Mom was a good cook and made many savory dishes I remember fondly. But she rarely made sweets of any kind -- maybe because all four of us kids loved to bake cookies, cakes, make fudge, etc. So she didn't need to; we always had abundant home-made treats in the house.

Once we'd all left the nest, Mom specialized in making the molasses cutout cookies for Christmas. She (finally!) had the time and patience to roll the dough, wash the cookie cutters afterward. Then she'd make Dad frost them.

My grandmother's Oyster Dressing made in a big pan and crab "cakes" made in the same big pan. I have no idea how many blue crabs she had to clean to make that big pan of "stuffed crab" (she couldn't be bothered to waste her time putting that small amount of crab cake into a crab shell.)

Both my Mom and my Maternal Grandmother were excellent cooks. They also baked wonderful desserts. Favorites were all their many pies like Rhubarb custard, Apricot, Shoofly, Apple crumb, Mincemeat, Raison which my Grandmother called Funeral Pie! Grandmom also made a wonderful Boston Fudge cake and a lemon sponge. My Mom loved Apple Brown Betty too and they both made a great baked rice pudding. We had wonderful food growing up! For comfort food for dinner we had meat loaf, Roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy, Baked Spaghetti, Pork chops and sauerkraut, Macaroni and cheese, fried tomatoes in the summer and my Mom baked chicken with mushroom soup which I loved. It made great gravy. I know all the folks who make fun of using soup in cooking but I loved it in casseroles like tuna noodle casserole too.

Joann

My mother was a good cook, but didn't fix dessert very often, and when she did. It was usually apple pie, which was my dad's favorite. I don't like apple pie, but she also would make a coconut cake that was very good, and I remember one time when she and a neighbor started making doughnuts and they sold them at a corner restaurant.

No desserts. My mom was not that interested in cooking. But, there were a few thinks that she made that I still remember. A stuffed veal, baked ziti, blintzes, chicken with Saucy Susan.

Lucille My dad made the pascha every year and my grandmother made the very best kulich. When we were children baba used to make a small individual kulich for each of us. I have the pascha recipe but never did have my grandmother's recipe for kulich.

My mom was just an average everyday cook but her soups were wonderful. She also made excellent pirozhki to eat with those soups. On weekends my dad would take over the cooking and roast things in the winter and BBQ in the warm weather. He would also do breakfast. My friends would love to stay the night and have fried bread dough for breakfast. We always had a Tupperware bowl of yeast dough in the fridge. Amazing none of us were over weight.

My mother's apple pie was the best I have ever had. Another comfort sweet was cottage cheese pie. We always had plenty of baked goods in the house from breads to pastries. Breads mostly came from a bakery and the sweets were either home made or from the bakery.

Anyone remember milk toast? We had that on a regular basis during the cold months.

Mother would toast bread with butter, put in a cereal bowl, pour warmed milk over it and cover with saucer, until we came to the breakfast table.

Haven't had that since I was a kid, which was oh so long ago.

Glenda, my DH talks fondly of milk toast, also of cracker soup. Just soda crackers, hot water and butter. In good times, any kind of meat or chicken broth might replace the water.

My mother made great pies and cobblers. She made all sorts of fruit pies. One of her prize pies was pumpkin. She loaded it up with enough spices to turn it a brown color. I don't know her recipe, but the pie disappeared fast. She had to make a number of pies for Thanksgiving Dinner in order to have at least one pie for the dinner.

Mother used to make the best fried fruit pies, mainly peach, which I loved, and apples.

Glenda - My first exposure to milk toast was reading about it in a Donna Parker book when I was around 8 or 9. Donna and friends had to make milk toast in home ec in the book and were required to eat what they made. Several years later when I took required home ec in the seventh grade I was happy to find that we would be learning to make French toast not milk toast. The tuna casserole was bad enough. LOL

Mom used to let me put vanilla ice cream on my cornflakes in the morning. That was yummy.

Oh Boy --- this post brings back memories of my mom . Thanks for posting it ,Glenda ! She was the best cook / baker in the world. ( I didn't inherit that gene,darn it ! ) She would set aside a whole day to make dozens of Oatmeal raisin cookies. They were more like little cakes than cookies. It was like Crack to us kids ! LOL She'd even involve my dad . She'd drag out the old meat grinder that attached to the table and have my dad grind up nuts and raisins for her . Now that I'm older , I knew it was to keep him out of her way...hehehe !

