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.

We must have been a bit posher, because we had brown bread with our meals, not white! 😆 But always with a tub of Vitalite on the table too. (1980s)
Also loved banana and sugar sandwiches in cheap white bread.
My mum would make a lovely curry that had apples and sultanas in it. I can't recreate it - must have been the curry paste.
I also like a salad with a bit of fruit in Like melon or orange. Really refreshing on a hot day.

My school friends mum would make fishfinger pie - basically fishfingers and tomatoes with cheesy mash on top! It was delicious!

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius

I was in hospital with covid, in the Spring, and I was really worried about the food - when I was training as a nurse, the food we served the patients was atrocious - but I needn’t have worried.

My sense of taste had almost completely gone, but I still had some left, and the food was nicely savoury - soup and a sandwich for lunch, and a hot meal for dinner - but some of the combinations were odd, to say the least.

Lasagne with boiled, diced carrot and mashed potatoes, and macaroni cheese with cubed, boiled swede and mash were the highlights!

My dad was served spaghetti with mashed potato in hospital!

@CSJobseeker - dunno about London snails, this might not apply to them, but it could be very dangerous to do that in Australia, where snails pick up a parasite called rat lungworm disease from trailing over rat wee.
Rat lungworm disease, if caught by humans, can cause vacuoles in the brain and kill them.

I also don't know if it's killed by cooking the snails, fair play - but we're very careful with snails here, I try to keep the kids from touching them, but if they do, make sure they wash their hands thoroughly. There have been a few cases here of people dying from eating snails because of this.

@toothpicklover

I think it’s more that it’s sliced white bread and not a roll with the soup that’s an issue. It’s snobbery 🤷‍♀️

Exactly this. There's a snobbish vibe about this whole thread

@Mymapuddlington

Jam and marmalade only go mouldy if you use the same spoon/knife that you use for butter.

I was dating a lovely guy. First time I stayed over he made me breakfast. Set it all up. Was spoons there for some reason 🤔 at age 31 I discovered THE JAM SPOON.
First thing I did is FaceTime my mum. She was 57 and her life was transformed. Feel like we and a lot of people we asked about this led very deprived, ignorant lives.

I discovered the jam spoon in later life too, and it was a game changer for keeping jam nice.

My mum was a rubbish cook. She would often plain undercooked boiled potatoes with pickle. Tomato soup with lumpy mash in the middle and undercooked rice with cold milk on top with raisins.

@burritofan

Sausages cooked in milk. As in boiled . Or poached I suppose. With mashed potato and the hot meaty milk as gravy. Hi, I’m going to need to burn the entire internet to the ground to expunge the words “hot meaty milk”.

An ex-boyfriend’s family have Christmas mashed potatoes with chicken livers sort of blended and liquified and stirred in; they spoke of nothing else for WEEKS before we went round and this putrid thing took pride of fucking place in the middle of a fairly crap and meagre buffet, with them all circling round me smiling and nodding like a cult, encouraging me towards the livery mashed potato. Grim.

I was just sick in my mouth

I remember being absolutely aghast as a child (and still am) that my Grandparents -on posh occasions- would have a glass of fresh orange juice as a STARTER. It was to be savoured too, as a very rare and exotic thing.

I'd forgotten this. When I was a child, orange juice would often be a starter in a restaurant. And that's because fresh orange juice actually was a (relatively) rare and exotic thing back then. I'm talking early 1960s probably, when orange 'juice' meant squash 99% of the time. So yes, not odd for your grandparents to savour fresh orange juice at all.

@ColdTattyWaitingForSummer

Thinking about it the same boyfriend’s mum cooked the Xmas meat the day before, sliced it, then reheated it by pouring gravy over it and putting the whole thing back in the oven..

My MIL cooks the turkey on Christmas Eve and leaves it standing on the counter until lunch the next day. We haven't had lunch there for years as I want a decent meal, she isn't a great cook, doesn't make enough and I want different accompaniments.

My late DM was a really good cook but very much of her day - plain, home cooked nutritious food. But she tried a recipe for a curry that had sliced bananas dipped in lemon juice and coated in desiccated coconut as a side dish. Have never been able to eat bananas and that was foul.

