Childhood Dinners

     A lunchtime discussion at work today centered on dinners from our childhood. All of us spent our growing up years in the suburbs of St. Louis and our parents had only slight ethnic influences in their lives. Memories of respective grandparents, however included dishes from ancestral countries and seemed to evoke the most nostalgia; fare discussed included goulash and cabbage from Hungary, sauerkraut and golabki from Poland, risotto and gnocchi from Italy, sauerbraten and strudel from Germany, potatoes and stew from Ireland, and bread and scones from England.
     In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, our thoroughly modern mothers collectively tended to shun those cultural tendencies and therefore meals, though delicious, were rather generic: meatloaf, fried chicken or pork chops, roast beef, pancakes and applesauce, burgers or on rare occasions, a grilled steak. Seafood consisted of tuna casserole or fish sticks and the closest we got to ethnicity was spaghetti or American chop suey. TV dinners did not seem popular in our homes and eating out was a rarity -McDonalds was a very special treat and the only menu items allowed were burgers and fries. One tradition we all shared was the partaking of the Sunday dinner early in the afternoon, which was amusing because none of us have continued that custom!