describing his own efforts to obtain tripe and clean it himself to make some dish that he'd heard about. Major kitchen horror.

If you ever figure that out, let us know.
(I still make what I call Panzade's Coleslaw)

I have never understood why parents do that, we always passed the dish and everyone served themselves. The rule was if you have never had it you must take a bite, and anything you put on your plate you had to eat. There were limited exceptions to the clean plate rule when it was served to you my someone else, which was rare.

It was to do with coming from a background (displaced/refuge) where people often often did not have enough food. So we were taught to be grateful that we did. And were expected to eat what was presented to us, not waste it.
(but I don't wish to create a digression, so let's leave it here, OK?)

Wait...how does that explain it, because we were taught the same thing be we served ourselves. We were told to think of all the starving kids in Africa who did not have enough to eat. That is why the mantra was " you take it, you eat it, no exceptions" Do parents serve so that they can make sure that each kid gets some, because there might not be enough to go around?

BTW- there is a major push by the do gooder dietary police against the clean plate rule, which still exists to some extent. They blame the rule for childhood obesity.

There were some dishes (quite a few actually) where you helped yourself to the quantity you ate. And quite a bit of it was very good!
It was more that you couldn't use "the ick factor" to refuse what was cooked for you. (Like some kids refuse to eat their greens, for example.)

Um, that would be me.

The ickiest: canned spinach. Even the smell of it turns my stomach.

Ha, Eva.
I've never had canned spinach.
Perhaps you were right!

Oh, it is the same then....very often the response to the assertion "I dont like THAT" was "oh really (insert mocking tone), when did you try it?" If we could not document it we were forced to take a spoon of it. We all tried to out stubborn mom but no one ever got up from the table without eating a spoon of what ever was.

I've been sitting here feeling sorry for ebeth.
...
This is the opposite of what this thread is about, but my Mom's Red Sauce ....oboy, that was something good.
Her first year out of nursing school was spent taking care of a dying Italiano man. She said she used to sit in the kitchen and talk to the old man's wife while she cooked. You can learn a lot about red sauce in a year.
Pop's bowling night was Wednesday. He needed something quick to eat when he got home so he (and I, if my homework was done.) could dash down to the Duckpin Arena on Silver Lane by 6:30PM. Spaghetti and Sausages or Lasagna or Ziti ala Bolognese were our tickets out.
The sauce was always started on Monday night after dinner, the chopped onions, garlic, peppers and celery sat sweating in a little drizzle of olive oil. They did not fry. They did not sauté. They melted together into a lovely caramelized mush. If there were going to be sausages, they were hot and sweet, never just one kind, they got browned up in a separate pan, just as slowly, never touched by a fork so as not to break their delicate skin.

Some kid would be sent to get three jars of tomatoes from the cellar. I don't think my mother ever bought a can of tomatoes until we all grew up and moved out and so weren't available to help can a couple hundred jars of tomatoes, corn, beans, beets, and, everybody's favorite, except my Mom, watermelon pickles.

(We need another thread.)

The tomatoes, crushed with a spoon, got plopped in, a couple cans of tomato paste was added, the basil, oregano, parsley and a couple of whole cloves of garlic were gently stirred in with the sausages, cut in one and half inch pieces, got added last.
Simmer for sixteen hours or so. Stir every second or third time you passed the stove. (Don't let anybody catch you stealing a sausage out of the pot. You might never be found again.)
Taste test every once in awhile. Add the secret ingredient.
Ah, what a lovely color!

After school on Wednesday, you got sent to Iannucci's to pick up the bread. The water would be beginning to boil just as Pop rolled in the driveway.
One last sprinkle of oregano on the sauce right near the end.
Drain pasta.
Plate.
Ladle out a big river of sauce and three pieces of sausage. (maybe you got all hot, maybe you'd get two sweet and one hot, you never knew.)
Eat. Go bowling. Get home late. Start homework. Sneak down to kitchen to see if Mom had left you a sausage hunk on a saucer.

She always did.
Joe(life was good)Nation

When I was a kid my mother also gave me a tablespoon of cod liver oil daily.
I really liked it - I liked so much, that if I did not behave she just had to say "if you are not behaving you wont get your cod liver oil"
All of a sudden I did not want it anymore and she decided I probably did not need it any more. But it was my favourite for a couple of years.

My mother was good cook and I was a good eater.

Joe - your mother sounds a lot like my mother. She taught me how to make her red sauce when I was eight or ten, whenever she figured I was old enough not to burn myself at the stove.
And I still make it - although over here you can't get the same good Italian sausages you can get in NJ and NY, so it's never quite the same. So when I was home and we were cooking up the sausages, I had two sweet Italian plain on sub roles. Ahh, I can still taste it.
But it's still my mother's and my favorite meal - our birthdays are three days apart and we always celebrate them together and we just did. Sunday lunch was spaghetti with red sauce and my sister Laura made her amazing lasagne - birthday cake was chocolate with chocolate.
We've been doing that for nigh on fifty years together now.

My mother also canned, froze, jellied and jammed, pickled everything- anything you could pick out of the ground or a tree or off a bush and put in a mason jar. I LOVE pickled beets!

I'm like Saab. My mother wasn an EXCELLENT cook and I loved everything - even the liver, bacon and onions she made us eat once a week.
I seriously can't think of one thing she made I didn't like- I asked her to buy and make tuna helper one time because I had had it at a friend's house - and I even liked that.
Her pot roast melted in your mouth. Her fried chicken was to die for. Her pinto beans and corn bread - her macaroni and cheese - her chicken and dumplings...seriously - I can't think of a thing I didn't love.
Even her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were special because you had a choice of home-made peach, pear, strawberry or blackberry preserves.

I didn't like eggs - she used to make me eat those for breakfast once a week. And I didn't like milk. I used to pour mine in the empty cookie jar when she wasn't looking.

But dinner wise - I seriously can't think of one thing she made that I didn't like.
But, again, like Saab, I'm not a picky eater and I do like everything. I even like eggs and will drink milk now.

My parents always wanted me to taste something before I rejected it.
I can´t remember the whole story, but it has been told in the family.
As a Swede of course I had Swedish meatballs. The first time I was going to eat them I made a big scene and refused. My parents more or less forced me to try them -not to eat - just to taste.
After a good "fight" I tried one little bit, made an even bigger scene screaming
"WHY DID YOU NOT FORCE ME TO EAT THEM LONG AGO: THEY ARE SO GOOD:"

You know I think the thing that made my mother's cooking so interesting and good was that she would try anything from any culture. She'd make swedish meatballs, hungarian goulash, matzoh ball soup...anything...because she likes everything.

And I remember the first time I had scallops, we'd gone out to eat which was a rare occurrence because we had six kids. My dad loved fish so we went to a seafood place and the only word I really recognized on the menu was 'scallops' because I had only recently learned to read and I had no idea what haddock or red snapper were.
But I thought it meant scalloped potatoes which I called cheesy potatoes.
So I said, 'I'll have scallops,' and my dad was like, 'Are you sure that's what you want?' probably thinking ,'is this six year old really going to eat scallops?' so I said, 'Yeah, that's what I want.'
Well they arrived at the table and I'm looking at these little round white things having expected cheesy potatoes and I said, 'What are these?' and he says, 'Those are scallops.' I said, 'I thought scallops were cheesy potatoes!'
And he's like, 'No - that's scalloped potatoes - these are scallops.'

Well, I tasted one and that was the end of that - scallops are one of my favorite seafoods.