There are lots of things that hold families together, but not surprisingly food is one of the best. I guess the families of today eat far fewers meals together. Somehow I suspect that does not matter in the long run. There will always be interesting little family food quirks that make little sense to others unless they become part of the family.
Of course on top of this, every family is bound to have some strange food preferences that can bring a chuckle to everyone's lips.
Every family passes down food favorites, and our family is no different, except we have given one of ours a name, the "Dippy Egg."
When you have a family, there are foods that seem to bring comfort to a situation. These foods have so many good experiences attached to them that when a college student shows up starved or when a teenager sleeps until noon or later, there really isn't a better way to break the ice than serve up a hot family tradition.
I can't remember when we cooked our first "Dippy Egg," but I have always loved my eggs over easy. Also we have always been a family that loved great home made or bakery bread. A perfectly cooked egg, matched with a perfectly buttered piece of toast is comfort food in our family. It's what the kids want when they're tired, hungry, or just need to remember simpler times.
The key of course to a "Dippy Egg" is that you break your toast in pieces and carefully eat the yolk before getting to the white. The number of "Dippy Eggs" we have cooked would make the egg marketing board ecstatic. Now my son has evolved slightly and likes his eggs cooked a little more, but then again his eating habits defy convention. He loves deli turkey but regularly turns down his mom's perfectly cooked Thanksgiving turkey. Of course the girls are true to the "Dippy Egg" tradition. Their favorite toast to go with their egg would likely be Boone's Mill white bread.
Then are some food combinations which I suspect to be universal, though I can only know for sure that my family loves them. On cold winter nights we enjoy homemade grilled cheese sandwiches served with Campbell's tomato soup. I think tomato soup was one of the foods that I lived on during my childhood. It was the one thing my baby sitter Annette could cook. Now the kids are developing some traditions on their own. My oldest daughter would rather have Kraft processed cheese in her grilled cheese while my son would prefer real cheddar cheese. Given their choice they would probably pick Mill Mountain White Bread for their bread of choice. Of course the grilled cheese sandwiches need to be grilled in real butter to be at their best.
Then there are those traditions which seem to defy definition. In our family hot dog fried rice has to fall into that category. In my college days I had a wonderful friend, Suzanne, who once in a while used to treat us to fried rice on Sunday nights. Often hot dogs were the only meat to be found and they made a very tasty addition to the fried rice which being homemade was a wonderful treat for all of us so far from home. The only condition was that we needed to use chop sticks. I have proudly known how to use chop sticks since college just because that was the only way to get a share of the hot dog fried rice.
Of course our kids took to hot dog fried rice like ducks to water. They never mastered chop sticks but they still love to have cut up hot dogs in their homemade fried rice. They even make it themselves now days.
Then there are those meals that the family used to have when I was out of town. The excuse was always "dad doesn't love tacos" or "he doesn't life broccoli and cheese soup." I finally complained one day that I never got to eat any tacos. After that we enjoyed passing all the taco fixings together on a regular basis. Of course we usually had to have a special bowl of mild salsa just for mom. Unfortunately I never took to the broccoli and cheese soup like the kids so that remains a special treat they share with their mother along with celery which I am still convinced is a vegetable from an alien planet.
Of then there are the famous BLTs or bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. In order to make the proper BLT, you need to know how to fry the perfect bacon. Apparently the kids have grown up since they all know that Hormel Black Label bacon carefully watched is almost a guarantee of success. Then of course you have to add a home grown tomato except to our son's sandwich which for some reason skips the tomatoes and becomes a bacon and lettuce sandwich. As I said he defies conventions.
There are other things that are special in our family such as Glenda's pot roast (memorialized in "Southern Cooking Magic"), her cole slaw, country style steak, corn bread, chicken & dumplings, strawberry freezer jam, or her famous potato salad which I have already written about in my "Great American Meal" article. If you know me, it is obvious that my wife is an absolutely great southern cook.
Probably the most unusual family food is Marmite which I picked up from some English friends that we knew in our Canadian days. Most of us, excluding my wife, enjoy Marmite on buttered toast. My wife claims that Marmite should be used for only as an industrial adhesive but that just leaves more of the scarce delicacy for the rest of us. More info on Marmite is available for those who have to know it all, but tread carefully at the Marmite FAQ.
There is one family tradition that has been absent for a little over a year. It was my mother's fried chicken. Perhaps this will be the year when we bring back that tradition. Of course I will only mention the problem the two older kids have with "chicken and bones" so that I can set up another story. So before you think we are a little strange or completely focused on food maybe I should mention the ham noodles recipe that is a family tradition with one of my cousins, but then that too is another story.
