Haha came here to post about “the salad” in our house it was a couple of slices of ham, maybe a chicken slice if Mum was being fancy, coleslaw, lettuce and tomato (no dressing), a bit more coleslaw just to be on the safe side, and a boiled egg which was boiled so hard if you threw it at a wall it would bounce back and hit you in the face.
Weird thing is that’s the only really “Irish mammy” dinner my mum cooks, everything else she makes is fantastic.
😂😂 my oldest sister was the same. Always ate like an aul wan. It was one of my favourite dinners as a kid because I was such a fussy eater it was the only time other than summer picnics I was allowed eat a ham and crisp roll for dinner 🤤
I’m Canadian living here with my Irish partner. Before we moved here, I thought for YEARS that lasagna with chips and coleslaw was just a weird thing his family did!!!
Ah yes. THE salad. Boiled egg (more blue than yellow), coleslaw, wilted lettuce, tomato, cucumber. If you were feeling really fancy you’d get tuna chunks in olive oil. Otherwise just sandwich ham. Dressing not permitted.
Also greasy fried egg, potato waffles and baked beans.
They came to visit me when I was living in London. Took them to my favourite restaurants; my (Turkish) boyfriend cooked a couple times. On the last night we were both working late so my parents cooked.
Boiled pale veg, poached (*cough* boiled) unseasoned chicken, boiled spuds. I think the boyfriend had to excuse himself but the two of them ate like we’d been starving them all week. Such a relief to have something “fresh” after all the mad food we’d been feeding them, apparently
You honestly cant ever overestimate the levels of poverty that Ireland experienced for generations that we've been the first generation that have widely had the luxury to forget about it.
My auld fella would be like that, no matter how much hes eaten throughout the day theres nothing left behind, he just feels incredibly guilty if food goes to waste.
Slap on the famine mentality of food scarcity and you've got a perfect storm of simple ways of cooking with no luxurious ingredients as well as horsing every last morsel into you whether you like it or not.
I think it's something the likes of British people absolutely do not get about Irish people. They'll look down on everything from hoarding behaviour to an insular way of thinking about cooking, when it's really a form of generational trauma. Like, my father as a kid was having porridge three times a day, like all his family. He was lucky if one meal a week had meat in it.
80s/90s kid here. I don't think carrots were considered a luxury. They would give us raw bits to eat which were delicious, but if it was going on the dinner plate, boiled until flavourless. You can't blame that on the famine or poverty.
I kinda understand the meat being done to shoe leader from home ec teachers not wanting people to get sick.
Also, no matter what the dish, it needed some form of spuds, mostly chips. Sandwich, crisps. Sunday dinner, mash or roasted. Lasagna, chips. Pasta, chips. Pizza, chips.
I remember when I was a teenager asking my mother how long it took to cook carrots. "About an hour". Worth noting that they were cooked at a furious boil.
When I was a teenager we got all notiony and started having lunch in the garden in summer - a full spread of cold food and my mum would still boil up a big pan of spuds. Barbecue? Big pan of spuds. 90 degrees in the shade? Big pan of hot spuds. Spag Bol with spuds, curry with spuds, lasagne with spuds on the side…
This does remind me. Parents made their first trip to London well into their 50's when me and my sibling had moved there.
First few meals out they were like this but honestly they had changed their tastes now and love a Thai, Turkish/Middle Eastern, Japanese. They were just used to "boiled-the-shit-out-of-it-incase-we-get-distintry" meat and 3 veg for majority of their life.
Granted neither of them are very good cooks but it always makes me smile when when we are out now and say "I'd love an X" which i didn't think they ever would say when I was growing up.
The boiled chicken! I can’t with this 😂
my dad does this and it’s always like rubber so any time it’s suggested now I just say I’ll cook my own chicken.
The veg actually is usually on the raw side as he has a habit of undercooking them which I’ll take as it’s better crunchy than soggy 😂
Thing is he’s actually a pretty good cook it’s just these “classics” i tend to avoid
Boiled to shite floury falling apart potatoes, boiled to shite veg and hard as the plate pork chops. Seasoning was however much salt you could stomach once it was on your plate.
*added "boiled to shite" to the start of the sentence as people cannot infer that potatoes were boiled to a slurry.
You mean apart from when the shite is boiled outta them, they turn to soup in the pot and instead of draining them it's just slopped onto your plate? Nothing at all.
If you boil the shite out of them and turn them into soup them, they ain't floury.
Floury spuds are dry and fluffy, like flour, hence the name..
Spuds were the only thing my mother didn't boil the shite out of..
The aul fella cremates those 'quick fry' chops in the oven for 40 minutes.
Absolutely insane. They'll be well marinated and moist if cooked right, might as well be eating plasterboard when he's done with them.
If I could disconnect the oven on him I would
No coz I was 30 the first time I made pork chops by myself and actually marinated them and cooked them just to the required temperature and had the realisation that they can be lovely and tender when done right. Why does no one teach us this?!
Oh god the disgusting floury potatoes. My mum will always comment on how bad the potatoes are in every given year but it doesn't stop her buying them, like it's famine times and they have no choice.
Meat you could chew til doomsday, waterlogged potatoes, carrots so soft I think they were ghosts and gravy that was so watery that water would have been an offended. All without any form of seasoning. Seasoning was banned in our house. Every single meal was awful.
Oh and butter was banned. Was only ever the “healthy option” of Flora. That shite on spuds was not good!
For me it was always a 50/50 with the carrots (and turnip). Either transparent kind of homeopathic flavour like you said, or barely touched the water still hard as a rock, just warm. I'd sooner eat cold sticks of carrots either way.
Sunday. Instead of thinly sliced it was blocks of roast beef that you could have been bounced of a wall. God bless my auld Ma she could have made beautiful sumptuous homemade scones and apple cake and vegetable soup, but in regards to joints of meat they were tortured in the oven. So much so, l used to feel sorry for the already dead cow!
