foodperson.com

Nothing like a long-distance trip to make you see home with fresh eyes. Just back from a week in Portugal, I recognize a few things I’d forgotten about myself.Among them are that fish doesn’t turn me on and that I love carbohydrates.

In the coming days, I’ll write more about specific things we ate, but my first food thoughts upon returning have been very much about what we did not eat.

We did not eat, at least in significant quantities, bread, salad, vegetables, beans or beef. We did eat lots of fish, olives and fruit. My favorite dishes involved fruit. Eggs and cheese also were plentiful.

Geography rules?

Although I like to think that I eat a varied and healthy diet, I’m clearly a product of my geography. Take fish. When you grow up in Kansas and spend most of your adulthood there, too, you just don’t get exposed to all that much fish. (Note to geographically impaired: Kansas is more than a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.)

When I was a kid, the fish we ate at home came in a can (tuna, salmon) or in a box (fish sticks). The only fish commercially produced around here is catfish. I’ve never been crazy about its texture or slightly sweet flavor, and I don’t know that my mother ever prepared it.

So the only fresh fish I ate as a child was vacation fish—primarily trout pulled fresh from a lake or stream in Colorado. I don’t recall swooning over it, but it was good, and from my perspective decades later I think, “what’s not to like?”

Maybe Mom would have made shrimp if the cheap, farmed shrimp prepped overseas by near-slaves had been available back then as it is now, but we’ll never know.

Bring on the starch

What we did eat plenty of was carbohydrates interlaced with added protein: spaghetti and meatballs, hamburgers, roast beef with potatoes and carrots, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, tuna and noodles, minute steaks with rice, chicken cacciatore, salmon croquettes, meatloaf, fish sticks.

It was 1950s-1960s American fare for a family on a budget: meat plus starch plus green vegetable plus some kind of salad.

Breakfast usually was cereal—pancakes on Saturdays—and lunch was sandwiches: peanut butter or baloney between slices of soft bread. Sunday nights, after the big midday Sunday dinner, was grilled cheese (American on white bread) and tomato soup. Snacks were apples, carrots or graham crackers.

Summers meant culinary treats: home-grown tomatoes and corn and green beans (not all grown at our home).

It was satisfying, if dull, but this trip makes me realize I haven’t moved as far from that diet as I might think. While I eat lots more fresh fruits and vegetables than I did back then and considerably less meat, my fish intake hasn’t changed much, and bread, pasta and rice are very much the base of my personal food pyramid.

I missed them.