For years I was in a bi-monthly cooking group. We usually met at a friends house and would make dinner there. One night all those terrible things your mom and your aunt Sally forced on you came up.
Number 1 was Green Bean Casserole, for the uninitiated this is 1 can green beans, 1 can Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, topped with Durkee fried onions then baked. It is terrible, canned green beans are mushy and flavorless, cream of mushroom soup is also mushy and terrible with the added bonus of tasting like a salt lick. Durkee fried onions I will eat as a snack (I will hear no bad words about them, though they are also terrible in their own way. Don’t start). The original recipe unsurprisingly came from Campbell’s Test Kitchen as a way for working housewives to get dinner on the table with a minimum of fuss.
We talked about it (argued) and half the group thought it could be a great dish, the other half speed dialed their therapists.
The next time we met Green Bean Casserole was the main. Blanched fresh green beans were layered with crimini mushrooms simmered in cream and herbs, then topped with Asian fried shallots. It was a hit, and ended up in rotation. It is actually fantastic when made fresh.
No.2 was Fish in Aspic. No one could do anything with this, the dish just sucks.
No.3 was Fondue, which I hated as a kid then had good versions of. Porcini (Cepes) with Beaufort and sourdough, Beef loin with carmelized onions and red wine reduction, etc.
What are yours? Have you recreated any horrible dishes and made them delicious?
p.s. great aunt Beth you almost put me off Turkey for life…
ETA: I know we’re supposed to tag posts, I don’t see a way to do that in Voyager. Anyway, Discussion
My most hated was macaroni salad. Bowtie noodles with Miracle Whip, peas, shredded carrot, dill, and salt. Occasionally other items would make an appearance, but the main recipe was the most common.
It was so bland and mushy, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that it was made every few weeks during the summer, and in a quantity that meant I was eating it for lunch and dinner for almost a whole week every time it was made.
Grandma Helen is offended, as it was her goto in the summer.
Agreed, I don’t remember touching on that one though.
It can be really good though, don’t cook the pasta for three hours, don’t use that McCormick Dill you got as a wedding gift in 1946, etc.
Fresh herbs, aioli, slightly less than al dente pasta.
Yes! I make my own salad with fresh dill, onion and garlic powder, homemade mayo or olive oil, a bit of fresh basil, and baby spinach leaves to add some crunch. I just don’t call it pasta salad or macaroni salad because the name is forever associated with blandness to me lol.
I don’t ever make pasta salad, but I’ve heard you actually want to overcook the pasta to account for the retrogradation of starch once you cool it down. https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-make-the-best-pasta-salad#toc-rule-3-overcook-your-pasta
Same here. Cannot stand pasta salad. Ironically I love cold macaroni and cheese though so I don’t know exactly what way my brain is short-circuited.
macaroni salad. Bowtie noodles
I’m seeing a discrepancy here
It drove me crazy too. It was actual macaroni when I was a kid, but then my mom decided bowties were fancier and started using those instead.
I LOVE your fixed version of green bean casserole—I make the Bon Appetit version every year at Thanksgiving.
I vaguely remember my mom making a god-awful casserole with halibut, a mayo-based sauce, and cheddar cheese. I think she called it halibut supreme? I’d be interested to see if it’s even POSSIBLE to make that edible.
Thanks for the trauma, my mom did Tuna Casserole. Canned tuna, some kind of creamed condensed soup, topped with potato sticks. I had actually suppressed this memory.
I can’t really see a way forward with those ingredients.
I actually grew up on a good version of tuna casserole. We never used the condensed soup or potato sticks, we made a bechamel and topped the dish with parmesan and breadcrumbs. My parents did some weird things when trying to use up leftovers, but I will give them credit for refusing to use the canned/premade versions of a lot of things.
Sausage and peppers. Italian sausage cooked to death with bitter, mushy, green peppers and Ragu. I hate green peppers so I’m not sure this is one that can substantially be improved upon and I have not tried.
I have made something like this but subbing yellow and red peppers for the green. It definitely cuts the bitterness of the dish.
That makes me sad. I’ve made sausage and peppers and it’s great. No Ragu, just sausage, peppers, onions, and potatoes. Par cook the potatoes so they brown nicely, start with olive oil and minced garlic and get everything cooked to where it’s done but not dead.
In theory it sounds like it could be good. Stuffed pepper kinda thing. The execution here sounds… lacking, though lol
There was this recipe my mom got from a magazine like Country Living or Women’s Day or something called “Garden Skillet”. It was shell noodles with sautéed onions, zucchini, stewed tomatoes, and Campbell’s cheese soup. I hated it. I’d try to scrape the cheese stuff off the zucchini and eat that and as few noodles as possible. I have never tried to recreate it. 🤢
If you make green bean casserole well, it’s my fave thanksgiving dish. It is a mushy mess but either it’s pretty solid sometimes, or everything else at my childhood Thanksgiving was terrible garbage
After seeing your comment I looked at some recipes for it. I had no idea it was a Thanksgiving dish, this was in weekly rotation at our house, but we literally never had it at Thanksgiving.
For me it was pretty much meat cuts like steak or pork chops. My parents erred on the side of making sure it was safe, so the steak was medium well or even well done and the pork chops would have little internal moisture left. I grew up thinking I just didn’t like those meats. I’m still not a big fan but I do understand that they can be cooked better now.
Though to balance it out, my mom was Italian and we had enough good pasta that I took pasta being good for granted.
Though to balance the balance, her tortiere was also very dry and she’d get offended if we wanted to add any sauces.
I miss her risotto with turkey giblets. Thanks to that (and maybe a lack of having it in other forms), I grew up liking organ meat.
