I've really tried, believe me. Today is the third time I've been tagged for the same meme and after quite a few weeks of thinking about my food memories during childhood, I still find it hard to decide. I guess I wasn't that aware of food back then, eating wasn't as exciting as it is now, it was merely part of the daily routine and many of the things that stick out don't make me nostalgic but rather shiver at the thought of them. I think I only started to appreciate food more when I started to cook myself, and that was only in adolescence, and so all the good memories (baking my first cake entirely on my own, buying and cooking live lobster, buying oysters straight from the fishermen at 5 in the morning, learning to make traditional Mexican food from my host-family's house keeper, etc, etc) start long after I turned 12, so don't qualify.
Here's what springs to mind about the early days:
I must have been about eight when I went to spend the summer with my Mom's Godmother somewhere near the Czech border. Her kids were all quite a bit older than me and the boys had great fun pulling my leg all day long (which was real easy for them given that, due to the difference in dialects, I didn't understand half of what they were saying) and making me believe the strangest things (like that I would get freckles if I went into the woods shouting "cookoo" - I did, in fact, return home with my formerly pale complexion forever cursed/blessed with over-pigmentation). The girl, though, Helga was her name, really took me under her wings and pretended to be my ersatz mummy, although she was barely 5 years my senior, and decided one day that she would show me how to bake a cake. We did an impressive job, considering the age, and had great fun - until Helga's plaits (over a metre long, I swear) got caught in the electric mixer. A day that had started with such beautiful intentions ended with a teenage girl sporting the same hairstyle as her brothers, wailing at the loss of her beautiful braids, and of course, we didn't get any cake either...
If I said above that I don't have positive food memories it wasn't that we grew up on bread and water - my Mom was certainly a more accomplished cook than any of my class/playmates' mothers. I remember one particular family living in the same block of flats who always had dinner long before us, so sometimes I would go up with them, wait until they had eaten, and we'd continue playing until I was called to the table. What I saw there, though, invariably resulted in my complete loss of appetite - all those kids ate were slices of rye bread spread with mustard or ketchup! I already knew back then that this was very, very wrong!
On a more positive note, over the warmer months, my parents would always take us out to the country on weekends - apart from staying at our (more than 200-year-old) farmhouse, we would also go on hiking trips in the mountains or just a stroll in the nearby lake district (Salzkammergut). What I remember from those excursions is that we would always bring back things we found on the wayside - wild garlic (best consumed the same day on some buttered rye bread), plump berries (only a fraction of which would make it back home, since all of us are terrible "grazers"), and mushrooms. Although my parents were quite good at knowing which were edible and which were best avoided, there was a second round of quality assurance back home, when everything was laid out on the kitchen table and, with the help of a reference book (colour photographs and all), they would decide which ones to chuck out and which to keep. As is to be expected, this didn't go without differences in opinion, and at the end of the evening, my Mum would freeze a lot of boxes labelled "mushrooms" and a few reading "mushrooms - for Rudi only". Rudi is my Dad, in case you were wondering... and he's still among us and still picking mushrooms!
The holidays always bore new food experiences that broadened my culinary horizon a bit - although profit I didn't much. I just observed and adapted, where I could... when in Rome, do as the Romans do! Well, I never made it to Rome, unfortunately, instead I bought milk in Yugoslavia before the Iron Curtain fell and was amazed to see it packaged in simple plastic bags (like a sandwich bag, dangerously thin, transparent and tied in a knot).
I also used to go on the milk round with my uncle, collecting hundreds of massive milk pitchers we then dropped off at the local dairy. Seeing milk pasteurised and butter churned in those massive containers was pretty impressive, and being paid in butter and yoghurt rather than money even more so!
When I stayed at my grandparents, I always looked forward to Wednesdays. Their farm was quite remote, my Mum having to walk for almost 2 hours to get to school when she was little, and it was only on that day of the week that the local baker would venture so far. So on Wednesdays, we would keep watch for his little pick-up truck and my Gran would buy us a poppyseed roll or a croissant instead of the home-made country-loaf we'd eat on other days.
There was one tradition where I just couldn't do as the "Romans" did: on their (or any typical Austrian farm), a new working day was started by everybody sharing breakfast - and literally spooning milk coffee and pieces of bread out of a community soup tureen the size of a massive salad bowl... apart from the fact that I didn't like coffee, I couldn't bear the idea of a dozen people digging into my breakfast!
The things I miss from my childhood are the tastiest apricots you can possibly find (from the Wachau or Hungary), picking strawberries on a field and getting really stuffed on them, since you had to pay for the ones you took home, not the ones you consumed on site, the scent of poppyseed rolls filled with cold meats (Extrawurst, Bergsteiger) and gherkins wrapped in foil, which my Mum would prepare for long drives, grilling sausages around the campfire...
The more I think about it, the more nostalgic I become... but now it's your turn!
Here are my nominations:
My good friend Jeanne of Cooksister
Christoph of Geschmackssachen, a new German blog, and
Keiko of Nordljus
Andrew of Spitton
So here's what the nominees need to do:
Remove blog #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired effect.
What a wonderful trip down memory lane!
The milk in bags sounds bizarre and I used to have a flatmate who would resort to salad cream (dressing) on bread for dinner, to my disgust!
The mushroom pickings sounded like so much fun. I love the looking up of reference books and the use of your dad as guinea pig! lol
Posted by: AugustusGloop | Sep 30, 2005 at 05:22 AM
Hallo Johanna!
Danke, endlich eine deutsche Site. Hoffentlich ist sie nicht so gut wie deine, weil ich mit ansonsten nicht mehr die Mühe machen werde englische Rezepte zu verstehen. ;-)
Ich wünsche dir eine gute Zeit!
Martina
Posted by: martina | Sep 30, 2005 at 06:55 AM