What meal made your heart sink as a child

Yes I hate potatoes too.

Jacket, chips, roasties- yum. Home made potato salad.- delicious.

New potatoes - not keen
Boiled floury bland peeled potatoes - yuck.
Mash - no thanks

Corned beef sandwiches

But both of you who've said you love a boiled spud have specified that it must be seasoned and covered in something to give it moisture.

That's not a plain, fluffy, boiled floury spud on a plate, which is what potatoes were when I was a child.

My Mum's stew. She used to save all of the veg from the weekend, including sprouts, parsnips everything and put it all into one pot . It was Monday slop! Thank goodness for tomato ketchup!

It's not luncheon meat, it's Spam

Definitely Luncheon Meat and (unbelievably) still available.

We never got the posh version

Another one for boiled bacon and cabbage lovingly cooked by my now dear departed grandmother. Vile stuff.
Also suet pudding steamed with a bacon/onion/dried mixed herb filling steamed for what seemed like hours which filled the house with a smell similar to urine. Horribly bland.
I liked the Vesta reconstituted stuff especially the paella. At least it had some taste. 60s and 70s childhood here!

Nothing, my dad used to cook anything I wanted to eat, he'd offer me a choice and cook whatever I wanted. Sometimes he'd cook me something else if what he'd made (that I'd chosen remember) I decided not to eat I was a spoilt brat

stubbornstains - i think my mum's sausages (see above) were a nod to those ideas. We never had salt or fat in or on anything, and it was always energetically removed even if that made the food inedible.

Thankfully I quite like brown rice and wholemeal pasta...!

My mum used to serve a big slab of liver - dry fried. Was disgusting and reminded me of the sole of a shoe. She thought we ought to have Vitamin A at least once a month.

Braised beef stew - hated the taste and texture of the meat. Can remember being left at the table to finish it, while my Mum sat nearby and watched me retching . Most of her cooking was very good though.

School dinners - bleurgh to spam fritters and semolina with jam. Feeling sick now.

My inner Irish person, both parents are Irish, loves a nice big boiled spud with creamery butter, salt and a pint of milk, its my comfort food!

I'm surprised at the relative dearth of traumatised victims of the 70s/ 80s wholefood craze on this thread. Nothing wrong with pulses and grains at all - I'm still a veggie - but back in the day it was All About Health. No fat allowed in any of this stuff. No salt. Brown fucking rice and wholemeal bloody pasta...

My mum made a thing called Tibetan Roast. I think it comprised mostly of buckwheat, with a few mushrooms. God, it was like eating dried compost.

Also, kidney bean chilli (no salt or fat, remember) with brown rice. There was something called Gado Gado sauce too, that wasn't a walk in the park....

Also, my mum's ratatouille.....I had to get to adulthood to realise that aubergines and courgettes are actually lovely - if you cook them in sufficient oil. My mum basically boiled them (shudder).

I will never forgive Rose Eliott her cook books from the '80s (her current ones are fine, lots of influences from cultures that actually do nice things to vegetables). Never.

Bowl of semolina with a blob of jam in the middle. I feel physically sick picturing it

I don't remember having anything I didn't like as a child. I'm either a human dustbin or my mum was very indulgent bit of both.

I do remember being told I couldn't refuse a pudding for school dinner and choosing a cream bun over rice pudding - two options I really hated. I was sick

Oh, I remember now - mum would insist on peas in the risotto, EVEN THOUGH I DON'T LIKE THEM!!!

My mum is an excellent cook.

Fried liver and onions

God, pretty much everything... lots of failures involving mince. And overcooked vegetables... and things like lamb's brains. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

Two frequent highlights were:
"Stir fry" with strips of no doubt quite expensive beef cooked until it was like rubber, with overcooked non-asian vegetables, watery vegetable water, and pasta shells...

Grilled sausages that had been pre-boiled, having been pricked all over to let the fat out. this inevitably meant the sausage mince was grey, tasteless, gagworthy little bits, and the skins would fall off under the griller, and the whole thing would be served up with grilled onions. Onions make me gag, always have, always will...

I was nearly 30 before i dared try a sausage and discovered that they're quite nice with the fat still in!

But i'm being mean complaining. Mother has ASD*, has practically no sense of taste or smell whatsoever, is completely insensitive to textures in food, and follows rules obsessively. So for her, the fact she followed the recipes for every single thing in the meal, means she got it right. Usually the recipe-following is fairly inaccurate though, so the recipes don't usually work...

*as do I, but my sensory issues are kind of mirrors of hers...

Stew that my DM made with bisto instead of using stock so that as it cooked it just got thicker and thicker. It was literally meat in bisto

I like boiled potatoes With olive oil or butter and seasoned salt.

How do you make bacon pudding then Happy? I need it!

A lot of you just don't realise how lucky you are / were. Yes, I had tripe but it was in a soup type of bowl with milk and sugar - no vegetables. My school break sandwich was one slice of bread (cut in half) spread with margarine and with glucose as the filling. I didn't know that my parents didn't have much but I was aware of rationing and put it down to that.

I now love liver with onions (can't have liver without onions), fried kidneys - ooh yum!

As for pilchards, I used to like them occasionally. My MIL discovered this and, every time we went there for tea, what would she give me? Pilchard and sliced tomato sandwiches with a hardboiled egg. I gave up buying tinned pilchards --and started to buy tinned sardines because they were too ....erm .... rich in flavour.

I still like semolina, tapioca, rice pudding and my dear aunt's bacon pudding to dream of. I'm so glad that I can make it the way she did.

Electric

that is awful.

same thing here, but class teacher in charge at lunch time.
first I was forced to eat horrible, oversalted, pureed vegetarian soup, then I projectile vomited it all over everything and everyone in a 3 m radius.
you've never seen green rain like that. then I collapsed on the floor shaking. I felt really ill.

all I could think while on the floor, shivering, that I don't ever want this to happen again so (aged 6) I thought I'd hold my breath a bit to properly scare them so they will never ever force me again.
I'm pleased to say it worked.

I don't get you.

I liked cornflakes in cold milk or in hot milk.

I really liked Shreddies or Shreaded Wheat in hot milk.

I will survive because I'm not only prepared to eat shit, I enjoy it.

Cornflakes with warm milk
Boil in a bag spaghetti Bolognese
Heinz ravioli
Mulagatawny soup
Liver
Angel delight
Rice pudding

I liked Angel Delight. It was some that mothers couldn't ruin despite their best efforts