Muscle memory is an amazing thing. On Saturday, YA and I had our next-door neighbors over for lunch. Just veggie burgers and corn on the grill. At the last minute, we decided it was a little too chilly to eat outside, so I set the table inside.
I set out seven little bowls in the kitchen. Onion slices, tomato slices, pickles and Boston lettuce to get started. Just as I started to squirt ketchup into the fifth bowl, YA walked in and immediately said “what are you DOING?” I told her I was putting the condiments in bowls and she pushed back with “WHY?” It took me a few minutes of standing at the counter, looking at the bowls before I realized why I was about to put ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise in little bowls.
When I was growing up, condiments went into little bowls. Not just for when we had company, but all the time. Even when we had dinner at my Nana and Pappy’s on Saturday nights, condiments went into little bowls. In fact, if condiments ever went on the table in their bottles, it was called “pinkert style”. It wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom told me why. When she was growing up, they lived a few houses down from the Pinkerts. Apparently the Pinkerts never put their condiments into little dishes… they always just set the bottles out willy nilly. So it turns out that my grandparents calling that “pinkert style” was actually quite pejorative – I never knew.
While I almost automatically put out little bowls when company comes over, YA and I do not do this when it’s just the two of us. Of course, YA and I eating a meal that requires condiments on the table is fairly rare.
On Saturday I put out the bottles; I really don’t need to be the third generation getting little bowls dirty in the name of shaming some family up the block from my grandparents!!
Any habits that have come down the generations in your family?
Trail Baboon 
I must have been around 7 years old. We went to visit the grandparents and extended group of cousins centered in and around Worthington. On the corner up the street from the grandparents’ place, there was a church. (Not my grandparents’ church.) The pastor there was Rev Minnema. The son, about the age of my brother and I, was Teddy. One day, Teddy came to play. He had his shorts or trousers belted very high. Apparently, one day not that long afterwards, I belted my own pants up high, and was told by my mother, “you look like Teddy Minnema.” She didn’t mean this as a compliment. The metaphor has hung with me ever since.
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Not my family but Robin’s and hence to me. In her family, a serving spoon with holes or slots to drain liquid was called a runcible spoon. My family didn’t call it anything, so I readily adopted the term. I was aware that Edward Lear had used it in “The Owl and the Pussycat” but for many years had no idea that it was not an actual thing and just a whimsy of Lear’s. Robin had no idea either. Her Dad was a fan of Lear.
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That’s funny – when you used “runcible”, it sounded familiar but I didn’t know why.
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Per Merriam Webster:
noun
run·ci·ble spoon | \ ˈrən(t)-sə-bəl- \
Definition
: a sharp-edged fork with three broad curved prongs
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It’s also been described as a spork, but those are later applications of the fanciful term to an actual utensil.
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I’m trying to think if we ever had ketchup at either grandparents table. I don’t think so. Mustard was never present during my childhood.
Ketchup at my parents was always in a special plastic squeeze bottle, never the one it was bought in.
Being part of the minister’s family meant eating out was usually dinner at a farm. Homegrown and plenty of it, but not a lot that wasn’t grown in the upper Midwest.
“Foreign food” was pizza and chow mein. Meatless? Please.
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I’ve probably mentioned this before, but the reason that we always had ketchup and mustard at my Nana and Pappy’s house is that the only time we ever ever ate at their house was on Saturdays, which was hamburger and french fry night. My mother refused to eat there the other nights of the week due to the whole “Pappy would only eat certain meals on certain nights” all of which my mother had decided she would never eat again once she moved away from home.
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We only had the ketchup and mustard on the table when we ate outside in the summer. Dad would grill hamburgers, and we would eat on the deck. I didn’t like hamburgers as a kid. I’ve never really liked ground beef, so I don’t have to eat it anymore. If we ate something around the dinner table that needed ketchup or mustard, Mom would put a dollop right on our plates for us.
Certain things are passed down: oyster stew on Christmas Eve; pronouncing “Onamia” as “ah-ne-m-eye-ah”; singing this song while collecting the trash to take to the township dump… https://youtu.be/icwPsVLdFEM?si=X9BzEFJiVWlNb6Hc
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Ketchup goes on meatloaf is my memory. Hamburgers as many have noted is summer grilling food.
Funny how what we eat has changed over the last 50 years or so.
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