Diets of our dads are food for thought

I don't remember how we got on the subject, but banter in the newsroom one recent day focused on the weird combinations of food our parents ate or still eat.

I think it began when our food editor came across a bizarre recipe as she was putting together the Wednesday food section of the Inter Lake. We quickly surmised that every family has its oddities when it comes to food.

One reporter offered up her dad's favorite combination: scrambled eggs and baked beans. Another said her father loved to saut/ Cheerios in butter as a snack, perhaps a precursor to that famous Chex Mix we all love.

"Braunschweiger and ketchup sandwiches - gross!" another reporter offered.

Yet another colleague was forced against her will to eat hominy because her mother loved it, even though the rest of the family loathed it.

"Even my dad hated hominy," she said. "But he loved creamed corn and could never eat it because my mom hated it and she was in charge of the grocery-buying. It was the great corn debacle."

My own father had a few unorthodox food combinations. Nearly every night when he got done milking the cows, he'd grab a handful or two of raw oatmeal and eat it with a couple of tablespoons of butter.

He loved green-onion sandwiches, and was known to favor strawberry sandwiches. He'd also slather Van Camp's pork and beans on buttered bread. There wasn't much he wouldn't put between two slices of bread.

My husband's family ate even weirder things. The one that immediately comes to mind is glazed doughnut-and-bologna sandwiches. I am not making this up. My mother-in-law still eats them.

Another infamous Hintze dish is "baggie mush" - mashed rutabagas with hot bacon grease drizzled over the top as gravy.

Go back one generation further and we Inter Lake staffers discovered our grandparents ate some odd things, too. Raw hamburger sandwiches, milk toast (bread soaked in milk and topped with butter and sugar) and calf brains topped the list.

I had my own run-in with calf brains in Austria, when the old lady who owned the small hotel where I worked served me a plate of scrambled brains and eggs, then told me afterward what I'd eaten. They actually tasted pretty good, though I've never eaten them since.

My mother used to make head cheese, a jellied lunch meat concocted by boiling pig heads, scraping off the meat, mixing in allspice and then compressing it into loaves. It was served with vinegar.

Every winter Mom also made "resk," a Norwegian stick-to-your-ribs dish of pig's blood, potatoes and sidepork baked into a kind of meat sheet cake. It was served with butter. It's stuff like this that makes lutefisk seem almost normal!

What seemed evident after our newsroom discussion was that my family seemed to have more than its fair share of weird foods. Somehow, peanut butter and pickle sandwiches - mentioned more than once by Inter Lake staffers - can't compare with boiled pig-head lunch meat.

Once again, I may have to blame my Scandinavian heritage.

Here's an assignment for Inter Lake readers: send me your family's most unusual recipes or food combinations. I'd love to expose other families' food secrets. It will give us all a little food for thought.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com