What meal made your heart sink as a child

[lemisscared]

For me i think it was mince and potatoes. The mince was from a tin ffs!! With tinned peas and carrots.

My mum used to make me eat this and i would gag and cry! Oh and fucking ready brek as i would get pneumonia if i didn't eat it - boak

ffs that's a typo and a half

TINNED fish

Raisins and unsalted, raw peanuts we had as a snack every day at infant school. You weren't allowed to refuse them.

The raisins reminded me of my rabbit's droppings and the peanuts tasted like his food.

I used to give them to my friend, but once we were caught and made to stand in the corner. Who does that to small children? I was too afraid to tell my mum, but if I had, she'd have had that teacher's guts for garters.

I loved my mum's food. She was no cordon bleu cook, but everything she did was nice and her bubble and squeak was ambrosial.

I cannot replicate it

Rimmed fish

I'm sure someone else with an Irish upbringing must have already said this on the thread but:

Boiled bacon and cabbage - all cooked together for hours in one big pot so the cabbage was grey (and the bacon come to think of it).

I didn't realise that boiled cabbage could actually be green until I was about 14!

White boil in the bag fish with a packet white sauce, served with not quite cooked boiled potatoes and bullet peas. This was followed by egg custard with pineapple rings. Refusal was not an option.
This was the meal my grand mother served whenever we arrived at hers after travelling for hours.
I loved visiting my grand parents but I dreaded the end of that journey.
My grandmother was a dreadful cook in her later years. I once stayed with her for a fortnight in my early teens and ended up unable to swallow food! I would put the food in my mouth and chew and chew but when I tied to swallow it was as if my stomach closed up!

What?

I loved boiled bacon with carrots and potatoes in a salty broth that was the colour of the wee you're all supposed to achieve if you're drinking enough water - straw coloured.

With many golden-edged rings of fat on top.

Mmm.

Reading this thread in horror, I now think I was really lucky! I was a picky child but wasn't ever forced to eat anything (school tried and failed - there was just no way I was going to eat those tinned mandarin segments).

At home I mostly ate what I liked, dry cornflakes for breakfast, peanut butter and honey sandwiches after school and then chips-with-everything family meal for dinner. We kept pigs, goats and hens and as far as I know my parents never bought meat, we just ate our own, so lots of roast pork and goat and the odd chicken or wild rabbit. It was always delicious.

I also had the cod in parsley sauce at school but it was my favourite!

Surprised at the widespread hate for cauli cheese and chops (and I agree with a PP's mum that the fat is the best bit of a chop )

And cloudy with a chance of dumplings.

Tripe and onions. Tongue [as a cold meat, with salad]. Hideous memories of trying to please my grandmother who was trying to feed us well with what little money she had...forcing it down and trying not to vomit.

Sago and tapioca. Vile.

Nowadays: squid, calamari. Yuk.

Liver and cabbage. On a Monday
I live cabbage now

With my gran... Mince, she didn't realise it needed gravy! Then she would do pork chops in gravy.

My mum, most things she cooked were minging. I became a better eater once I met dh and MIL cooked from scratch.

Cooked carrots. Love 'em now though.

My nan used to make neck end and barley broth and batch freeze it in margarine tubs. I used to cry when I'd see her taking those tubs out of the freezer.

I hate lamb anyway, but the neck end was especially horrible as it was really chewy, fatty and sinewy AND she'd leave the bone in. The barley was always like little bullets and the whole thing smelled like a dogs breakfast.

Just thinking about it now is making me feel queasy :(

Roast lamb - because I'd always rather have roast beef (with Yorkshires) or roast chicken (with stuffing).

I wonder how someone can always be a rubbish cook despite cooking for a family for years, I think it must take a determined effort

My DM used to cook sheeps head in the pressure cooker for the dog! Put it into plastic tubs and freeze it, dog loved it but whew it smelled. All that would be left is the jaw.

Beetroot, porridge

Heinz spaghetti bolognese with corned beef. Indescribably awful.

As an adult I am a bit funny about food texture, as a child I didn't have the choice. There was one food that really used to make me cry and that was pilchard sandwiches, digusting mashed up tinned pilchards in tomato sauce on a sandwich, for my packed lunch, three times a week, when I was 5. Take a moment to think about just how warm, pungent, soggy and revolting the bread was as I peeled it from the bottom of my lunchbox. The dinner ladies used to stand over me until I ate it and say 'your Mummy wouldn't give you something you didn't like'. I used get agonising stomach cramps from the stress of it. The day I went onto school dinners is one of my happiest school memories :)
Fellow pilchard sufferers you have my sympathy!

Pretend Pie.
My mum can't cook. She used to make this disgusting meat thing with gravy and stick a square of puff pastry next to it and called it steak pie!

One I was given tongue to eat! Fucking TONGUE!
My dad used to check the bin to make sure we hadn't thrown our tea away, so I posted it through the letter box and prayed that a dog would walk by and eat it!

I've spent 15 pages feeling sick.

Can I add my childhood bete noire? Some Fridays my df would proudly return from work bearing... bloaters . These were stinking white fish full of bones. Just the name was enough to ruin my weekend.

Luncheon meat.

Anything that glows in the dark has no place on a dinner plate.

Fish pie with parsley sauce, took me years to anywhere near a fish pie again.

Mine was:

• boiled potatoes (but not potatoes suitable for boiling)
• over cooked cabbage
• baked beans
• well done burnt bacon

And the piece de resistance was the bacon far would be poured over the potatoes and the cabbage to give everything an acrid greasy taste.

Whisket you poor sausage. How could anyone do that do a hungry five year old!