Re fresh orange juice as a starter. My Saturday job as a teenager was working in a supermarket, early 80s. It was around the time that card packed fruit juices were widely introduced which made drinking fresh juice much more available. Prior to that the choice was freshly squeezed oranges, small frozen cans of concentrate which were defrosted and diluted, or a Kellogg's thing called Rise and Shine which was a powder made up with water. We thought it was very exotic!

Before cartons of juice, the only time I had fruit juice was at a posh friends house. Her mum used to make fruit juice by squeezing oranges. It took a lot of oranges to make a glass of juice for everyone.

@saraclara

I remember being absolutely aghast as a child (and still am) that my Grandparents -on posh occasions- would have a glass of fresh orange juice as a STARTER. It was to be savoured too, as a very rare and exotic thing.

I'd forgotten this. When I was a child, orange juice would often be a starter in a restaurant. And that's because fresh orange juice actually was a (relatively) rare and exotic thing back then. I'm talking early 1960s probably, when orange 'juice' meant squash 99% of the time. So yes, not odd for your grandparents to savour fresh orange juice at all.

Yes. Back in the day when we’d hardly see or taste an orange apart from a few months of the year.

Most of what we ate was seasonal and from close to home.

I used to have a hotel in the 70s and fruit juice was served as a choice of starter as was grilled grapefruit with brown sugar and a cherry!
I remember fruit juice as a starter well into the 80s, and being given grilled grapefruit with brown sugar and a cherry at a dinner party in the early 80s. I thought the grapefruit particularly was SO sophisticated. In our house we had either very plain home-made things like chicken stew, or convenience foods like frozen stir-fry mixes.

I remember the odd hotel offering fruit juice as a starter in the '90s and I went to a small hotel in the mid 2000s and they also offered orange juice as one of the options. I found it rather charming.

@julieca

Before cartons of juice, the only time I had fruit juice was at a posh friends house. Her mum used to make fruit juice by squeezing oranges. It took a lot of oranges to make a glass of juice for everyone.

People would even have orange or grapefruit juice as a starter at their wedding reception.

I remember orange juice as a starter too - that, or a slice of melon!

I went for Sunday lunch on a large boat down the river and one of the options for a starter was orange juice. This was in 2018. I think their menu hadn't changed since the 1980s.

At Sunday breakfast a few decades ago we would start with half a grapefruit topped with a glacé cherry and eaten with a special grapefruit spoon, which was smooth edged and triangular and about the size of a teaspoon.

My mum was an excellent cook. The only thing she did terribly wrong was large fruit salads. A huge variety of fruits and berries that would have been absolutely lovely on their own. However, she used to smother the whole dish in vanilla essence. I have one idea why she did this. It completely be ruined the taste of the fruit 🤷🏻‍♀️

Oh gosh, I'd forgotten about the frozen orange juice concentrate!!

I remember in the late 70s/early 80s my mum buying orange juice or possibly grapefruit juice in a sort of crinkled glass container.
And she used to buy tiny frozen "portions" of orange juice to go in a cheese cake...it might have even been in a can or possibly a carton but I can't remember...anyway it was (I think) very expensive and not for drinking - it was for special occasions when guests came and she was required to make a cheesecake!

I remember the cartons of frozen concentrated OJ - they were cylindrical and plastic and smaller than a coke can with a strip to peel open the top. Dropped in a jug of water they made an amazing chilled drink - memories of summer!

@DoraMaude

Re fresh orange juice as a starter. My Saturday job as a teenager was working in a supermarket, early 80s. It was around the time that card packed fruit juices were widely introduced which made drinking fresh juice much more available. Prior to that the choice was freshly squeezed oranges, small frozen cans of concentrate which were defrosted and diluted, or a Kellogg's thing called Rise and Shine which was a powder made up with water. We thought it was very exotic!

I remember the Rise & Shine. We always had the grapefruit flavoured one & if you didn't drink it in time, it used to 'off' & be fizzy.

And them saying. Are you sure you've had enough to eat? Well no of course I haven't but I don't want to appear to be a greedy cow so I'll just politely say yes I have.