2024, Family, Food, History, Kids, Uncategorized

Nostalgia

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I returned home from South Dakota last week to find our refrigerator filled with some odd foods. There was a huge coil of liverwurst, a new bag of cornmeal, and fluffy biscuits. These are all things I dislike. I asked Husband what was up.

It seems that while I was gone he had a sudden longing for the foods of his childhood, particularly the foods of his family from Eastern Ohio and West Virginia. Their foodways were quite Appalachian, with a great love of cornmeal mush. His Ohio forebears were also butchers and made lots of sausages, hence the liverwurst. He insists he got the liverwurst because he wanted to make sure he had an adequate red blood count. Sure, sweetie.

I don’t get particularly nostalgic over food, unless I consider my Aunt Norma’s chicken. That was always a treat, and I have learned to master it so it tastes just like hers. Daughter is nostalgic over my pasta sauce, which she thought for years was my own creation until she saw the recipe online realized it was by Marcella Hazan.

I don’t know if I should consider it a compliment that, if Husband couldn’t have my company, he found solace in cornmeal mush. Oh well, there are worse things, I suppose.

What foods, activities, or things do you get nostalgic for?

25 thoughts on “Nostalgia”

  1. I will have to say that nothing compares to the holiday fish and lefse (made by my grandma, aunt or, later on, my dad). We used boxed salt cod instead of lutefisk (which I’ve never tasted). Boiled potatoes, melted butter, rolled up just right…

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  2. Music.
    I subscribe to an excellent YouTube curator, CasaDiogenes.
    Billboard Weekly Top Fourty
    Currently, the week of January 26, 1980 has begun playing.

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  3. I get nostalgic about hikes that we used to take in the fall. My former partner, Morgan, loved hiking, and we did it often. We went to so many beautiful places, and we went for long hikes. Walking in the woods when the colors are turning is not only good for the heart – it’s also good for the soul. After hiking we would find a bar and grill, and have a hearty, warm supper with a beer.

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    1. Yes, every walk through a carpet of fallen leaves recalls echoes of a past carpet of fallen leaves, and makes it impossible to declare one carpet more beautiful than the other.

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  4. Husband continued with nostalgia by making apple butter on Sunday from 6 pounds of apples a neighbor down the street gave us. He said his grandmother made apple butter.

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  5. Baking chocolate chip cookies with Mom as a kid. Dad’s bouillabaisse on Christmas Eve. But NOT his oysters on the half shell. Grandma Norbury’s pork roast. Walking the half block to Lynfred Winery in Roselle (where we lived for almost 6 years) and tasting a few wines. It became our version of a weekly happy hour. Got to know the staff and the winemaker pretty well. He made some of the best wines I’ve ever tasted. Going XC skiing almost weekly in the winter in Jay Cooke State Park when we lived in Carlton.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. I was kind of laughing while I was reading the post because there’s absolutely no food from my childhood that I feel nostalgic about. My mother did not like to cook and was not really good at it. Vegetables came from cans and there were not a huge wide variety of meals. Not her fault due to her very dysfunctional childhood.

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      2. I get nostalgic when I unwrap her old Christmas ornaments and hang them on the tree. This will be the third year in a row we won’t have a Christmas tree as we are spending Christmas in Brookings.

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  9. Better Late Than Never:

    When my mother was in her nursing home,the last two years of her life, she would often say, “I want my mother’s buttermilk pancakes. They were my favorite thing. Light and fluffy.” Knowing Grandma’s farm and her resources, I know these pancakes were made with the freshest REAL buttermilk (the liquid that was left from churning butter), fresh eggs, and bacon grease). I have no doubt they were incredibly delicious, but something I could not replicate for her. She was so nostalgic for those.

    My food nostalgia was also about her mother’s cooking or my own as I grew up and learned to cook early on. Grandma’s flat bread, her tapioca fruit salad,and her egg coffee all loom large in my memory. Her cooking was also somewhat like Southern cooking (cornmeal mush, hominy, cornbread, biscuits, bean soup), but no part of her geneology was from the South. So I am unsure what the influence was. Maybe Central Iowa at the end of the frontier was close enough.

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  11. Just recently I heard something on the radio from a food person talking about sandwiches. It was on public radio, I’m sure, but I can’t remember the writer or podcaster that was being interviewed. He was talking about a sandwich made with parmesan crisps. It took me back to when I was about five or six, my mother used to make sandwiches with Taystee bread, butter, summer sausage, and potato chips. The potato chips probably would have been Old Dutch. I will try to recreate that sandwich one of these days.

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