death by family cuisine

[kaigou]

Jump forward to about 3:30 and watch. The entire scene had me in hysterics. Exchange "frogs" for "pigs feet" and that's me and my sister on a family-visit when we were younger. Nothing like elderly cooks with good intentions to take years off your life. (Which, when you're 14 and 11, as we were, there aren't that many years to take.)

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(It's the younger girl, on the left, waving the food around as preface to not-so-stealthily trying to slip it into the older girl's rice bowl that really did me in. My sister tried that trick at least once every family visit.)

Comments

[taithe]

Ahahaha I still remember the horror of discovering my aunt was feeding us live prawns for lunch. At least their frogs were dead.

[kaigou]

Live prawns? Wow. To this day, I go through a split-second of recoil when I'm handed shrimp with the legs still on -- because I've got relatives who refused to remove the legs from crawdads because that amounted to wasting food. And that's... well, it's an awful lot of legs, and only two steps removed from, well, other creatures with lots-of-legs. Like, say, SPIDERS. Somehow the association stuck (or maybe it was an older boy-cousin teasing me by bringing up the lots-of-legs connection) and as much as I could live for shrimp... I could only live for them as long as they're legless.

*shudders*

Damn boy-cousins.

[dragonhand]

Yes! Thank you! Related to other creatures with too many legs. Like spiders. Yes, exactly. Very yes.

[mongrelheart]

Hehehe.... reminds me of my family too. Not so much the "here, eat this weird item, it's good for you" part, but just the constant exhortation to "eat, EAT!"

[kaigou]

I think the idea of "food as literal expression of love [for another]" is universal, jokes about Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Southern, South African, Mexican and Irish mothers aside. It's just that when you get to the elderly mothers (grandmothers, godmothers, and so on), you get not just "eat, eat, you should eat more!" but what they're giving you to eat is stuff that... well, when you're a kid, it's... hard to control the ewwwww response.

My extended family (especially the blue-collar and/or rural parts) cooks fish whole, so the bit about still having eyes & head was where I really started to lose it. I can so relate.

Thanks to trauma from my grandparents, I still have a thing about food-with-eyes. I remember going to eat with a Chinese coworker and she introduced me to an absolutely awesome Shanghaiese steamed fish dish, but it's served whole. She caught me taking some of the shredded vegetables and carefully covering just the fish's eye... and gave me That Look (the one all mothers have). I turned beet-red and she just laughed at me. It's the eyes! Childhood flashbacks! Food staring at you! Family trauma!

I have absolutely no idea how it is that I adored flounder as a kid, seeing how that's a fish often served whole and it has TWO EYES on the same side. You'd think that's a double whammy. Bizarro kid logic at work in there somewhere, I'm sure.

[mongrelheart]

HEEhee! I can totally see your coworker giving you the Look =D

I was brought up with the cooking the fish whole thing, & the eyes/head never bothered me, but I remember once going to a friend's house and her mom had cooked tongue for dinner. And it just disturbed the hell out of me--the fact that we were eating an animal's *tongue*! And her mom belonged to the "you must eat everything on your plate" school... so I just ate it as fast as I could while trying very very hard not to think about the cow without its tongue :P