What was it like for you growing up at home?
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What are Belly Busters?
CraigC
Guru
A belly buster is a huge (length and girth) hotdog/sausage. There is a dive in West Virginia that makes one of these they call "The Home Wrecker".
If you've ever seen an episode of The Waltons TV show from the 1970's, that's pretty much how I grew up, right down to the sawmill.
We raised our own food, for the most part, killed our own meat, made our own butter, and until the mid-1990's (long after I moved away) Mom continued to cook on a wood cook stove.
We canned and preserved, kept a milk cow, made cheese, had a root cellar and a smokehouse. My dad and my brothers built the house I grew up in, from digging the basement to doing the wiring and plumbing, the whole bit.
Very little automated in the way of kitchen tools. About the only electric things my mom had were a hand mixer and a blender, and she got those for free.
No microwave. We had an electric cooker, but it was never used (except by me when I got older).
Six kids, two parents, and one set of grandparents who didn't live there but were there all the time.
Dad owned a sawmill and worked a day job for a soft drinks bottling company. Mom stayed home and ran the house and raised us kids. Sometimes when money got tight, she'd find a temp job "doing for" an older person nearby.
We ate a lot of pork and chicken and ground beef. Pork chops, bacon, and sausage and hamburgers and fried chicken and chicken and dumplings.
We had a grapevine, so Mom put up grape juice. Lots of beans and potatoes and onions. Buckets and buckets of tomatoes and peppers.
We had fruit trees and lots of berries as well. Mom baked a lot of pies. There was always pie.
Truth be told, though, my mom wasn't a very good cook. She was always rushing around, behind schedule, so she burned a lot of stuff and she was also from that generation that felt meat, especially pork, had to be cooked extra well done, or else you'd die.
I rarely ate cereal as a child, unlike most kids. We always had a full breakfast of eggs, potatoes, meat, biscuits and gravy, and pie every morning.
We didn't eat a lot of processed food. I never had a pizza from a pizzeria until I was 19 and had moved away. Same with steak and a lot of things like Fritos.
No "foreign" food whatsoever was allowed in the house. No Mexican, Chinese, or Italian food items.
I have a lot of funny/weird/sad stories of not being exposed to common things until after I left home and moved out on my own.
We didn't celebrate Christmas or Easter or birthdays or anniversaries. My dad was very religious, but not in the usual sense. Closest thing today would be Jehovah's Witnesses. Us kids were not allowed to participate in any school celebrations, like Valentine's Day card exchanges or cupcakes for a classmate's birthday. We had to sit out in the empty hall while the other kids had fun.
We didn't associate with other people as friends. Anyone who was at the house was primarily there for some kind of business. We went to school and came home and worked. No after-school activities, no friends, no sleepovers, no dating, no dances. No toys or anything like that.
If I have one overwhelming memory of my childhood, it was work. Never-ending work. On a small family farm/homestead, there is always something to fix. Something always needs painted, repaired, planted, weeded, harvested, fed, or otherwise tended to.
We heated mainly with wood, and no central air conditioning. Ohio, if you're not familiar, is as hot and humid as Satan's backside in the summer and as cold as a snowman's cold bits in the winter.
All in all, I can't say that it was a lifestyle I enjoyed much, and of all the kids, I'm the one who lives the least like that now.
We raised our own food, for the most part, killed our own meat, made our own butter, and until the mid-1990's (long after I moved away) Mom continued to cook on a wood cook stove.
We canned and preserved, kept a milk cow, made cheese, had a root cellar and a smokehouse. My dad and my brothers built the house I grew up in, from digging the basement to doing the wiring and plumbing, the whole bit.
Very little automated in the way of kitchen tools. About the only electric things my mom had were a hand mixer and a blender, and she got those for free.
No microwave. We had an electric cooker, but it was never used (except by me when I got older).
Six kids, two parents, and one set of grandparents who didn't live there but were there all the time.