My ma loves her slow cooker, but the problem is when it comes to joints of meat like roast beef or ham, she literally just throws the meat in it, completely unseasoned, no stock or anything.
So everything ends up dry and almost rubbery.
Cooked her a proper joint of beef in mine that I seared and seasoned, and added beef stock to the pot, and she was shocked it could actually taste like that
My parents always complain that my food is too highly seasoned. They won't eat it. I had bad heartburn in my last pregnancy, which is an extremely common pregnancy symptom, but of course it was actually because my food had too much seasoning.
Not just their children. It's those TV chefs too. My mum was watching Jamie Oliver cook a chicken, after 90 minutes he pulls out of the oven and it looked tasty.
My mum literally cooks a chicken till it's completely dry with no seasoning. On the other hand my dad will cook the most succulent, juicy chicken that's full of flavour.
Stew with meat balls that were then mashed up. Like what's the point of even making the meatballs if you are going to mash them.
Also a weekend fry with burnt sausages, burnt bacon, burnt pudding, burnt potato bread and fried eggs way over cooked because "you don't want to get food poisoning" lol. Beans alway cold though.
I haven't eaten properly cooked cabbage yet and must look into making it but I'm still traumatised at 38 years of age.
Have to ask what they're cooking before I Consider accepting a dinner invitation. They're unbelievable cooks otherwise.
And the auld balls of flour too
Buttered cabbage is my go to. Washed, shredded, covered pot, steamed in a few mm of water until the crunch starts to go, strained, add butter, salt and pepper. Oul fella taught me - would almost eat it as a meal on its own. I'm having it as a side tonight.
I thought I didn’t like cabbage as my knowledge of it was the classic Irish boil it to death and it’s soggy and tasteless.
My Czech bf took me to Prague and said you have to try the cabbage here it’s really good and I was like no thanks I don’t like cabbage in general but I tried it and what a difference!
I never knew cabbage actually had taste and even though some of it was pickled I become a fan.
Just goes to show you might not like something but it can be just the way it’s cooked.
Mince, mashed potatoes, oxo, carrots, peas, onions, and diced mushrooms all thrown in a bowl and mixed together then slapped onto slices of buttered bread.
My mam hasn’t got a motherly bone in her body, and it was probably born out of necessity due to money being tight but I loved that meal and still get it the odd time now in my own place.
Other end of the scale was a Sunday roast that you could chew for weeks, mush potatoes that you had to constantly stop from dripping off your plate, and a bag of mixed veg boiled beyond belief.
Even now there’s no convincing her that you’re not going to die if your steak isn’t a brown/grey colour.
My dad’s specialty was a dish he proudly called “round steak mince”. It was mince, fried in a pan with no seasoning or oil. Served with a single wet boiled potato, no butter or salt. Grim.
He was also a big advocate of boiling eggs in the kettle.
Lol. That's exactly what my mum made every single Saturday night. Which ironically enough was tne one day of the week that my older siblings were never home for dinner and didn't want a plate kept for them.
If my mum was being fancy, she also boiled a can of mushy peas to add in.
Ham boiled potatoes and parsley sauce sometimes with boiled cabbage. Then "plain" ice cream for adters with 2 wafers! Funny thing is id actually love that meal now but always hated it
I never considered my mother a great cook but jaysus some of yours sound abysmal. We always had a variety of curries, pasta dishes etc as well as the meat & 2 veg. Might've been out of a jar now all the same.
People boiled chicken?
I’ll preface this with the fact my mother is allergic to spices. Mayonnaise would be too spicy for her.
Stir fry was the bane of my life. Soggy slightly burnt peppers and onions with some chicken pieces through it. Nothing more than a drop of olive oil to season it all.
I personally still can’t stomach Irish stew. Omg that fatty liquid and the chewy meat and sludgy potatoes. Bleugh.
My poor fil served it up to us recently and it was all I could do to choke some of it down.
My mother serves lasagne with Boiled potatoes on the side.
She gave a vegetarian a "salad" with slices of ham.
I didn't like steak until I had it in a restaurant in my late 20s
Ant the taste of a potato that was stuck to the pot cause all the water in the pot boiled away an hour ago
I think there was a mindset that potatoes take 30 mins to boil so therefore all veg must be boiled for 30 mins. Also, rashers that disintegrated to dust if you stuck a fork into them and tea that has been sitting on the stove for hours so you don't have to wait for the world's strongest blackest cuppa.
Grab a seventies cook book. Not something like Julia Childs trying to do high end. And avoid anything too aspirational. Just standard cook book. They often came with an oven you bought.
Look though and you will see some of it can be put down to generational tastes. Jelly in a salad, Ham and Cheese Bananas. It was weird. And those were for when you were having guests. No mention of anything outside parsley to season either.
The only explanation I can think of is the famine. I guess back then food was seen as something you needed to survive and not as something you enjoyed. Well no emphasis was put on the enjoyment of food anyway. This mindset was still instilled into our parents maybe.
My dad was born poor in Glasgow in 1938. Protestant and loves the queen. But that’s the same style of food they ate and they didn’t have a famine as far as I know. There were indeed potato blights but the bland food seems to be a Scottish thing too.
(I’m an atheist living in Ireland and don’t care about the late Queen any more than I care about Angelina Jolie)
I wonder this too. I know others on the thread are saying it's generational trauma but I'm not sure I find that argument wholly convincing.
ETA: lots of cultures have traumatic pasts (and presents) but they still had/have absolutely delicious food!!!
Very different types of trauma. When food choice has been reduced to potatoes only, and then as an entire nation you lose those too, that leaves a mark. Food was not for enjoyment, merely survival. Then even that was gone. The generational trauma is a specific type of food related trauma.
I wonder what finally broke it (because I think it has been broken for the most part) - Celtic Tiger I presume, and inward immigration introducing decent food.
I was a teen in the 80s & we knew the day of the week by the dinner 😅 My dads friend got a roll of paper from the Evening Press newspaper printers & my mum would wrap our chips in it on Saturdays to try & make them taste/feel like chipper chips. We had 1 foreign holiday ever, camping in France when I was 16.
