Childhood dinners that made your heart sink?

[Harveypuss]

A lighthearted post!

Do you remember any childhood meals, that when you asked your mum (or dad) "what's for dinner?", their answer made your heart sink?!

Mine was Lamb's hearts. My Mum cooked these often, presumably it was a culinary delight and was probably cheap, but I hated them (this was back in the late 70s so you ate what was given or went hungry). I don't know what she did with them, but they were as tough as old boots and really chewy. I'm sure offal like that is probably quite delicious in some top-end restaurant but dear Mum didn't cook it like that! I'm in my 50s now and I've only just told her I hated that meal. She was mortified!

We have this with our son now, aged 17. He hates pasta and when we have a family pasta meal, I cook him something different. He's off to Uni next year, so don't know how he's going to manage as I'm told all students live of pasta as it's really cheap...!

What was your least favourite childhood meal...?

I like liver and onions but my mum used to buy calves liver which is more tender to start with.
My mum was not a good cook and still isn’t so many things were rank including her homemade bread which could double as a hammer if needed.
She also used to make fish pie which I detested, I still have never managed to eat fish pie.
I also actively avoid boiled potatoes unless they are jersey royals with lots of butter. We used to have cheap gammon, boiled potatoes and peas with nothing to lubricate it. I’d never inflict that on my kids.

I also will not eat runner or green beans, broad beans require peeling the outer skin off so we rarely eat them. My grandparents grew them and we used to get them all summer.

Almost everything she threw onto a plate and slammed down onto the table.

Salt was bad as she had high blood pressure. All salt. So no salt was ever to cross my lips. The problem with that, apart from the complete absence of flavour, was that I had POTS, so actually needed more salt than the average to prevent me from keeling over at regular intervals. The flabby unsmoked bacon, soaked in milk overnight to get the salt out, then rinsed, then microwaved until the white stuff rose to the surface, once a quarter as a 'treat' convinced me that I hated bacon for forty years. And pastry. And home baked bread. And food, to be honest.

Other flavours were to be dispensed in homeopathic doses. A whole tablespoon of tomato puree? How profligate. A quarter teaspoon will do. Why waste a pale, hard tomato by grilling it when you could cut it roughly and leave the hard, cold, tasteless chunks on the plate with a puddle of sour juice?

I existed mainly upon toast with shit margarine and fizzy drinks for 16 years.

Lambs hearts with stuffing and wrapped in foil then baked in the oven.

Boiled Yellow fish cod with yellow smoked salty dye added to it

Spaghetti and mince. That was it - no sauce or seasoning. Not even onions to enliven it. Grey, rubbery lumps of mince dumped on a pile of white spaghetti.

My mum used to make the most awful sausage pasta dish with very anaemic sausages because she wouldn’t brown them first. The pasta was always crunchy too. She died when I was 16 and I now make it for my kids on her anniversary 😂

Love this thread! Always thought it was just my mums cooking/food that was atrocious ..but can see it was a common theme of the 70s

Where to start ..

Hearts (not sure what animal)
Lentil soup
Anchovy paste sandwiches
Grey mince (god knows what made up mince back then / same with sausages)
Liver

Was so relieved when mum gave up with it all when we were in are teens and it was mainly fish fingers & chips after that

@Mothership4two

Liver and onions Chewy roast lamb My Dad's homemade coleslaw with raw onions in it

What other kind of onions would you put in coleslaw?

Fish pie .. the house would smell for days after , yuck!

Eggs. Having the same meal on set days, as an adult I love I can choose a different meal whenever I like.

Cottage pie, sweet and sour or a stew.

The sweet and sour my mum used to make was awful

Nothing springs to mind. I was one of those children who would eat practically anything put in front of them.

Including liver. Loved it. Still do.

Herrings. All those disgusting little tiny bones. Apparently I could just eat them.

Sprouts with anything. Still can't stand them.

Other than that, DM was a fantastic and very adventurous cook, with spag bol a regular feature from c1970 onwards. Fried rice. Curry. She used to make a sort of pizza flan - bloody amazing. And meringues and éclairs. Still miss her cooking.

Entire meals consisting of boiled things with no flavour. Boiled potatoes, boil in the bag fish and boiled veg. It was probably quite healthy but so bland.

Belly draft
Liver
Kidney
Tongue sandwiches

Corned beef hash. Mum was the only one that liked it, the 8 kids did not

Liver and onions
Some weird kind of aspic jelly thing
Once my mum did this fancy salmon mousse for a dinner party ( very 70s) and made us all finish the leftovers. Makes me gag to think of it.
Tapioca pudding 🤢

Boiled watery mince and boiled watery potatoes 🤮 i dont know how she could boil mince till it went watery and grey

My parents were into local, seasonal food, and the Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall thing of respecting the animal by eating all of it. They also grew, produced, or traded most of the food.
Mums cooking was overall pretty terrible tbh. Meals that particularly struck terror into my heart (and you ate it whether you liked it or not else there was trouble) was anything with microwaved marrow (just marrow, and we'd have it for weeks and weeks in season), boiled tongue, heart, tripe, and oxtail. I'm sure oxtail is nice cooked long and slow, but it would be thrown together when she got home from work, boiled furiously and served so you'd be picking bits off the bone, and all the horrible little bits. Bleugh.
I became veggie for years, and tbh am still very selective about meat.

TVP (textured vegetable protein) Bolognese with the onions still crunchy, watery tomato sauce and brown pasta. Like eating wet dog biscuits.

Liver and bacon
Shepherd’s pie (lumpy mashed potato 🤮)
My mum’s version of risotto (the rice was hard)

And Spam sandwiches
Sandwich paste sandwiches
Tinned sardines on toast

My DC don’t know how lucky they are...

Fish pie
Liver
Faggots
Boiled potatoes
Broad beans
Steak & kidney pie instead of roast on a sunday

Cold lamb or beef left over from Sunday roasts.

Braised steak.

Some of these sound revolting! I wasn’t a fussy eater at all but for some reason I used to dread meatloaf.

At school I absolutely hated the beef burgers and am still indignant that a dinner lady made me finish one of them as I retched even though I’d never left of my dinners before.

I wonder what my children would say their most dreaded meal was. I don’t tend to make them things they don’t like but I know they roll their eyes when I try to serve a portion of veg with meals that don’t really go with veg-pizza and broccoli etc