Strange catering habits you have experienced when eating at friends/family houses?

My family were the weird ones. Burnt toast with sugar. Toast with brown sauce. Ketchup sandwiches. Banana sandwiches. Lard sandwiches (which was the grease left over after cooking up the morning's breakfast). Actually pretty much everything was put into a sandwich.

Yes, a big mug of tea was the normal drink with a meal throughout my childhood. Maybe kiddies were offered 'pop' (but never a glass of milk like you see in American TV and films 😶 )

Fluid milk consumption has been going down in the US for decades. Kids might have milk on cereal in the morning, but it's mostly gone as a beverage. You might get bread and butter with a meal at a restaurant, but not at home.

@cricketmum84 yes yes yes to shepherds pie sandwich. My DIL, the one I converted to mash potato sandwich, makes Christmas Lunch Sandwiches.

The. Cooking stuff to death is such a memory for me. My mum worked full time including Saturdays. This meant that my brother and I, primary age, cooked our own meals.

We would put the mince in a big roasting pan of water in the oven and cook it for an hour. After that when the water was neatly gone we would add one oxo cube and cook it for another hour.

During school holidays we would often make chips with a huge pan of boiling chip oil. We only had one kitchen fire. We ran next door to the neighbour and asked her to phone our mum. She called the brigade and by the time mum got home they were just finishing up.

We got a telling off for, Showing her Up. I guess she’d rather us burnt to death.

I have an aunt who doesn't refrigerate things she should. I'm not sure that's that 'strange' but it is off-putting. She lives (not in the UK) in a warm, sunny part of the world. We went for Christmas one year and she made pasta and all sorts of other mayo/cheese based salads the afternoon of Christmas eve and then just left them out on the counter covered until the next afternoon's lunch. My mum and I just kept giving each other eyes over lunch as we panicked trying to figure out which dishes would be least likely to give us food poisoning.

I think I can beat ‘hot meaty milk’! My maternal grandmother used to say that a wonderful remedy for any ‘chesty’ complaint was hot milk with - wait for it - melted lamb fat mixed in! How’s that for mega 🤮?

She was very fond of any meat fat - preferred it any day to the lean, and funnily enough was always slim until she died well into her 80s.

Might add that my DF always utterly loathed milk, and cream for that matter - wouldn’t eat anything that even looked as if it contained either.
He dated it back to being made to drink Bovril made with milk as a young child, when he was ill. (Meaty milk again…..)

Invited for a first (and last ) dinner; hostess brings in plates bearing veal(Marks and Spencers ready made, microwaved) and says " I hope nobody objects to eating veal." With no alternative offered.

Today I made DP and I a hot bowl of homemade soup each for lunch. DP made two large mugs of hot tea to go with it. Why would I want hot tea with my hot soup?!

Another tongue one.
Years ago I shared a flat with another girl. One day I came home and there was a huge pot simmering away on the stove, smelling rank. I lifted the lid and there was this huge ... thing ... in there. I put the lid back on pdq and asked her what on earth it was.

"It's a tongue!" she said, looking at me pityingly like I was some igoramus.

I processed this information for a bit the said: "You mean "tongue" is actually A TONGUE???"

I had no idea. I thought the name of the cold meat "tongue" was simply that - a name, like Spam or something.

When I was a child, if we had a picnic, mum would make egg sandwiches, but instead of using mayonnaise, she would use salad cream, and mash the boiled eggs into that. Sounds strange, but I loved it.

Then, one day, she decided that it was too much work to boil and de-shell the eggs, so took to making the sandwiches with scrambled egg. Cold scrambled egg, with no mayonnaise or salad cream - utterly gross.

@florentina1 nowadays social services would have been called, even without the boiling chip fat 😢 What decade was that? I remember lots of public services info about chip pan fires in the mid 80s and even now I remember it - turn the cooker off and throw a wet tea towel over it! There must have been an awful lot of chip pan fires.

When I was a child, if we had a picnic, mum would make egg sandwiches, but instead of using mayonnaise, she would use salad cream, and mash the boiled eggs into that. Sounds strange, but I loved it

My grandmother made egg sandwiches with salad cream too! In fact anything that would normally use mayo (potato salad etc), she used salad cream.

Yep, I was super old when I realised tongue was, well, TONGUE.

Agree with previous posters re many of these being class based.

Bread and/or tea with a meal was to fill you up cheaply.

We were encouraged to have a slice of bread and butter with our main meal.

Baked beans In shepherds/cottage pie another way of bulking out what you had. I still do it now.

People don't realise tongue is, er, tongue because it is rolled & pressed. I was a dinner at a local dignitary's in France as a teenager & I remember my horror at the tongue laid out on a bed of vegetables, taste buds & all - it was a sort of beige colour & very long. It felt like I was french kissing my dinner (not envy!)

Yep, we had a chip pan fire in the 80s. Singed the kitchen cupboards and the fire engine came. My brother didn't even get a telling off. But my parents didn't replace the chip pan unfortunately.

Many years ago me, dh and dc’s went to stay with a relative of his by the sea. We thought it would be a nice break but they were all quite slim, barely ate anything and we were so hungry the entire time we were there..
they bought two thin crust supermarket pizzas for 4 adults, two teens and three children. So we had like one and a half slices each.
The following night the relative then made a spaghetti bolognese with no sauce!! So mince and spaghetti pasta. The final straw was snack time, they cut up one apple into slices for the 4 younger ones to share! My kids were wasting away. We popped out for a bit and bought lots of snacks and hid them in our room! We also treated the kids to a chocolate bar each and then their parents wouldn’t let them have it.. We couldn’t wait to leave!!

Oh yes, always egg mayonnaise made with salad cream. Lovely.

@OverByYer
Same. Nothing better with Heinz tomato soup than white bread and butter dipped in it

False - Heinz tomato soup with white-bread cheese sandwiches dipped in it is better

The worst thing about eating at other peoples houses was stingy portions.

I remember going to a friends house after school, her mum was cooking a strew or curry on the hob, cats on the worktops digging in with their paws in the pot...cue my friend asking me if I'd like to stay for dinner...Err no thanks.