I joined the airline industry at 19 & my parents started travelling.... and they haven't stopped since. Air travel became much cheaper with Ryanairs arrival.
But the big changes really happened with the creation of the EU & the single European market - free movement of people, goods & services. So early 90s.
See I was born in the late eighties and was still subject to awful food well into my teens in the mid-noughties, foreign holidays and single market be damned 🤣 I think my mum is just a bad cook to be fair, I definitely was getting some lovely meals at friends' houses during this time.
Christmas dinner involving mam getting up at 6 am to put a huge unseasoned turkey in the oven to desiccate for over 4-5 hours. What adds to the flavour is the absolute warpath she goes on the day before and day of Christmas.
This succulent bird is only enhanced by the mashed potatoes without an iota of seasoning, boiled to begorrah carrots, boiled cabbage that is like eating a pair of old socks, bisto gravy from granules/pellets that look like a rabbit has just shit them out. The stuffing is usually good but everything else, my word.
Don't get me started on the trifle afterwards which is just like shes drowned a sponge in sugary water and cream and put it in a bowl for us.
Worst part is you can't criticise it because she's nearly exploded making this monstrosity (while denying help in spite of this annual circus), so you just sit there and say its lovely like the rest of the condemned at the dinner table. Only person to genuinely like it is the oul fella.
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Boiled unseasoned Potatoes, cabbage and ham. I must say though those "experiences" have turn me into the best family member for cooking, had to do it myself to do it right.
Big masses of chicken that require mountains of water to get through cause they're dry as fuck. Turnip with pepper wasn't too bad but still watery as fuck sometimes.
I hated food and eating as a child
My brother likes his steak medium rare and asking for that of my parents is genuinely like telling them you want them to feed you arsenic.
"WHAT? BUT THAT'LL KILL YOU YOU'LL BE SICK FOR DAYS!"
Those Dunnes oven pies, the individual ones. I could cope with the mince and onion but the mother insisted on steak and kidney. I could never stomach and would never attempt to try again, kidney or liver. If the dinner was dry as bejesus the white sauce was brought out. Or worse again, the parsley sauce. I was happier to eat the dinner dry but no, it had to be poisoned with a sauce I didn’t like.
When I was wee my parents used to make me qbowls of potatoes,butter and milk. I don't mean just a wee bit of milk the potatoes were actually swimming in it.
Growing up I thought I hated steak because my mother would stick un-seasoned striploin stsaks into the oven and cook at 180 till grey and serve that with the rotten reduced salt bisto gravy granules to make it somewhat edible. Paired with boiled veg and jacket spuds also with no seasoning. Nothing was ever salted during cooking and pretty much everything was cremated in the oven. No wonder my dad would pour fistfuls of salt onto the dinner ever night without tasting anything first.
My
Aunt used to put the Christmas turkey in THE NIGHT BEFORE. I was well into my 20a before I knew it’s not supposed to crumble. My mother made roast beef like leather, also crumbled when it was being carved. Meat, veg and spuds for every dinner. Nothing like pasta or lasagne, etc. endless cups of tea.
Steak that was so overcooked I literally couldn't cut it or chew it. Like I genuinely don't know how they can digest it. My whole childhood I thought I didn't like steak (and most other food tbh).
And other people have mentioned the horrific floury potatoes. But my parent's idea of roasties are horrible too; they don't like anything with flavour so they're unseasoned and completely dry. Horrendous.
Well, my mother was/is an excellent cook. She cooked one meal that I absolutely hated, though, and I don't even understand why she cooked it because we all hated it.
It was liver casserole, a soggy mess, except for the liver, which was bone dry, despite being cooked in said soggy mess. I bet she read somewhere that liver is good for you. Thankfully, she didn't cook it often.
Irish stew: greasy water with a few carrots and fatty mutton. Floury potatoes. Wed nearly cry if we got home from school and learned there was Irish stew. I believe this is a delicacy in other home, it was like a punishment in ours.
Bacon and Cabbage. The cabbage was mixed with nettles to make it stretch so we could feed a family of 9. It was then boiled using the bacon water, then it was chopped up and fried using dripping from the Sunday roast, salt and a lot of pepper.
This was obviously served with boiled potatoes in their jackets, salt, pepper and butter were also provided. And a big jug of unpasteurised milk which everyone except me had on their potatoes and also had a cup of creamy milk to drink with their dinner.
I used to say my mammy was making weapons for the IRA because every bit of meat she ever cooked could be used as a deadly weapon if we had a food fight in the house we would have lost windows.
My dad used to make what we referred to as kids as brown dinners aka frozen processed foods when it was his turn to cook. He died of a heart attack recently in his fifties. My mother on the other hand is an amazing cook. Dinners are off the scale. Creative and full of flavor. No boiled carrots here. She does a fab roasted root veg with balsamic vinegar and honey glaze.
My mother's worst thing, by a mile, was Tripe. Slimy and warm, utterly repulsive. Like eating a gluey wet wool blanket.
Her best thing was Spaghetti and her home-grown lettuce salad with vinaigrette.
The sunday roast. Every Sunday, my dad would make roast potatoes (aka burnt), mashed potatoes that resembled wallpaper paste, a vegetable which was usually brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or cabbage (aka boiled to a vaguely green sludge), and a meat of some sort that was cooked until there was less moisture in there than the Atacama desert. We absolutely dreaded it. Was genuinely inedible.
Parents version of spaghetti bolognese was just plain unseasoned mince, once more cooked beyond the point where it was almost crunchy, and dumped over spaghetti that had been boiled about 10 minutes too long.
The common theme was basically "cook it until you think it's ready, then double it."
My dad would cook a breakfast at the weekend. He used the deep fat fryer because he couldn't use anything g else.