Dad owned a sawmill and worked a day job for a soft drinks bottling company. Mom stayed home and ran the house and raised us kids. Sometimes when money got tight, she'd find a temp job "doing for" an older person nearby.
We ate a lot of pork and chicken and ground beef. Pork chops, bacon, and sausage and hamburgers and fried chicken and chicken and dumplings.
We had a grapevine, so Mom put up grape juice. Lots of beans and potatoes and onions. Buckets and buckets of tomatoes and peppers.
We had fruit trees and lots of berries as well. Mom baked a lot of pies. There was always pie.
Truth be told, though, my mom wasn't a very good cook. She was always rushing around, behind schedule, so she burned a lot of stuff and she was also from that generation that felt meat, especially pork, had to be cooked extra well done, or else you'd die.
I rarely ate cereal as a child, unlike most kids. We always had a full breakfast of eggs, potatoes, meat, biscuits and gravy, and pie every morning.
We didn't eat a lot of processed food. I never had a pizza from a pizzeria until I was 19 and had moved away. Same with steak and a lot of things like Fritos.
No "foreign" food whatsoever was allowed in the house. No Mexican, Chinese, or Italian food items.
I have a lot of funny/weird/sad stories of not being exposed to common things until after I left home and moved out on my own.
We didn't celebrate Christmas or Easter or birthdays or anniversaries. My dad was very religious, but not in the usual sense. Closest thing today would be Jehovah's Witnesses. Us kids were not allowed to participate in any school celebrations, like Valentine's Day card exchanges or cupcakes for a classmate's birthday. We had to sit out in the empty hall while the other kids had fun.
We didn't associate with other people as friends. Anyone who was at the house was primarily there for some kind of business. We went to school and came home and worked. No after-school activities, no friends, no sleepovers, no dating, no dances. No toys or anything like that.
If I have one overwhelming memory of my childhood, it was work. Never-ending work. On a small family farm/homestead, there is always something to fix. Something always needs painted, repaired, planted, weeded, harvested, fed, or otherwise tended to.
We heated mainly with wood, and no central air conditioning. Ohio, if you're not familiar, is as hot and humid as Satan's backside in the summer and as cold as a snowman's cold bits in the winter.
All in all, I can't say that it was a lifestyle I enjoyed much, and of all the kids, I'm the one who lives the least like that now.
CraigC
Guru
All I'll say is that when we lived with my oma, things were pretty good. Then when my mother decided to remarry my POS father it went to hell until he died. I didn't spend much time at home until he died when I was a senior in high school.
@TastyReuben - what an extraordinary and fascinating picture you paint. So far from my own experience growing up in a little 50's council house - just the 2 kids, Dad worked as a carpenter and Mum was blind and stayed home. We had very little money. Thank you for posting this. It was most unexpected...
Pie for breakfast?
What sort of pie are we talking about?
It sounds almost Amish. But surely a very unusual upbringing. No birthdays celebrated even! Do you stick to that?
Is that through choice? Would you ever go back to that kind of life?
Pie for breakfast?
What sort of pie are we talking about?It sounds almost Amish. But surely a very unusual upbringing. No birthdays celebrated even! Do you stick to that?
Is that through choice? Would you ever go back to that kind of life?
Pie for breakfast?
Fruit pies (apple or peach or some kind of berry, mainly), and custard/cream pies.
My heritage, though I was born and raised in Ohio, is mainly Appalachian. Pie for breakfast wasn't unusual. Also, in addition to the "normal" breakfast meats, we frequently had fried chicken. Fried chicken for breakfast was a staple.
As to birthdays, once I got married, I had to start leading a more conventional life.
We still keep it low-key, though. With no kids, birthdays and anniversaries are simply going out to a nice dinner somewhere, maybe a small gift.
I *love* Christmas, and one upside is that I was never raised with the commercial aspect to the holiday (nor the religious connotation), so Christmas to me is simultaneously very secular and very much about the "best" parts of the holiday: food and festivities.
I would never, ever, ever willingly to back to that lifestyle. Never. Not in a million years.
