'Kyoozeen' is what they call it, Ma

My father was a ‘meat-and-potatoes’ kinda guy. You don’t hear that expression much any more, but that was what he was. The exotic in cuisine was something that, on his part, had to be regarded with caution and wariness. This was something especially apparent to me when I was a kid. We did not suffer any misapprehensions about culinary sophistication.

Dining for us called for nothing ‘foreign’ to be put on the table, especially in front of Dad. His idea of exotic was Franco-American Spaghetti. And, growing up in such a household it wasn’t until I was in high school that I first went to an ‘ethnic’ restaurant.

Meals in the family home were basic in nature. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of money to be spent frivolously, but even so, there was even less inventiveness or sense-of-adventure. Meatloaf, sausages and mashed potatoes, repellent canned peas, pork chops, macaroni-and-cheese (which was served far too often, leaving me disliking it to this day), and then the big Sunday roast. Sometimes beef, but more usually pork or lamb because they were cheaper. Maybe a chicken on rare occasions and, for some odd reason, chicken was considered almost a gourmet treat.

I’ll give Mom credit. She tried to educate our reluctant palates in the direction dishes she’d heard about, and she would doggedly follow recipes from Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s or Family Circle, and attempt to foist the concoctions on her family, only to be greeted with:

“What’s this stuff?”

“It’s called Beef Stroganoff.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You haven’t even tried it.”

“I still know I don’t like it. It looks like dog-food and smells like puke.”

We didn’t dine out much when I was a kid. We never went to fancy restaurants, and ‘never’ to foreign ones. In my home community, the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, There were some basic places, a couple of Chinese joints (too foreign for Dad), and our 'mainstay.' Our mainstay was a place called Rob Roy. I doubt if there was a Scottish connection, somehow. I recall their slogan was “Coffee till the pot runs dry.” Not much of an enticement for me, since I didn’t consume much coffee at that age. If we were to go out en famille, it was usually to Rob Roy for some fare like the aforementioned meatloaf, or maybe a ‘hot roast beef sandwich’ on white bread, smeared with gloppy cornstarch thickened gravy. Never a hamburger. For some reason we never went for burgers when I was a kid.

Many years later I would marvel at the sophisticated tastes in dining of my stepdaughter when she was about twelve. She showed how cosmopolitan culinary tastes have become during my lifetime. For example, she not only loved sushi, but also could actually prepare it and use the correct terminology. But, she grew up loving exotic things like sushi (this was over a decade ago. I know sushi is not considered especially exotic these days and is indeed as common as, say, tongue-piercing, but when I lived with her it was still a little exotic) in an era where somebody going out for a bite can toss up among Italian, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, or Szechewan.

Furthermore, my own tastes expanded hugely to the degree that what was once deemed foreign is now the norm, and I am always game for something new. Furthermore, there has been a bit of a quantum shift in what has become regular fare for me. When we were living in France last fall our two favorite restaurants were not Gallic haute cuisine places, but a Vietnamese eatery and an Indian joint. As the cultural mosaic in my part of the world has changed so much, those two places felt like we were eating at home.