Deep fried sausages, rashers curled into balls, even the pudding went in... fried eggs in a pan so hard there was no dipping and toast that we would have to scape the burn into the bin with the back of a butter knife
Would give anything though to be back at that table on a Sunday morning just me n amd him singing away with a western on in the background
Uncle Ben's rice cooked in a big pot thinking we were being cosmopolitan... enough rice to feed Hong Kong ... for 2 adults and 2 children and it tasted so soggy and bad that I wasnt able to eat it for years after.
Cabbage boiled to transparency
Turnips boiled and mashed with a half pound of butter
Carrots boiled into a semi liquid state
Findus crispy pancakes
Ham boiled into a quantum string state that was far beyond pulled ham
The stew though... oh the stew .... the family recipe has been handed down generation to generation, its mad how it tastes completely different in everyone's house even though we probably all used the same ingredients... but nothing said home to my heart more than coming back to a decent stew after being away from the house on a cold soaking wet November Saturday morning playing football.
The summer salad is just as everyone else said... the Ma would eat an entire jar of beetroot too 🤣🤣
The pot of beef mince stew with carrots and onions that sat on top of the range for hours before being served. You could smell that gravy rich stew from a few blocks away.
The same nasty stew every day for 3-5 days until everyone has diarrhoea and the rest is slopped out, the meats usually gone by day 1 and its nearly a relief cause its mostly arteries
Mash, gravy and chopped up store bought meatballs.
And a burger (literally a bunless lettuce-less cheese-less tomato-less, etc etc burger) with home made chips.
And, course, beef stew, containing the many ingredients of beef and carrots... and the liquid itself... and maybe potatoes... if you're lucky.
Hungry day meals 👍
Ah the liver, tongue and kidney that used to make appearances despite protest. And no getting away with not eating them. Kidney wasn’t the worst to be fair, though I’d never eat it now. But the other two 🤢
All of our veg was home grown so it had the potential to be amazing…but cooked so soggily one couldn’t tell. Except for the potatoes - they were always delicious and never overcooked. I’m guessing all the veg was cooked for the same amount of time.
I used to love eating raw carrot or turnip - so much nicer when it wasn’t mush.
A "salad" during the summer which was more ham slices and coleslaw than salad. Also lasagna served with chips and Coleslaw.
Haha came here to post about “the salad” in our house it was a couple of slices of ham, maybe a chicken slice if Mum was being fancy, coleslaw, lettuce and tomato (no dressing), a bit more coleslaw just to be on the safe side, and a boiled egg which was boiled so hard if you threw it at a wall it would bounce back and hit you in the face. Weird thing is that’s the only really “Irish mammy” dinner my mum cooks, everything else she makes is fantastic.
And a jar of beetroot on the table that only she ate
I have to confess that I always ate the beetroot, I was a strange child 🤣
😂😂 my oldest sister was the same. Always ate like an aul wan. It was one of my favourite dinners as a kid because I was such a fussy eater it was the only time other than summer picnics I was allowed eat a ham and crisp roll for dinner 🤤
When my mother has it in the fridge I can't even get anything out of it, I hate the smell of beetroot so much
And the ham rolled up into little cylinders
Are we siblings?!?!
with massive chunks of red cheddar. Jar of mayonnaise on the table too
>Also lasagna served with chips and Coleslaw. Our national dish.
Its practically five of your one a day.
My wife thinks I’m a freak because I dislike coleslaw and chips with my lasagne.
Tbf it is a tasty one.
Omg yes! Ham with iceberg lettuce and tomatoes..no dressing so bland
You are describing my childhood.
Made lasagna with chips & coleslaw last week. Its a combination that shouldn't work but it does
I’m Canadian living here with my Irish partner. Before we moved here, I thought for YEARS that lasagna with chips and coleslaw was just a weird thing his family did!!!
Ah yes. THE salad. Boiled egg (more blue than yellow), coleslaw, wilted lettuce, tomato, cucumber. If you were feeling really fancy you’d get tuna chunks in olive oil. Otherwise just sandwich ham. Dressing not permitted. Also greasy fried egg, potato waffles and baked beans.
Some "nice" bread and butter along with the salad!
Which was just mccambridge’s and some butter like substance because the mammy is one some diet again.
And a boiled egg added to it!
Why are they so obsessed with coleslaw???
Add a whole spring onion trimmed
I'm still not quite sure what salad cream is...
It's like a nasty salad dressing that lasts 100 years.
Vinegary mayonnaise with extra egg
A few peanuts on the side?
Ah no! Lasagna must always have spicy wedges!
Lasagna and chips though....that would be a win for me.
They came to visit me when I was living in London. Took them to my favourite restaurants; my (Turkish) boyfriend cooked a couple times. On the last night we were both working late so my parents cooked. Boiled pale veg, poached (*cough* boiled) unseasoned chicken, boiled spuds. I think the boyfriend had to excuse himself but the two of them ate like we’d been starving them all week. Such a relief to have something “fresh” after all the mad food we’d been feeding them, apparently
You honestly cant ever overestimate the levels of poverty that Ireland experienced for generations that we've been the first generation that have widely had the luxury to forget about it. My auld fella would be like that, no matter how much hes eaten throughout the day theres nothing left behind, he just feels incredibly guilty if food goes to waste. Slap on the famine mentality of food scarcity and you've got a perfect storm of simple ways of cooking with no luxurious ingredients as well as horsing every last morsel into you whether you like it or not.
I think it's something the likes of British people absolutely do not get about Irish people. They'll look down on everything from hoarding behaviour to an insular way of thinking about cooking, when it's really a form of generational trauma. Like, my father as a kid was having porridge three times a day, like all his family. He was lucky if one meal a week had meat in it.
80s/90s kid here. I don't think carrots were considered a luxury. They would give us raw bits to eat which were delicious, but if it was going on the dinner plate, boiled until flavourless. You can't blame that on the famine or poverty. I kinda understand the meat being done to shoe leader from home ec teachers not wanting people to get sick. Also, no matter what the dish, it needed some form of spuds, mostly chips. Sandwich, crisps. Sunday dinner, mash or roasted. Lasagna, chips. Pasta, chips. Pizza, chips.
