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

[Chicchicchicchiclana]

The grazing table thread inspired me! I know one should always be grateful when people invite you to eat with them (and I am!!) but I find it interesting the great variety of ways people do the hosting. Have any memorable dining experiences in other people's houses really stuck with you? Without being mean of course.

I went to a boyfriend's parents one Xmas and they served cold turkey. All the usual trimmings were cooked fresh but the turkey was done Xmas eve and left to go cold.

Apparently that was normal, and I learned how normal when on boxing day we went to his grandmothers for another cold turkey and hot veg.

One of my friends hated BBQs which I thought was odd as he loves burgers and sausages and being out on a nice day.

Then I went to a BBQ at his mother's.

The BBQ is lit and all meat is put on at once, no waiting for the coals to go white.

The meat is then taken and put in the oven on 1000 degrees while a table is set with a cloth, plates, glasses, knives and forks and salt and pepper pots.

A large undressed salad is put on the table and finally the meat comes out of the oven, well I think it's meat, it was black and vaguely resembled what had been on the BBQ.

Everyone sits at the table and eats and then the table is cleared.

If you come to a BBQ at mine the coals will be lit before you get here, a few bits of meat are put on the BBQ and there is salad, bread, sauces. Once something is cooked it is put on the cooler bit of the BBQ and you help yourself.

You are expected to sit around with a glass of wine / beer and have fun with occasional shouts of, "there's some burgers/sausages/chicken ready"

@Angrymum22

My MIL still bases all cooking on the recipes she learnt at school in the 1950s. Gravy is made by adding flour to the water used to boil the veg and she always makes Yorkshire puddings with self raising flour. I am convinced that she made mistakes copying the recipes and has continued to follow the flawed recipes for the last 65yrs. I was lucky to have a mother who was a fantastic cook and skilled baker. Although she did used to make a weird concoction called porcupine meatballs made with tomato soup,rice and mince mixed up and made into meatballs then cooked in more tomato soup, yuk. To be fair it was a recipe she was given.

My mum made porcupine balls also! In fact a few weeks ago i asked her for the recipe and served with with green beans, tinned corn and mash. I loved it! (Nobody else did though).

I imagine my adding baked beans to chilli wouldn’t be popular on here, the sweetness helps balance the chilli and is delicious!

My great aunt makes something called pizza pie, it’s a thick base almost scone like topped with tomato sauce, corned beef and red onion. It’s delicious

@ginghamstarfish

Wonder if some of these things are a 'class' issue? Growing up working class in Lancashire some years ago it was normal to have sliced white bread with soup (and many other meals, chip butty etc), to drink tea with meals, to have little idea of what a proper salad was. I still have tea with certain meals contains chips or bacon, it just goes ... Had a friend who put tomato ketchup on salad, and a friend whose huge Polish dad amazed me by having everything double strength - my friend had to make his tea, toast for breakfast before she was allowed to come out with me, and he had two teabags, two spoons of coffee in each cup, two slices of bread together in one toaster slot, etc. My own family's weird contribution to this is 'cheese dip', which I still eat to this day. On Sundays mum would fry sausages, then bacon, then in the same pan, put crumbled Lancashire cheese and milk, heated until the cheese melted. With bacon, sausage and hunks of bread to dip, it is heavenly.

Definitely a class thing. I grew up working class and we always had sliced white bread and tea with meals, weird 'salads' and nothing as fancy as a salad dressing (we'd have plain chopped cucumber, radish and tomatoes, and celery sticks in a pint glass for everyone to help themselves. Angel Delight, cheap ice cream with Ice Magic etc for puddings.

Toast buttered on both sides! Very messy and sticky also werid

Went to Sunday dinner at DH’s colleague’s house. Seemed perfectly nice and I offered to help wash up after. The colleague’s DW washed everything under the lukewarm tap: no dishwashing liquid or anything - Boak...

@peachescariad

Growing up in late 60s/70s tea would occasionally be 'roast cheese ' which was slices of cheese on a green Pyrex plate and grilled...just that and of course every meal had white sliced buttered bread on plate in middle of table.

Always had baked beans in shepherds pie.

Tined fruit cocktail and evaporated milk

Worst was poached fish....a piece of white fish, poached in milk and all of it served in a bowl.

Anyone remember Virol? - thick brown substance...I had to have a spoon of that every morning - it was delicious though.

Oh Virol, LOVED that stuff. I was severely underweight as a child, even though I ate well, so I was allowed Virol sandwiches in between meals!! Wish they still made it! I looked just like the child on the jar too!

@Pebbledashery

I remember going on a church picnic with my parents and siblings and other congregation members. There was a bloke there, single, middle aged, no kids. He made a Russian salad, but what absolutely flabbergasted me still to this day is he put the entire thing in a bowl of lime jelly and froze it. When dishing up, he proudly calmed it "solid salad" that was over 30 years ago and I still remember it to this day. Most bizarre thing ever.

Russian salad in aspic (if not lime jelly) is authentic, @Pebbledashery.

Salads in fruit jelly was a 1950/60s convenience food thing, although more popular in the US than the UK. If he was middle aged 30 years ago, when he was a child, it was probably his mum's favourite dinner party speciality recipe from the pages of Woman's Weekly.