I have a lot of respect for my parents, regardless of what I still feel were some pretty cruel child-rearing practices, because they walked the walk, so to speak. They lived it, and it was hard, backbreaking work.
All of my siblings have adopted some, if not most, of that lifestyle into their own lives, but I'm definitely the outlier. I like cities. I like hotels. I like good food in nice restaurants. I like plays and ballet and (gasp!) opera.
I like to travel. Here it is 2019, and fully half of my siblings (ages 56-60) have never been on an airplane or more than a day's drive from their houses. All of my siblings have very simple tastes. Even now I'm (somewhat) good-naturedly ridiculed for my "high-toned" ways.
I don't like being dirty, because my whole childhood felt like one dirty day after another, whether it was digging potatoes, slopping hogs, or helping deliver a calf - dirt and dust and gunk and grime.
I like nice clothes, clean clothes, because growing up, I had one "dress" outfit for funerals, and everything else was work clothes; jeans, flannel shirts, coveralls, and boots.
You mentioned Amish...Ohio has the largest population of Amish, and even away from the larger settlements, a lot of towns have small Amish communities across the Midwest, and we did as well. Also, my grandmother on my mom's side was Mennonite, similar to Amish, and I definitely grew up with that kind of food, fused with the more southern-inspired food that my dad preferred.
Regarding outhouses: the first house I grew up in (until I was five) had an outhouse out back, but by the time we moved into the house, it had indoor plumbing.
In that house, with eight people, my parents had one bedroom, my sister had one bedroom, and my four brothers had the last one. When I was born, my "room" was the front room and my "bed" was the sofa. I still have distinct memories at four and five of crying because I was tired and wanted to sleep, but everyone else wanted to watch TV.
That house was in a very small village, right on the Main Street. You've heard of one stoplight towns? There wasn't even a stoplight, or even a stop sign. Still isn't and a couple of years ago, they even lost their village status. Now they're just "unincorporated."
While we were building the new house, Dad dug a deep pit and put a beam across it, and that was our toilet at the job site. Stand at the edge to pee and walk halfway across the beam with your bare butt exposed, and sit down to poop. You better hope you didn't forget the toilet paper, or else it was an unpleasant walk back.
My chore, due to my young age, was shoveling lime dust and dirt over the day's droppings, so it was all fresh and ready to go for the next day.
My dad's family all lived up a holler in Kentucky, about three hours' drive away, and when we'd visit them, we'd stay with his grandparents on his mom's side.
My great-granddad was a tobacco farmer (as was all the family there) and my great-grandmother was Shawnee.
They didn't have indoor plumbing. The outhouse was well back and I hated it, because you had to traverse a large plot of land rife with spiders and blowing vipers to get to it, and they didn't use toilet paper to clean yourself afterwards, but rough corn cobs.
They also had chamber pots in the house for overnight use, colloquially called "slop jars." I remember one visit, just before my great-granddad (named Mare) died in 1978, when I was awoken in the middle of the night by my great-grandmom shouting, "Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy! Mare's done got his foot caught in the slop jar! Oh, Lord have mercy!"
She had used the jar earlier and hadn't put it back under the bed, and when he got up to use it, he stepped in it and got it jammed onto his foot, kind of like Pooh Bear and the hunny jar.
In that house, with eight people, my parents had one bedroom, my sister had one bedroom, and my four brothers had the last one. When I was born, my "room" was the front room and my "bed" was the sofa. I still have distinct memories at four and five of crying because I was tired and wanted to sleep, but everyone else wanted to watch TV.
That house was in a very small village, right on the Main Street. You've heard of one stoplight towns? There wasn't even a stoplight, or even a stop sign. Still isn't and a couple of years ago, they even lost their village status. Now they're just "unincorporated."
While we were building the new house, Dad dug a deep pit and put a beam across it, and that was our toilet at the job site. Stand at the edge to pee and walk halfway across the beam with your bare butt exposed, and sit down to poop. You better hope you didn't forget the toilet paper, or else it was an unpleasant walk back.