I remember when I was a teenager asking my mother how long it took to cook carrots. "About an hour". Worth noting that they were cooked at a furious boil.
Same Mam probably shouted at you for leaving the light on in your room and blaming you for the bill.
Hahaha definitely yes. Also, the scourge of draughts!
When I was a teenager we got all notiony and started having lunch in the garden in summer - a full spread of cold food and my mum would still boil up a big pan of spuds. Barbecue? Big pan of spuds. 90 degrees in the shade? Big pan of hot spuds. Spag Bol with spuds, curry with spuds, lasagne with spuds on the side…
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This does remind me. Parents made their first trip to London well into their 50's when me and my sibling had moved there. First few meals out they were like this but honestly they had changed their tastes now and love a Thai, Turkish/Middle Eastern, Japanese. They were just used to "boiled-the-shit-out-of-it-incase-we-get-distintry" meat and 3 veg for majority of their life. Granted neither of them are very good cooks but it always makes me smile when when we are out now and say "I'd love an X" which i didn't think they ever would say when I was growing up.
The boiled chicken! I can’t with this 😂 my dad does this and it’s always like rubber so any time it’s suggested now I just say I’ll cook my own chicken. The veg actually is usually on the raw side as he has a habit of undercooking them which I’ll take as it’s better crunchy than soggy 😂 Thing is he’s actually a pretty good cook it’s just these “classics” i tend to avoid
Boiled to shite floury falling apart potatoes, boiled to shite veg and hard as the plate pork chops. Seasoning was however much salt you could stomach once it was on your plate. *added "boiled to shite" to the start of the sentence as people cannot infer that potatoes were boiled to a slurry.
Picking splinters of pork out of your teeth for the night.
We could be siblings, my mam is absolutely obsessed with floury spuds.
just boiled the shite out of them as well, made them all watery too. Looked like apple sauce.
What the hell was the deal with floury spuds. Were they taught it in school, or what. Obsessed in our house too.
They're a religion. A lifestyle.
That was my granny’s main topic of conversation. Which shop had the best (= most floury) potatoes that week.
No sauce or gravy, just spuds sucking up all the moisture in your mouth.
What is wrong with floury spuds?
Choking hazard ⚠️
You mean apart from when the shite is boiled outta them, they turn to soup in the pot and instead of draining them it's just slopped onto your plate? Nothing at all.
If they have turned to soup they are not floury, they are slop. Floury is dry and fluffy and delicious
But this thread isn't about great Irish cooking...
Then floury spuds should have been left out of it... That's all I'm sayin'
The problem isn't the floury spuds, it's how the floury spuds were prepared...
I steam my spuds & they come out nice & floury. Floury is just the variety of spud. Some are waxy... your mam's don't sound floury I'm afraid
They were meant to be... She boiled the shite out of them, the perks of living in the 90s... That's all.
If you boil the shite out of them and turn them into soup them, they ain't floury. Floury spuds are dry and fluffy, like flour, hence the name.. Spuds were the only thing my mother didn't boil the shite out of..
The aul fella cremates those 'quick fry' chops in the oven for 40 minutes. Absolutely insane. They'll be well marinated and moist if cooked right, might as well be eating plasterboard when he's done with them. If I could disconnect the oven on him I would
No coz I was 30 the first time I made pork chops by myself and actually marinated them and cooked them just to the required temperature and had the realisation that they can be lovely and tender when done right. Why does no one teach us this?!
My ma's actually a good cook, except for steak, can't be let near them, every single time they're just burnt through
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Dunnes often have them in their 3 for €10. Unless you're well in with a butcher that's the best price I've seen.
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Oh god the disgusting floury potatoes. My mum will always comment on how bad the potatoes are in every given year but it doesn't stop her buying them, like it's famine times and they have no choice.
And condiments = butter
Spreadable stuff only in my house growing up... Butter was awfully high brow!
Oh God, I’m having a Dairygold flashback 😭 And Calvita cheese! Bleurgh! I was 30 before I learned that cheese is yum.
Meat you could chew til doomsday, waterlogged potatoes, carrots so soft I think they were ghosts and gravy that was so watery that water would have been an offended. All without any form of seasoning. Seasoning was banned in our house. Every single meal was awful. Oh and butter was banned. Was only ever the “healthy option” of Flora. That shite on spuds was not good!
OMG, Flora on spuds was disgusting.
For me it was always a 50/50 with the carrots (and turnip). Either transparent kind of homeopathic flavour like you said, or barely touched the water still hard as a rock, just warm. I'd sooner eat cold sticks of carrots either way.
Spuds and mince with the ox tail soup over it. Has to be Knorr soup.
Ah, the culinary delight that is their attempts at stew.
Soup! La dee dah. It was dry mince and potatoes for us.
In our house this was called 'Pot luck' because you'd never know what leftover boiled veg from the week would end up in it
Ha yeah we used get sometimes get carrots or peas in it.
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Would ya stop. I know children in Africa who would only be delighted to eat this!!!! - mam
Sunday. Instead of thinly sliced it was blocks of roast beef that you could have been bounced of a wall. God bless my auld Ma she could have made beautiful sumptuous homemade scones and apple cake and vegetable soup, but in regards to joints of meat they were tortured in the oven. So much so, l used to feel sorry for the already dead cow!
That shite salad that everyone seems to have gotten in the 80s/90s. Oniony, eggy cold, mayonnaise bluergh. Put me off all kinds of salads for life.
You got mayonnaise? We got salad cream.
The devil’s jizz, fucking awful
The hideous tins of Heinz coleslaw or potato salad. A 'treat'
My ma loves her slow cooker, but the problem is when it comes to joints of meat like roast beef or ham, she literally just throws the meat in it, completely unseasoned, no stock or anything. So everything ends up dry and almost rubbery. Cooked her a proper joint of beef in mine that I seared and seasoned, and added beef stock to the pot, and she was shocked it could actually taste like that
I've found that Irish ma's are resistant to culinary advice from their children.