@cheshirecat99 even if it is authentic - I find it very odd!

@chesirecat99 is that a picture of hard boiled eggs in jelly? 🤮

Oh the salad in jelly reminds me of a colleague years ago inviting me to a BBQ. She made what she called 'sunshine salad'. It was grated carrot, sultanas, cucumber I think all set inside an orange jelly with marshmallows on the top.

It's the most bizarre thing I remember from being a child, needless to say NOBODY sampled!

@Tractordiggerdump

At a birthday party, white bread & butter with sprinkles..🤮

Do you guys not do fairy bread at kids parties?

Oh it's an actual 'thing'

www.lanascooking.com/sunshine-salad/

described as a traditional congealed salad. if that doesn't make you want to make it, what will?

It is bizarre, @Pebbledashery, but at least it wasn't his insane idea He probably thought he was bringing something super sophisticated to the picnic.

Yep, those are boiled eggs in lemon jelly, @TheGrumpyGoat.

How about prawns or olives?

Do you guys not do fairy bread at kids parties?

No. It isn't really done in the U.K.

When I was little we once went for Sunday lunch to people my mum and dad were vaguely friendly with. They had three kids around my age. My mum and dad weren't very well off but they did eat really well, putting good food on the table was a huge priority, all guests would be generously catered for etc.

These friends were rather well off, lived in huge house in leafy suburb etc. But we got there and the food was divided into Things for the Adults and Things for the Children. There was a dish of butter out but only the adults were allowed to eat it. A box of margarine was there for the kids and voices were raised if any of the kids wanted butter. Adults were given a plate of cold ham, some lettuce and a bread roll. Kids had a plate of corned beef (ham was "too good"), some lettuce and a bread roll. There were two tomatoes sliced up on a dish in the middle of the table "for any of the adults to have". Cake appeared on the table afterwards "for the adults", while kids had a pile of cheapo biscuits from a tin. It was all very very strange.

@Angrymum22 using the water the veg is boiled in to make gravy is an early example of health-conscious food. It was because people had learned that boiling veg meant a lot of vitamins were lost in the water, so you used the water to add them back in.

I've just eaten my lunch of home made broccoli and stilton soup with a slice of stilton sourdough bread spread thickly with butter, if anyone finds that odd then I beg to differ, it was delicious.

Cold rice and sultanas in salads and this a common theme in hospital it’s rank.

My late mother couldn’t cook or really a lazy bugger everything she did came from a tin. Some of the things we had where vile.

Plus she’d make banana pieces with sugar my brother loved them I found them disgusting but if I didn’t eat them I’d get a smack for being ungrateful.

Step dad came along and it was meat and two veg, once a week roast and a pudding as he could cook. Mum still wouldn’t cook and when I was 7 was shown the kitchen and told to get on with it only when my dad wasn’t in but that’s a whole other thread. I have and had issues with food for a long time after leaving home too.

Dad was a bread man too but was fresh everyday because if he didn’t use it all he’d take it to work with him the next day.

In the late 80s, my friend's mum cooked every meal except the Sunday roast in the microwave. She had a huge chest freezer full of frozen foods and she would put whatever each person wanted on their plate still frozen, microwave your plate of food and serve it on the same plate. These were not special pre-cooked microwaveable foods, just standard burgers/sausages/chips/veg etc. The result was inevitably hard chips, soggy meat and over cooked veg. There was a hand written note on the wall in the kitchen with times for different combinations of food.

When I do a roast I always cook Yorkshire puddings and have mint sauce. My husband and his family make the same comments all the time about how yorkshire puddings only go with beef and mint sauce with lamb. Most people I know have these things with most dinners so didn't think it was that odd 🤷‍♀️

TBH, I think my parents were the weird ones for food. Mum was pretty hippyish (she even made her own tofu) and by budget or inclination they didn't buy anything processed (the only packaged food was tinned baked beans and tomatoes) and grew all their own food with goats for milk/cream/butter etc and raised lambs/calves/piglets for meat.
So, waaaay before it was fashionable, and with mums less than enthusiastic cooking, we'd have ***ing marrow for weeks at a time when it was in season, or indeed whatever was in season and past its season when purple sprouting was hard and woody or kale like eating tarpaulin. Ate 'everything but the squeal' in meat terms - and boiled tongue, stuffed hearts etc were eternal horrors for me. There was always loads of food around, and some was amazing, but mums wholemeal bread could have been used in combat and it took me years to realise that not all yogurt and jam was pourable...

Mint sauce does only go on lamb!

DS's school friend's mum used to serve them plain pasta drenched in tomato ketchup every time he went for a playdate. After the second or third time he just used to make excuses and come home.

Also - some very wealthy friends of ours (think £5m+ house . . .) invite us over perhaps once a year and they give us the SAME meal every time:

• baked potatoes with chilli and bagged salad
• a tiny portion of one of those frozen apple strudels which are cardboard and dry, served with tinned custard.

If they don't 'do' cooking that's fine, but I don't understand why they don't just order in some Cook meals or something!?