EVERYTHING was a comfort food when I was a child, LOL. We're German and most all meals had something made out of dough. Kase Knephla (cottage cheese, egg and onion turnovers), Knephla (tiny dumplings boiled in salt water, then drained and put into a milk based soup), Blechinda (Pumpkin hand pies), ducks (sweet bread dough tied in a knot that resembled ducks when they rose during baking).... You get the picture. At a family reunion when I was in my teens, a waif of an aunt, who couldn't have been even five feet tall, said upon meeting me, "Yah, Donna, you are a hardy girl". I weighed about 115 pounds! Of course, eventually all that dough caught up to me. I've worked hard to lose the pounds and I'm okay with my weight now, but I'll never see 115 again.

Nah. Mom never was fond of cooking and was not good at it though she now loves to bake. Meals were simple and boring. Breakfast was fried egg sandwiches or something like that. Dinner was meat,potato, veggie. Filling and consistent,even if not particularly yummy.Occasionally a casserole if she was feeling creative. (I remember the heinous fish stick casserole she came up with one Lent. Gag.) She never seasoned the food because the first thing dad does for any meal anywhere,even in restaurants is cover the food in salt,so most food had no flavor. And she would often burn things because she was so uninterested, she would put something on the stove walk away and forget about it until someone smelled it burning. All her pots and pans had a burned ring on the bottom,which she jokingly referred to as the "flavor ring." :)

Now, I love and look forward to her pumpkin pie. I love it for breakfast.

The food all of us siblings remember as "comfort food" from our childhood was mainly processed. Planters cheese balls that we used to get in our stockings on saint Nick's day,things like that. They recently re released them for an short time and we all went a little nutty over them. Probably as they really were a treat. We did not keep snacks in the house and almost never went out so things like that were a novelty.

I remember milk toast too; this is what DM fed to us when we were ill. Major comfort food was perogies sprinkled with chopped onions caramelized in butter. The kitchen had the most delicious aromas when she was at work! Best of all was homemade noodles tossed with a golden brown crumble made from cooking down full fat cream. We were a large family of 8 children and DM made the noodles completely by hand. She worked very hard to keep us fed on very limited means.

My mom was not a baker, but her coconut cream pie was to die for. However, everyone said she had a magic touch with meats. Roasts, BBQ, pork chops, chicken, fish - you name it. She never met a protein she couldn't make delicious! Sides were normally fresh vegetables and delicious. We always thought processed food was a mysterious treat. :)

Oh, I can't forget my grandmother's chicken and dumplings, chocolate pie, peanut butter cookies, and yeast rolls. Great stuff for sure!

My mother was a wonderful cook and baker. She baked all our bread and rolls. I loved her banana cream pie and make it too. She made wonderful rice pudding and bread pudding, and I plan to try to replicate her recipes one of these days. Usually, dessert was big for Sunday dinner. But in between we would find her baking cookies as we arrived home from school or would sometimes have less fancy desserts during the week. Loved her angel food cake with the 7 minute frosting too.

We ate lots of pork "n beans and fried potatoes. When I was a teen my mother joined the county home demonstration club, and her cooking changed to incorporate what she learned. We did not recognize some things anymore. Nor did we adapt too well to that strange "stuff." Occasionally she made ice cream in the ice tray in the refrigerator.. It was always icey.

My mom was a good cook, made all the basics like pot roast, ham, fried chicken, meatloaf, pork chops. She was an even better baker and we always had homemade from scratch goodies for dessert. My sister and I helped make a lot of them by 10 YO. My dad had a sweet tooth so we had something almost every night.

I don't make much any more because we don't need the calories but occasionally I will have the urge to make something from my 1950 Betty Crocker's cookbook. Desserts I grew up with were Pineapple Upside Down Cake, Cobblers, Pies, Boston Cream Pie, all kinds of Cakes - Devil's Food and Angel Food, Cream Puffs, Gingerbread, Rice pudding - made with sweetened condensed milkand raisins, Tapioca pudding - slow cooking one, Indian pudding, Custard, Baked Meringue Shells that were filled with ice cream and topped with fresh fruit. We always had a cookie jar full of cookies. My favorites were Peanut Butter, Oatmeal Raisin, Date Bars and Molasses.

She stopped baking so much by the time I was in HS in the late 1960's. I was the last kid of 5 that was still home. That was the first time having store bought cookies. I still prefer homemade. By then we only did a special dessert for Sunday dinner.