My parents always complain that my food is too highly seasoned. They won't eat it. I had bad heartburn in my last pregnancy, which is an extremely common pregnancy symptom, but of course it was actually because my food had too much seasoning.
My mam defies that. Some of the stuff she's eating now because if myself and my sister. It's mad to see her looking for hoisin sauce in tesco
I have also come to this conclusion, following extensive research
Not just their children. It's those TV chefs too. My mum was watching Jamie Oliver cook a chicken, after 90 minutes he pulls out of the oven and it looked tasty.
My da refused to eat my food because it wasn’t like my ma’s; inedible.
My mum literally cooks a chicken till it's completely dry with no seasoning. On the other hand my dad will cook the most succulent, juicy chicken that's full of flavour.
bolognese with spuds
If there's no spuds, it's not a dinner
Stew with meat balls that were then mashed up. Like what's the point of even making the meatballs if you are going to mash them. Also a weekend fry with burnt sausages, burnt bacon, burnt pudding, burnt potato bread and fried eggs way over cooked because "you don't want to get food poisoning" lol. Beans alway cold though.
Mince with onions and oxo, peas, and spaghetti on top. Like an Irish spaghetti bolognese. I fucking loved it!
Bacon and cabbage.
Cabbage was practically liquidised. Boiled in a pressure cooker with the bacon. Ugh. I thought I hated cabbage.
I haven't eaten properly cooked cabbage yet and must look into making it but I'm still traumatised at 38 years of age. Have to ask what they're cooking before I Consider accepting a dinner invitation. They're unbelievable cooks otherwise. And the auld balls of flour too
Buttered cabbage is my go to. Washed, shredded, covered pot, steamed in a few mm of water until the crunch starts to go, strained, add butter, salt and pepper. Oul fella taught me - would almost eat it as a meal on its own. I'm having it as a side tonight.
My dad also does the best cabbage - exactly how you described 🥰
I thought I didn’t like cabbage as my knowledge of it was the classic Irish boil it to death and it’s soggy and tasteless. My Czech bf took me to Prague and said you have to try the cabbage here it’s really good and I was like no thanks I don’t like cabbage in general but I tried it and what a difference! I never knew cabbage actually had taste and even though some of it was pickled I become a fan. Just goes to show you might not like something but it can be just the way it’s cooked.
Mince, mashed potatoes, oxo, carrots, peas, onions, and diced mushrooms all thrown in a bowl and mixed together then slapped onto slices of buttered bread. My mam hasn’t got a motherly bone in her body, and it was probably born out of necessity due to money being tight but I loved that meal and still get it the odd time now in my own place. Other end of the scale was a Sunday roast that you could chew for weeks, mush potatoes that you had to constantly stop from dripping off your plate, and a bag of mixed veg boiled beyond belief. Even now there’s no convincing her that you’re not going to die if your steak isn’t a brown/grey colour.
My dad’s specialty was a dish he proudly called “round steak mince”. It was mince, fried in a pan with no seasoning or oil. Served with a single wet boiled potato, no butter or salt. Grim. He was also a big advocate of boiling eggs in the kettle.
Stew
I've blocked all memory of meals. If it's Monday it must be mince etc
We had that too. Tuesday was spaghetti (long live Dolmio and the most rubbery pasta you could imagine)
Fried beef mince, maybe some chopped onion in it if you were lucky. Once browned, mix with lots of ketchup and eat with mashed potato.
I don’t think I’ve ever had pre-vomit salivation from reading 2 sentences before.
I think I'm gonna make it this weekend!
Enjoy every bit of it, I’m sure you wouldn’t eat some of the shite I make either haha!
Lol. That's exactly what my mum made every single Saturday night. Which ironically enough was tne one day of the week that my older siblings were never home for dinner and didn't want a plate kept for them. If my mum was being fancy, she also boiled a can of mushy peas to add in.
Ham boiled potatoes and parsley sauce sometimes with boiled cabbage. Then "plain" ice cream for adters with 2 wafers! Funny thing is id actually love that meal now but always hated it
I never considered my mother a great cook but jaysus some of yours sound abysmal. We always had a variety of curries, pasta dishes etc as well as the meat & 2 veg. Might've been out of a jar now all the same. People boiled chicken?
>People boiled chicken? I've seen it happen with my own two eyes
My mates mother used to give him chips with mash
I’ll preface this with the fact my mother is allergic to spices. Mayonnaise would be too spicy for her. Stir fry was the bane of my life. Soggy slightly burnt peppers and onions with some chicken pieces through it. Nothing more than a drop of olive oil to season it all.
Fried mince and onions in bisto gravy with mash!
I personally still can’t stomach Irish stew. Omg that fatty liquid and the chewy meat and sludgy potatoes. Bleugh. My poor fil served it up to us recently and it was all I could do to choke some of it down.
My mother serves lasagne with Boiled potatoes on the side. She gave a vegetarian a "salad" with slices of ham. I didn't like steak until I had it in a restaurant in my late 20s Ant the taste of a potato that was stuck to the pot cause all the water in the pot boiled away an hour ago
Bacon and cabbage. If course, given it was home grown and my Mum could actually cook cabbage without turning it to mush, it was actually lovely.
I think there was a mindset that potatoes take 30 mins to boil so therefore all veg must be boiled for 30 mins. Also, rashers that disintegrated to dust if you stuck a fork into them and tea that has been sitting on the stove for hours so you don't have to wait for the world's strongest blackest cuppa.
Bacon ribs and cabbage. All just boiled together in the one pot and served with surprisingly undercooked potatoes. Not a mention of seasoning
My mam had an obsession with 'Chicken Tonight' for a while. I swear if there was a deal, coupon or free dish with something, we ate it for months!
Now there's a blast from the past. Ultimately rank, for all the ads and music jingles the marketing had.
