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

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...

Fried liver and onions

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.

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

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.

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!

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 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.

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...!

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

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!

It's not luncheon meat, it's Spam

Definitely Luncheon Meat and (unbelievably) still available.

We never got the posh version

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!

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.

Corned beef sandwiches

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

CalamitouslyWrong yes your right, ''a ball of flour'' as my Dad calls it without something is in fact a ball of flour, its horrid. If I had a ''ball of flour'' I'd make bread with it! I have memories of old stringy thready potatoes and crying because it was gross, been told to eat it.

Also I love mash, but my mother pawning off a peeled and mashed on the plate boiled potato as mash was a cop out. She used to do the raw onion added to the mash too as mentioned upthread. You'd have smooth creamy mash and suddenly a hard, raw lump of strong onion, usually with beans on top

My mum isn't a bad cook, and I'm not very fussy, so there wasn't much I didn't eat. She had a bit of a thing for tinned prunes, and I still hate those. I used to hate smoked fish, but I love it now. Same with Brussels sprouts.

Pizza. Because we only ever had it when dad cooked and it was always burned.

Also stuffed marrow for obvious reasons like it tastes like shit.

Lastly bread and butter pudding because I have never ever understood why anyone would eat warm stale bread filled with warm raisins. BARF.

Oh, and my dad used to cook this vegetarian meat substitute which I called TCP but am sure it wasn't really called that. It was horrific.

And Sprats. Little bony fish. Bleach.

[[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textured_vegetable_protein]] actually TVP

Fray bentos steak and kidney pie, almost uncooked cooked chips and tinned peas, all kept warm and very dry in the oven, then served without any gravy or anything remotely moist. My mother was in hospital and my father was 'cooking' it was gross and he served it most days followed every day by a tub of strawberry mousse

Corned beef, boiled cabbage and boiled potatoes. Bleugh.

Tinned mackerel fillets in tomato sauce. Yeuch.

My kids don't know they're born!