A Matter of Taste

 

I’ve always been a picky eater. Many of the tears shed as a child were over being made to eat something I didn’t like.

Back then, I couldn’t stomach foods with strong flavors. I still mostly don’t. I didn’t even like pizza until I was about 10.

For me, corn and salad were the only two edible vegetables. And that salad had better not have peppers, onions or carrots in it, or that, too would be inedible.

Onions and peppers were the two worst offenders. I still don’t like onions all that much. Cooked, they’re slimy as well as harsh-tasting. Raw, they’re edible in tiny amounts, but my war with them is that they won’t go away. No matter how much toothpaste or mouthwash you apply, there’s that taste, still partying in your mouth the next morning. Yet oddly, I love French Onion Soup.

Peppers are another matter. It makes no difference if they’re green, orange or yellow. I have always had a hate-hate relationship with them, even though it wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered my stomach liked them even less than my mouth did. And yet, the flavor of jalapenos doesn’t bother me.

Oh, lest I forget, I also have the gene that makes anything with cilantro in it taste like soap.

Some veggies were simply too strong-tasting for me to be able to handle as a child, like broccoli and asparagus – but with age I’ve come to appreciate them.

Actually, there are a number of veggies I never knew I liked because we never had them at home. Not until I went away to college did I discover such delights as broccoli, cauliflower – which I prefer raw – eggplant, zucchini, and butternut squash. When I announced I liked these things and asked why we never had them, my mother replied that my father didn’t like them.

I grew up thinking I didn’t like vegetables because I hated peas, carrots, lima beans and baked beans when there was a world of veggies I never knew about until college.

Peas have caused misunderstandings. I often describe my dislike of them in terms of being cute, but leaving a nasty scum on the roof of your mouth. People ignore the fact that I also say I don’t like the taste – the epitome of what green tastes like – and decide it’s a sensory thing. No, that just adds another layer.

I have found that I like fresh, uncooked peas in a salad. But cook them, freeze them or put them in a can and you’ve ruined them.

I also like carrots shredded in a salad. That way you can’t actually taste them. And who could refuse carrot cake? (Without the icky, overly-sweet icing, of course)

While I may not be the biggest veggie lover, I love almost all fruits – except cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon.

To me honeydew and cantaloupe taste exactly the same. I get an argument when I say that, but that’s what my taste buds tell me: a harsh bland with an aftertaste. Perhaps I’m colorblind to their particular tastes. But they’re an all-around disappointment in my book.

Watermelon is a texture thing, mainly because it doesn’t have a whole lot of taste. It’s more of a wet sugar taste. I do like watermelon flavored things, like Jell-O or Jolly Ranchers.

I didn’t care for cream sauces, especially on meat, when I was a child. Potatoes au gratin (potatoes all-rotten, as I called it), cream dried beef or similar delights would not pass my lips. My mother knew it was the sauce, so I got the un-creamed version. Yet I loved milk.

Similarly, I ate nothing containing mayonnaise. “Salads” with mayo – potato, egg, macaroni, tuna, etc. – were on the repugnant list. They also usually contained peppers and onions, so it was a triple whammy. The sourness of the mayo put me right off. Consequently, I was an adult before I discovered by accident that I’m severely allergic to mayonnaise. My sensitive taste buds probably saved me from a childhood trip to the emergency room.

People get as defensive about mayonnaise as they do about meatloaf. Say you don’t like mustard or ketchup, and all is well. Say you don’t like mayonnaise, and it’s an attack on the American way of life!

It’s slightly less offensive to say you’re allergic to it.

“Store bought mayo or homemade?”

“Real mayonnaise or Miracle Whip?”

I really don’t know. Nor do I care. Several things containing mayo caused head to toe hives that lasted several days. I’m really not willing to experiment to find out which brand is the culprit. For heaven’s sake, it’s a condiment!

At a party, once they discover it’s an allergy, people are so consoling.

“You poor dear! You can’t have any potato or macaroni salad? That’s terrible.”

That’s okay I’ll “suffer” with potato chips instead.

Meat wasn’t a huge problem. I don’t like lamb, but we never had that when I was a child because my father didn’t like it. I’m not sure my mother did, either, and she liked everything – except mushrooms.

But the one meat I could never manage to swallow was meatloaf. It made me gag. It still does. While others seem affronted by my hatred of what they consider “comfort food,” it gives me only discomfort.

“You’d like mine,” they assure me.

No. No, I wouldn’t. I don’t care what you do or do not put into it. Trust me on this.

I tried hiding small crumbs of the meat in my mashed potatoes, or forcing it down my throat with a mouthful of milk, but once the milk and potatoes were gone and there was meatloaf left, I knew I was in serious trouble.

My mother wouldn’t allow me more milk or potatoes because she thought I was trying to fill up on those things instead of eating my meat. She didn’t realize it was the only way that meat would make it to my digestive tract.

One such traumatic Sunday was when I was about four years old. My family apparently saw this as something special for Sunday dinner. I remember it clearly. Everyone else had finished eating, and my mother put out dessert, which was ice cream. Mine was near my plate, but I was forbidden to touch it until that meatloaf was gone. Everyone else had their ice cream to the tune of my crying, despite my mother’s admonishment, “Stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry for.”

Finally, when everyone else had gone and my mother was anxious to get the dishes washed and the table cleared, she let me have the semi-melted ice cream. She could have refused to give me the ice cream, but she knew it wasn’t enticing me to eat meatloaf, and she hated wasting things (and in those days, we didn’t have a dog).

My mother’s meatloaf contained both onions and peppers diced into nearly-microscopic pieces that couldn’t be picked out easily. She knew from other food concoctions that I didn’t like those two veggies.

So she tried making meatloaf with nothing in it at all, just shaped into a loaf and baked.

And to me, it tasted nearly as bad.

She persevered for so long trying to force me to eat it because I would eat ground beef in casseroles, meatballs and hamburgers without issue. But shape that thing into a loaf and bake it, and all bets were off. She didn’t seem to realize that baking it changed the texture as well as the taste.

Finally, tired of mealtime drama, every time the family got to enjoy their meatloaf, she would make me a hamburger.

I was lucky in not liking liver: my brothers didn’t like it, either. Rather than having a showdown with all three children, my mother decided it was too expensive to waste on unappreciative kids. The same with stuffed peppers – we had stuffed Pyrex dishes instead.

A final bit of oddness about me is a lack of appreciation of bacon. One of the worst smells to be stuck in a house with, in my humble opinion, is bacon. While I like Canadian and British bacon, those greasy strips of fat that pass for bacon in the US not only look disgusting, they also positively reek. And like onion, the stench refuses to leave the building.

I just hope the next wave of air fresheners isn’t bacon-scented.