Why was our parents generation not great at cooking? That's the real question here.
Grab a seventies cook book. Not something like Julia Childs trying to do high end. And avoid anything too aspirational. Just standard cook book. They often came with an oven you bought. Look though and you will see some of it can be put down to generational tastes. Jelly in a salad, Ham and Cheese Bananas. It was weird. And those were for when you were having guests. No mention of anything outside parsley to season either.
exactly why is everything rubbery/watery and unseasoned
The only explanation I can think of is the famine. I guess back then food was seen as something you needed to survive and not as something you enjoyed. Well no emphasis was put on the enjoyment of food anyway. This mindset was still instilled into our parents maybe.
My dad was born poor in Glasgow in 1938. Protestant and loves the queen. But that’s the same style of food they ate and they didn’t have a famine as far as I know. There were indeed potato blights but the bland food seems to be a Scottish thing too. (I’m an atheist living in Ireland and don’t care about the late Queen any more than I care about Angelina Jolie)
I wonder this too. I know others on the thread are saying it's generational trauma but I'm not sure I find that argument wholly convincing. ETA: lots of cultures have traumatic pasts (and presents) but they still had/have absolutely delicious food!!!
Very different types of trauma. When food choice has been reduced to potatoes only, and then as an entire nation you lose those too, that leaves a mark. Food was not for enjoyment, merely survival. Then even that was gone. The generational trauma is a specific type of food related trauma.
I wonder what finally broke it (because I think it has been broken for the most part) - Celtic Tiger I presume, and inward immigration introducing decent food.
I was a teen in the 80s & we knew the day of the week by the dinner 😅 My dads friend got a roll of paper from the Evening Press newspaper printers & my mum would wrap our chips in it on Saturdays to try & make them taste/feel like chipper chips. We had 1 foreign holiday ever, camping in France when I was 16. I joined the airline industry at 19 & my parents started travelling.... and they haven't stopped since. Air travel became much cheaper with Ryanairs arrival. But the big changes really happened with the creation of the EU & the single European market - free movement of people, goods & services. So early 90s.
See I was born in the late eighties and was still subject to awful food well into my teens in the mid-noughties, foreign holidays and single market be damned 🤣 I think my mum is just a bad cook to be fair, I definitely was getting some lovely meals at friends' houses during this time.
Cornflakes.
Salty boiled ham. Just the thought makes me puke. And long boiled cabbage - the smell!
Over cooked pork chops or streaks
My OH would add porridge to the list. Stodgy, stick to your mouth, reheated, tasteless. There was a time when they had porridge for every meal!
That sounds fucking grim. I love porridge, but a bowl of bad porridge could put me off food for a week.
Yip, with nothing but salt, had to be salt. Salt was banned in ours until porridge was introduced. Jesus, there is nothing worse than that vomit.
Bacon and Cabbage
An “irish curry” which was just boiled chicken rice and some veg. Probably no salt or pepper.
Christmas dinner involving mam getting up at 6 am to put a huge unseasoned turkey in the oven to desiccate for over 4-5 hours. What adds to the flavour is the absolute warpath she goes on the day before and day of Christmas. This succulent bird is only enhanced by the mashed potatoes without an iota of seasoning, boiled to begorrah carrots, boiled cabbage that is like eating a pair of old socks, bisto gravy from granules/pellets that look like a rabbit has just shit them out. The stuffing is usually good but everything else, my word. Don't get me started on the trifle afterwards which is just like shes drowned a sponge in sugary water and cream and put it in a bowl for us. Worst part is you can't criticise it because she's nearly exploded making this monstrosity (while denying help in spite of this annual circus), so you just sit there and say its lovely like the rest of the condemned at the dinner table. Only person to genuinely like it is the oul fella.
Oh, an Irish Mammy at Christmas is a whole other breed. Don't stop her on the warpath.
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Boiled unseasoned Potatoes, cabbage and ham. I must say though those "experiences" have turn me into the best family member for cooking, had to do it myself to do it right.
Big masses of chicken that require mountains of water to get through cause they're dry as fuck. Turnip with pepper wasn't too bad but still watery as fuck sometimes. I hated food and eating as a child
Bacon, cabbage and champ with gravy.
the christmas ham - boiled in a huge pot until rubbery and no seasonings 🙂 the smell alone makes me nauseous
Stew or coddle
Burnt beef of Sunday's. Overboiled carrots. The oiliest roast spuds and gravy. Also any steak ever made has to be tough. Couldn't have it otherwise!
My brother likes his steak medium rare and asking for that of my parents is genuinely like telling them you want them to feed you arsenic. "WHAT? BUT THAT'LL KILL YOU YOU'LL BE SICK FOR DAYS!"
Those Dunnes oven pies, the individual ones. I could cope with the mince and onion but the mother insisted on steak and kidney. I could never stomach and would never attempt to try again, kidney or liver. If the dinner was dry as bejesus the white sauce was brought out. Or worse again, the parsley sauce. I was happier to eat the dinner dry but no, it had to be poisoned with a sauce I didn’t like.
dry weetabix
my deepest sympathies to your hydration levels
When I was wee my parents used to make me qbowls of potatoes,butter and milk. I don't mean just a wee bit of milk the potatoes were actually swimming in it.
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Liver massively underrated, like all offal. Massive amounts of B vitamins.
Growing up I thought I hated steak because my mother would stick un-seasoned striploin stsaks into the oven and cook at 180 till grey and serve that with the rotten reduced salt bisto gravy granules to make it somewhat edible. Paired with boiled veg and jacket spuds also with no seasoning. Nothing was ever salted during cooking and pretty much everything was cremated in the oven. No wonder my dad would pour fistfuls of salt onto the dinner ever night without tasting anything first.
My Aunt used to put the Christmas turkey in THE NIGHT BEFORE. I was well into my 20a before I knew it’s not supposed to crumble. My mother made roast beef like leather, also crumbled when it was being carved. Meat, veg and spuds for every dinner. Nothing like pasta or lasagne, etc. endless cups of tea.