Beans and cornbread! White beans, a slice of white onion, and if we were feeling fancy we'd add a dollop of chowchow to the beans. Savory cornbread (no sugar - ever) with fresh butter. Yum!

My mother was a fabulous cook, and like many southern women, baking was her specialty. Her buttermilk biscuits were so light and flakey they could float right off the table! The same with her cloverleaf yeast rolls. And her cakes and her pies - all TDF. Her cookies were the thing of legends. Yes, lots of carbohydrates and lots of sugar, but oh it was good.

When I think of "comfort foods", I think of what I wanted if I was sick or it was the dead of winter and I had the "blues". My mother made the best potato soup on earth and how I wish I could have a bowl of it tonight. My mother never made bread pudding or rice pudding or Tapioca (she did make chocolate pudding), but I love all of these puds today and make them often - far easier and faster for a person living alone.

This winter, I have gone back to a favorite from decades ago: twice baked potatoes. I often make a meal on this with some applesauce or baked apples. When it's cold at night, nothing beats a potato in some form!

Three things I remember most: rice pudding, banana pudding, and a simple cake with chocolate pudding. My mom will be 89 in a few months. She doesn't cook so much these days but she made banana pudding back in the fall. She forgot to put the bananas in.

Sheilajoyce, as kids, we could request any birthday cake we wanted, and my grandmother would bake it. Mine was always, always her angel food cake with 7 minute frosting. She'd put a drop of red food coloring in the frosting to turn it pink. I remember using her mixer in the double boiler once I was old enough to help.

My mother was a good cook, but I don't remember desserts much, except for red jello with fruit cocktail suspended in it. When she baked a cake it was almost always a German chocolate cake with mocha frosting, so when it was my birthday I would always ask for a _white_ cake with _white_ frosting for my birthday cake. I also remember her making chocolate chip cookies with peanuts added to the mixture.

When we had spaghetti for dinner, she would fry up the leftovers for lunch the next day. I loved it but I've never been able to replicate it.

When we were sick she would give us baked custard and sweet hot black tea. I always crave that when I'm feeling off colour.

Saturdays sometimes we had French toast which she served with powdered sugar and cinnamon. The powdered sugar would clump into little balls with the butter and were so good. Mine doesn't do that but I still enjoy the French toast :-). Some Saturday mornings we would get to eat a can of mandarins. I loved the soft texture of them so occasionally I will buy a can as a treat.

My mother was a wonderful cook, but she really did not like to bake. One of my fondest “comfort foods” is fried green tomatoes! That has to be my all-time forever-favorite breakfast! She could do that!

Our mother was not a great cook but she had her specialties like shrimp tarts and really nice porridge with raisin cinnamon and apple in it.

Also for a breakfast treat we would have quite often actually, probably more often than we needed, rye bread porridge with a sugary egg topping on it. Simply Delicious.

Sunday roast was very good with potatoes and carrots and often salad. Though it was sometimes a little overcooked.

She also made a delicious kringle a Danish style walnut raisin and sugar filled pastry.

For Christmas we would have rice pudding with almond slivers. Whoever found the whole almond would win the prize of a marzipan stuffed chocolate. She somehow would work it so everybody would get a chance to have it. She knew exactly where the almond was.

I can't eat any of these desserts so my dessert is yogurt and berries if I have dessert.

We were dirt poor so not a lot of memories of great fancy food but when there was a little extra money the one "comfort" food I do recall was chicken and dumplings. The fluffy kind that were dropped, not the rolled kind. Other than that she did make very good biscuits, cornbread, gravy, fried potatoes (oh my did we have a lot of potatoes), potato soup, and Pinto or great Northern or dried Lima beans. I do remember eating dried or "chipped" beef and gravy and fried spam but I don't consider them to be comfort foods. Oh, yeah, she made homemade baked macaroni and cheese, definitely comfort food. When times were good on Easter we had a ham with sweet potatoes and baked beans. Mom wasn't big on desserts either but occasionally made banana pudding,
using tapioca instead of vanilla pudding, upside down pineapple cake,
and fried apple pies.

As a child I thought my mother was a pretty good cook, but as an adult I realized she wasn't all that great. But my ultimate comfort food was her baked mac and cheese. Still to this day that's what I go for when I need comfort food.

