Diet Grape Jelly...

And other horrors of my childhood kitchen

One of the requirements for becoming a celebrity chef, along with good teeth and some lovable personality quirk, is a charming story about how your mother/grandmother inspired you in the kitchen.

Something along the lines of how your Nana couldn’t find her teeth and was never clear about how to turn the television on but possessed all the culinary knowledge of the Old Country, and could make a meal out of a tomato, three pieces of garlic and half a head of cabbage.  Or about how your mother ran away with a matador when you were 14 and the only way to keep your father from hanging himself in the barn was to cook for him and your seven siblings using your mother’s recipes, which she’d left behind.

If you didn’t have a mother or grandmother or auntie who spent golden moments in the kitchen with you, showing you the craft, divulging the secrets, then the next best thing was to be sent away to France for your schooling. This worked out very well –way for Ruth Reichl, who referred to her own mother in her memoir Tender at the Bone, as “The Queen of Mold.” 

But even if you weren’t lucky enough to get shipped off to boarding school in France during your impressionable years, chances are you are nostalgic for the kinds of aromas and tastes you grew up with; the special family dishes your mother prepared for you, however humble.  Anyone who cooks well (professionally or otherwise) will point directly to that desire of recreating a sense of home and well-being when they put ingredients together for others to enjoy. And it goes way past rank nostalgia. Michael Pollen, in his book, In Defense of Eating, refers to MOTHER as the conduit through which culture and tradition is passed, via the food she prepares for her family 

Big, important stuff indeed. Too bad the womenfolk in my family never got that memo.  My Irish grandmother was certainly entrepreneurial. But a homebody she wasn’t. She taught me how to pour a beer and wink. Which, from an Irish perspective, what more does a girl need? I can’t say these skills haven’t served me well on occasion.

My mother was a tomboy who nevertheless grew up to embrace her generation’s imperative of marriage and children, dropping out of UCLA with a year to go so she could marry my dad, whom she’d met at a party two years earlier. Critical errors both, as she’d never let me forget.

But while she was a strong, caring, loving mother who laughed at our jokes and re-wallpapered our rooms every few years, she wasn’t known for her skill in the kitchen. She just wasn’t interested. She embraced the concept of better living through processed foods. Why cook anything when Swanson or McDonald’s did it better?

Allow me then, gentle readers, to relay a key culinary moment in my upbringing. A touchpoint in the tale of how I got to my mid-30s without being able to so much as chop an onion:

Diet grape jelly.

I can’t begin to parse how many things are wrong with that idea today. Why would anyone even think of manufacturing such a product? If you’re on a diet, don’t eat jelly. But then you shouldn’t be drinking soda either and that notion hasn’t exactly put a dent in the diet Coke/Pepsi market, has it?  So not only did Smucker’s market diet jelly back in the ‘70s, but my mom bought it regularly. 

Our larders were filled with diet and low-sugar products, even though my mom was never particularly overweight, especially by today’s standards. And we three kids were stick figures, remaining almost unpatriotically thin until well into our middle age. We had it all: Sweet ‘n Low, Nutra-sweet, diet ice cream, diet Fresca and Shasta drinks. Low-calorie Kool-Aid. Reduced fat Swanson’s TV dinners. The diet food industry was just going nova in the ‘70s and my household certainly did its part.

Readers of a certain age will surely remember Tab. That 1-calorie drink so popular in the ‘70s? In its cute pink can with a hip little name, it was a phenomenon. Women loved it. All the women. My mom and her friends. All the moms on the cul-de-sac and all the baybsitters. I thought it tasted like engine oil, but I kept opening cans because everyone else professed addiction, and maybe it was something I had to learn to love? 

Certainly all the famous brand name crap food of the ‘70s were prominently featured in my kitchen growing up. But they don’t make the final cut when it comes to culinary memory of my childhood. 

Let me set the scene for you:

I am about 7 years old. Sick, sick, sick and home from school on the living room couch. As darkness fell, I lay there in my fever, TV blaring some cartoon I had no interest in. Although the rules regarding television at my house were never rigorous, they opened up to new hedonistic heights when we were sick enough to stay home from school. There were pillows and blankets, pulled from our rooms and arranged into nests on the couches. There were multiple bowls of sugary cereal eaten from our perch.

Mom brought me a sandwich wrapped in a paper towel. Peanut butter and jelly. 

I took a bite, not suspecting a thing. I remember my reaction to this day.

I was seven. I didn’t have a sophisticated palate. I ate highly processed foods every day. I considered a Hostess Blackberry Fruit Pie a fine dessert. But something was very, very wrong with this sandwich. 

It tasted of chemicals. Of steel grey. The taste buds in the back of my jaw kicked into saliva overdrive, even as my stomach heaved and I spit the offending bite out into my hand. 

Even in a house where nobody thought of food as anything more than fuel (and hopefully sweetened at that) to put in your mouth, this stood out as an exceptionally bad taste. It actually put me off PB&J’s for years.

But there was something even worse. And I didn’t realize what it was until I was making a PB&J for my own then 7-year-old.

I was digging through my refrigerator, overgrown as it always is with dodgy Tupperware and tinfoil-covered dishes of unknown provenance. I was certain I had several jars of jam or jelly or something, but now I couldn’t find any…ah.  It was hiding on a side shelf. I opened it up and took a sniff…

That putrid, grey metal smell of jelly that had gone over hit me like a bullet up the nose, throwing me backwards and gagging me. I’m not prone to hyperbole – I swear! – but I very nearly hanked on the kitchen floor. 

The most pungent food memory of my childhood came rushing back, and was made even worse by the realization: The diet grape jelly was also rotten. 

This was my upbringing. My birthright. The summation of culinary memories from my sweet, sweet childhood. 

So you see, kind reader, I didn’t have many good food memories growing up. I learned how to make Toll House chocolate chip cookies in junior high Home Ec. This upbringing is the reason I thought cheese meant Kraft American Cheese slices and wine meant Gallo in a jug. I didn’t even know what pesto was until I was in my mid-20s!.

I did eventually learn (although I can still botch a meal like a professional). Bookmark this Substack to read the wacky highjinks.

C’Mon. It’ll be fun!