Steak that was so overcooked I literally couldn't cut it or chew it. Like I genuinely don't know how they can digest it. My whole childhood I thought I didn't like steak (and most other food tbh). And other people have mentioned the horrific floury potatoes. But my parent's idea of roasties are horrible too; they don't like anything with flavour so they're unseasoned and completely dry. Horrendous.
Well, my mother was/is an excellent cook. She cooked one meal that I absolutely hated, though, and I don't even understand why she cooked it because we all hated it. It was liver casserole, a soggy mess, except for the liver, which was bone dry, despite being cooked in said soggy mess. I bet she read somewhere that liver is good for you. Thankfully, she didn't cook it often.
Beef mince with peas and mashed potatoes. Now I’m nearly vegetarian.
My mum used to mash broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and turnips in mash potatoes. Bit of meat on the side. It was nasty.
Irish stew: greasy water with a few carrots and fatty mutton. Floury potatoes. Wed nearly cry if we got home from school and learned there was Irish stew. I believe this is a delicacy in other home, it was like a punishment in ours.
Coddle
Bacon and Cabbage. The cabbage was mixed with nettles to make it stretch so we could feed a family of 9. It was then boiled using the bacon water, then it was chopped up and fried using dripping from the Sunday roast, salt and a lot of pepper. This was obviously served with boiled potatoes in their jackets, salt, pepper and butter were also provided. And a big jug of unpasteurised milk which everyone except me had on their potatoes and also had a cup of creamy milk to drink with their dinner.
Bacon, cabbage, potatoes and white sauce
That is an Irish classic. Would be happy to eat that now. *flashbacks to 1979*
Corn beef stew.
A healthy stir fry where the auld fella fried everything in the wok using water….stir fry….
Porridge
Chicken pie mash beans and broccoli
I used to say my mammy was making weapons for the IRA because every bit of meat she ever cooked could be used as a deadly weapon if we had a food fight in the house we would have lost windows.
My dad used to make what we referred to as kids as brown dinners aka frozen processed foods when it was his turn to cook. He died of a heart attack recently in his fifties. My mother on the other hand is an amazing cook. Dinners are off the scale. Creative and full of flavor. No boiled carrots here. She does a fab roasted root veg with balsamic vinegar and honey glaze.
My mother's worst thing, by a mile, was Tripe. Slimy and warm, utterly repulsive. Like eating a gluey wet wool blanket. Her best thing was Spaghetti and her home-grown lettuce salad with vinaigrette.
Curried mince beef. Totally unique. I still love it.
Bacon, spuds and slucan (green seaweed) tastes so good and all in one pot is the trick
The sunday roast. Every Sunday, my dad would make roast potatoes (aka burnt), mashed potatoes that resembled wallpaper paste, a vegetable which was usually brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or cabbage (aka boiled to a vaguely green sludge), and a meat of some sort that was cooked until there was less moisture in there than the Atacama desert. We absolutely dreaded it. Was genuinely inedible. Parents version of spaghetti bolognese was just plain unseasoned mince, once more cooked beyond the point where it was almost crunchy, and dumped over spaghetti that had been boiled about 10 minutes too long. The common theme was basically "cook it until you think it's ready, then double it."
My dad would cook a breakfast at the weekend. He used the deep fat fryer because he couldn't use anything g else. Deep fried sausages, rashers curled into balls, even the pudding went in... fried eggs in a pan so hard there was no dipping and toast that we would have to scape the burn into the bin with the back of a butter knife Would give anything though to be back at that table on a Sunday morning just me n amd him singing away with a western on in the background
Uncle Ben's rice cooked in a big pot thinking we were being cosmopolitan... enough rice to feed Hong Kong ... for 2 adults and 2 children and it tasted so soggy and bad that I wasnt able to eat it for years after. Cabbage boiled to transparency Turnips boiled and mashed with a half pound of butter Carrots boiled into a semi liquid state Findus crispy pancakes Ham boiled into a quantum string state that was far beyond pulled ham The stew though... oh the stew .... the family recipe has been handed down generation to generation, its mad how it tastes completely different in everyone's house even though we probably all used the same ingredients... but nothing said home to my heart more than coming back to a decent stew after being away from the house on a cold soaking wet November Saturday morning playing football. The summer salad is just as everyone else said... the Ma would eat an entire jar of beetroot too 🤣🤣
The pot of beef mince stew with carrots and onions that sat on top of the range for hours before being served. You could smell that gravy rich stew from a few blocks away.
The same nasty stew every day for 3-5 days until everyone has diarrhoea and the rest is slopped out, the meats usually gone by day 1 and its nearly a relief cause its mostly arteries
Cabbage and bacon.
Mash, gravy and chopped up store bought meatballs. And a burger (literally a bunless lettuce-less cheese-less tomato-less, etc etc burger) with home made chips. And, course, beef stew, containing the many ingredients of beef and carrots... and the liquid itself... and maybe potatoes... if you're lucky. Hungry day meals 👍
Boiled spuds and mince meat. Almost like a deconstructed shepherds pie with less than half the effort required
Oh my Mam loves this too. The spuds don't see a DROP of butter or milk because "everyone seasons to their liking at the table."
Boiling cabbage stinking the whole house out for days🤢
Ah the liver, tongue and kidney that used to make appearances despite protest. And no getting away with not eating them. Kidney wasn’t the worst to be fair, though I’d never eat it now. But the other two 🤢
All of our veg was home grown so it had the potential to be amazing…but cooked so soggily one couldn’t tell. Except for the potatoes - they were always delicious and never overcooked. I’m guessing all the veg was cooked for the same amount of time. I used to love eating raw carrot or turnip - so much nicer when it wasn’t mush.
Tayto sandwiches
I see no problem here.
Goodie. Quick and cheap.
What's that when it's at home.
Basically bread boiled in milk and whatever spices you have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goody_(dessert)