My chore, due to my young age, was shoveling lime dust and dirt over the day's droppings, so it was all fresh and ready to go for the next day.
My dad's family all lived up a holler in Kentucky, about three hours' drive away, and when we'd visit them, we'd stay with his grandparents on his mom's side.
My great-granddad was a tobacco farmer (as was all the family there) and my great-grandmother was Shawnee.
They didn't have indoor plumbing. The outhouse was well back and I hated it, because you had to traverse a large plot of land rife with spiders and blowing vipers to get to it, and they didn't use toilet paper to clean yourself afterwards, but rough corn cobs.
They also had chamber pots in the house for overnight use, colloquially called "slop jars." I remember one visit, just before my great-granddad (named Mare) died in 1978, when I was awoken in the middle of the night by my great-grandmom shouting, "Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy! Mare's done got his foot caught in the slop jar! Oh, Lord have mercy!"
She had used the jar earlier and hadn't put it back under the bed, and when he got up to use it, he stepped in it and got it jammed onto his foot, kind of like Pooh Bear and the hunny jar.
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I wonder where your 'high taste' came from? I'm not really a fan of opera and ballet but good food and good restaurants... oh yeah!
I seriously think you need to be writing a book about your background. Not sure quite how... but to me its fascinating! And you write so well about it.
^^^ Thank you, it would probably be good therapy. 
Who knows why people develop they way they do? For example, two of my brothers are like my dad, they can fix anything, design anything, engineer anything.
Two of my other brothers are so socially backward, they can barely function in public, like my mom.
Me...I like going out and experiencing things, but I'm very introverted at the same time. I love coming over to the UK and Europe, but the flights are excruciating for me, so much so that I'm terrified one day, I just won't be able to do it, mentally, whereas my wife can fly as easily as walking out to get the mail.
I possibly got a lot of my more high-toned interests (that's why my family calls it) from growing up watching a lot of PBS broadcasting on TV and listening to it on the radio. I got exposed to a lot of stuff that way.
I mentioned in my intro that "Reuben" is a childhood nickname (that, and shortened to "Reub"). No one in my family calls me that anymore.
Several years ago, I was flipping TV stations while visiting my parents and, lo and behold, the local PBS station was showing "Mr. Bean," so I started watching that.
Two of my brothers stopped by, and when they walked in, they saw me watching this rubber-faced, obviously foreign, guy on TV and asked, "What in the world are you watching?"
"Mr. Bean. It's a British TV show. We used to watch it when we lived there. He doesn't talk much, and he just gets in crazy situations."
"Well, excuse me, your Highness! Hey, get a load of Lord Bean over here, with his la-dee-dah TV show!"
Ever since then, all my siblings call me Bean or Lord Bean, especially if I say something like, "They were doing free Shakespeare In The Park last night."
"Well, well...was your old runnin' buddy Queen What's-Her-Face there? Off with your head! Haha!"
It's equal parts brotherly joking and a derisive attempt to put me in my place (as my dad frequently tells me, "Don't get above your raisin', Boy!").
Who knows why people develop they way they do? For example, two of my brothers are like my dad, they can fix anything, design anything, engineer anything.
Two of my other brothers are so socially backward, they can barely function in public, like my mom.
Me...I like going out and experiencing things, but I'm very introverted at the same time. I love coming over to the UK and Europe, but the flights are excruciating for me, so much so that I'm terrified one day, I just won't be able to do it, mentally, whereas my wife can fly as easily as walking out to get the mail.
I possibly got a lot of my more high-toned interests (that's why my family calls it) from growing up watching a lot of PBS broadcasting on TV and listening to it on the radio. I got exposed to a lot of stuff that way.
I mentioned in my intro that "Reuben" is a childhood nickname (that, and shortened to "Reub"). No one in my family calls me that anymore.
Several years ago, I was flipping TV stations while visiting my parents and, lo and behold, the local PBS station was showing "Mr. Bean," so I started watching that.