For a significant portion of my childhood, any and all food my mom made was made in a slow cooker. There are many great meals you can make in a slow cooker, but there are also many things that should never be slow cooked. Just because you get results if you Google “crock pot pasta” does not mean you should ever get pasta anywhere near a crock pot.
Re: green bean casserole, that’s sounds similar to the logic around the “egg in the cake mix” thing. Basically, the minimum effort to make something “homemade”.
I have the same reaction when I see people doing instant pot pasta now. It isn’t any faster than boiling it on the stove and almost certainly will overcook.
I’ve never seen someone do pasta in an instant pot, but yeah, sounds horrible. Pasta on the stove might take 10 minutes, while an instant pot would take a few to get up to pressure, a few to cook, and a few to cool down. Best case scenario, you save yourself a minute, while completely throwing away your ability to control doneness.
Green bean casserole absolutely. I have never had a good version of it. Your version sounds better but I’d say it’s a flawed concept.
My most hated was white beans and ham with cornbread. It ruined both the ham and beans and smelled like hot dog water. I ended up just eating cornbread and pushing the beans and ham around until I could be excused.
Also creamed spinach. It looked and smelled like I had already puked it up.
We didn’t do white beans or cornbread, Ham was like the Sahara, or cooked with Collards until everything was a salty stew with chewy bits in it.
Thinking very hard, I’m unsure if they’re was any food so bad I remember it being bad. Mother would claim her meatloaf was bad but I legit don’t remember it being bad? It was fine. She held herself to a high standard when she had two kids, one of which ate sour cream with a spoon and pickle juice from the jar.
She never did make green bean casserole since she hated it so much.
She canned green beans, and those could be weird after a year or two on the shelf, maybe once I get a pressure canner I can try to make those.
Hmmmm… Pickle juice… 🤤
It’s delicious!
And unnerving, apparently, so I’m not allowed to just drink it from the jar, even when the jar is empty. I must be polite and use a glass! XD
No one in my family could cook, at all. I say that as someone who would happily eat Spaghetti-O’s cold from the can after turning it upside down so all the pasta was now on ‘top’.
I was extremely lucky. My mother knew how to cook (not from her mother though, she never cooked) and my dad, during his stint of “all jobs are a job” he was a line cook and made a number of nice dishes.
Neither did baking much, and that fell to me during the holidays since I looooved cookies.
Greene bean casserole was one of those many things I’d seen in american TV shows but wasn’t sure if it was actually a real thing, was a real thing 50 years ago, or was never a real thing outside of TV
In my experience, the standard American Thanksgiving meal contains a whole bunch of dishes, and everyone who attends is responsible for making something. The host will be in charge of the turkey cause it takes a long time to make, and no one wants to have to transport a turkey to a second location. Other competent cooks will make mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, baked goods, desserts, etc. There’s always one person who has somehow skirted through life refusing to learn how to cook, so you tell them to make green bean casserole. It’s like $5 of ingredients, and you literally just dump then together and heat them up. No measuring, temperature of the oven doesn’t really matter, time in the oven doesn’t really matter. A bunch of people put some on their plates, a few people might even eat a few bites, but most of it you just throw out, cause it sucks, but you don’t really feel bad about it.
Fish in aspic sounds similar to gefilte fish, which is universally terrible in every jar, can, or whatever you can find at the store.
I wish I could tell you how, but my grandmother would make gefilte by hand annually and it was delightful. Slightly tart, slightly sweet, bouncy texture and bursting with delicious whitefish flavor and lightly spiced.
So while I don’t have a recipe, I know it can be done and maybe looking into recipes for homemade gefilte fish can help you figure out how.
This was something like Sole in tomato aspic. ‘It’s French’ my mother said. Very young me stuck a hand into what I thought was raspberry Jello and shoved it into my mouth when no one was looking. It was not raspberry Jello.
Chicken and rice. Bland, boring, and terrible. We also had it A LOT.
Definitely boring if you just eat boiled chicken and plain rice. Check the recipe for hainanese chicken rice, a few additional steps but tastes completely different.
That’s what it was. Prepared in the plainest way possible. I’d try what you’re suggesting, though!
I can’t think of any particular dishes that my mom made per se, but she only knew how to cook things that took a long time. So lasagna, spaghetti with meatballs, chili… all wonderful. Steak and broccoli, on the other hand… Oof. I loved my mom, but she could not cook these things well. When I finally had a well cooked steak that didn’t eat like shoe leather it was a revelation.
The trick with the green bean caserole is don’t use canned beans. Use the frozen french cut green beans, not mushy at all.
Also learn to make white sauce instead of using canned cream of mushroom soup.
Here’s a ham casserole: In a casserole dish, layer cooked noodles (any pasta though better if it’s not one of the long tangley ones, just cook it al dente), ham (cut into small cubes), frozen peas, chopped onion, white sauce, shredded cheese. Then repeat those layers. Top with breadcrumbs and paprika. Then bake at 350 for about 40 mins uncovered. It was a staple growing up on any night after having ham for dinner. These days I’ll make it without bothering having just ham the night before.
For me it was salmon patties. My parents were fond of making them, especially during Lent. It was basically a can of salmon, toss in some (light) seasoning, and cook until its the consistency of a hockey puck. They were these dry, tasteless abominations and I could not stand them.
If I were to make them today, it’d be more akin to a crab cake and with fresh salmon instead of canned. But I won’t.
You’d be better seved taking a more croquette approach - especially Japanese potato and salmon croquettes. I prefer to use gresh cookror frozen, but canned CAN work. Main thing is seasoning your spuds, making then not too big, and frying at the right temp. As a bonus, they ait fry rather well, and I have previously cheated the ‘binding’ by miing buttermilk and a bit of kewpie mayo, dunking the croquettes in that, and tumbling them in panko.