Two of my brothers stopped by, and when they walked in, they saw me watching this rubber-faced, obviously foreign, guy on TV and asked, "What in the world are you watching?"
"Mr. Bean. It's a British TV show. We used to watch it when we lived there. He doesn't talk much, and he just gets in crazy situations."
"Well, excuse me, your Highness! Hey, get a load of Lord Bean over here, with his la-dee-dah TV show!"
Ever since then, all my siblings call me Bean or Lord Bean, especially if I say something like, "They were doing free Shakespeare In The Park last night."
"Well, well...was your old runnin' buddy Queen What's-Her-Face there? Off with your head! Haha!"
It's equal parts brotherly joking and a derisive attempt to put me in my place (as my dad frequently tells me, "Don't get above your raisin', Boy!").
It's equal parts brotherly joking and a derisive attempt to put me in my place (as my dad frequently tells me, "Don't get above your raisin', Boy!").
Mr Bean! I don't know if may Americans will know that show.
rascal
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rascal
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Windigo
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When I was a kid there were a lot more common appliances than most members here had in their childhood I think. I was born in the 80's so we had a gas stove, an oven and a fridge plus chest freezer. This was also because my parents both loved food and cooking, so we always had pretty good kitchen equipment. I'm pretty sure my mom had a magimix too.
However my parents were pretty prone to 80's diet fads, so we were macrobiotic until I was about 8 years old. This meant all our food came from the organic store, and I didn't eat anything with cane sugar until I at home until about this age. Macrobiotic diet - Wikipedia . My parents stopped eventually because I became malnourished and deficient in certain nutrients. After that we were mainly vegetarian until I was about 12 and we became fully omnivorous after that. The meat we consumed was always organic though.
So as a kid I mainly ate a lot of whole wheat products, cooked and fresh veg at every dinner, limited meat & protein and limited fats. I also did not get cane sugar as mentioned, so I had fruit bars, rice wafers with peanut butter, unsweetened candy and fruit for snacks. It was a healthy lifestyle, but also pretty boring as a lot of foods were kind of bland. I never tasted industrial dairy until my parents stopped eating macrobiotic food. Our milk and yoghurt still came from glass bottles, and we milled our own oats for breakfast. And the food did not provide enough nutrients for a growing child.
It did set me up for some healthy habits, I do still love vegetables and whole grain products and never became super fond of very sweet things like marshmallows and sugar cane. But most of my favorite foods are from our vegetarian period, and not the macrobiotic one. I still really dislike miso..
However my parents were pretty prone to 80's diet fads, so we were macrobiotic until I was about 8 years old. This meant all our food came from the organic store, and I didn't eat anything with cane sugar until I at home until about this age. Macrobiotic diet - Wikipedia . My parents stopped eventually because I became malnourished and deficient in certain nutrients. After that we were mainly vegetarian until I was about 12 and we became fully omnivorous after that. The meat we consumed was always organic though.
So as a kid I mainly ate a lot of whole wheat products, cooked and fresh veg at every dinner, limited meat & protein and limited fats. I also did not get cane sugar as mentioned, so I had fruit bars, rice wafers with peanut butter, unsweetened candy and fruit for snacks. It was a healthy lifestyle, but also pretty boring as a lot of foods were kind of bland. I never tasted industrial dairy until my parents stopped eating macrobiotic food. Our milk and yoghurt still came from glass bottles, and we milled our own oats for breakfast. And the food did not provide enough nutrients for a growing child.
It did set me up for some healthy habits, I do still love vegetables and whole grain products and never became super fond of very sweet things like marshmallows and sugar cane. But most of my favorite foods are from our vegetarian period, and not the macrobiotic one. I still really dislike miso..
A fascinating childhood diet indeed. But - what do you really dislike about miso? I find it has loads of umami and if used in small amounts is a great addition to stews, sauces etc. If I taste it 'neat' I'm not so keen though.