My Mm learned to cook in her middle age, after Grandma (who had done all the cooking for our family) passed away. Mom learned quickly, self-taught mostly from recipes in the newspaper. My favorite dinner was her "goulash": ( ground beef, kidney beans in a tomato based sauce). And her best dessert was apple crisp with lemon-vanilla sauce.

Ritaweeda, that pretty well describes my mother's cooking. Except I don't remember her ever making mac and cheese. She did make wonderful biscuits almost every night, or cornbread. I loved her fluffy chicken and dumplings, and I make it often, trying to recreate hers. She also made banana pudding.

She made delicious gravy and I recall one of her friends saying she "could take a bath" in my mother's chicken gravy...it was so good.

And Watchme, you are so right about that tuna casserole in Home Ec. That was horrible stuff. I have never been big on casseroles. Didn't grow up eating them...I don't remember my mother ever making one.

She also never cooked some things because it reminded her of someone she didn't like. She never cooked rice or chocolate pie because her mother- in-law would cook it. The worst insult in the family was to be compared to Grandma Stout....who truthfully was a very mean old lady.

I don't associate desserts as 'comfort food', either. Fortunately for me, I guess, my mother succumbed to the lure of stuff made from boxes.....cakes, puddings, and lots and lots of dreadful congealed concoctions, oh my goodness.

To this day, I never fix a dessert as part of our everyday suppers but will provide something special for company.

My mother learned to cook from my father. He taught her to drive too.

My father was a country club manager, if we wanted to see him, we ate at the club. I still love club sandwiches. My memories of them cut into triangles with little frilly toothpicks stuck in them. Eating on the "Greens" patio, watching people pick up their golf clubs and head out is my "comfort" food memory. lol

Marilyn, you’ve reminded me that my mother used to make tuna noodle casserole a lot when we were young. I loved it so much that I requested it for my farewell dinner when I left home. DH dislikes tuna, though, so I never make it any more.

I was a very picky eater as a child. So I didn't like anything good for me. We always had made from scratch chocolate cake around, and homemade ice cream in the freezer.Both were so good. When I was sick Mom fixed soft boiled egg on toast. I still make that when I don't feel well, or just want a comfort supper.

I do associate any foods as comfort food.

My mother always had some kind of dessert for my dad for the dinner meal.

Banana pudding, from scratch, goes right along in that area.

Fried chicken with milk gravy goes right along with comfort foods in my part of the world.

Nothing better than homemade vegetable soup with cornbread.

My mom grew up in the Far East with servants so she didn't learn to cook until she was an adult and after moving to the US right before WWII. But she had a decent teacher and by the time I showed up, she was an accompished, if not overly creative, cook. But she was never a big baker......that was a role my older siblings assumed and any homemade cakes and cookies we had were typically their offerings.

Most of the meals I associate with comfort food growing up were typical British dishes - roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Lancashire hot pot, kedgeree, steak and kidney pie. But the ones that really stand out for me are calves' liver fried with onions and bacon, stewed chicken wth fluffy dumplings and a goulash type casserole called Tallerine that was always, always my birthday dinner request!

Any desserts were usually reserved for Sunday dinner or when we had guests. "Magic" lemon pie, pineapple upside down cake, steamed puddings, trifle. And angel food cake sliced and filled with fresh rapsberries from the garden and whipped cream!

My mother was a good cook and baker. Except she almost always overcooked vegetables. But that was a standard back then, vegetables were cooked almost into mush! It's kind of a miracle that I love veggies today as much as I do.

Comfort food desserts? Oatmeal cookies, apple pie, cream puffs. Mom would always ask me what kind of cake I wanted for my birthday, and I always asked for oatmeal cookies. That always upset her, she thought birthdays should include a cake with icing, something I never cared much for. She did make one cake that I liked a lot, don't know that it had a name, we called it 'frying pan cake' because she baked in a large cast iron frying pan. No icing on it, it made its own kind of a 'crust' on top. I know it used quite a few eggs, and she used almond extract in it. I've tried numerous times, but have never been able to duplicate it.

Savory comfort foods would be split pea soup, rouladen, spare ribs and sauerkraut, any of her soups, and a tuna noodle dish she made. Not the infamous tuna noodle casserole, I think it was her own 'invention'. It was made in a frying pan on top on the stove, contained no cream of mushroom soup. I think it was just the tuna and cooked noodles, which sounds pretty awful, but it was really good! So there must have been something else in it. And her potato salad! Which I have learned to duplicate.

We were very poor, money-wise, when I was growing up in the 40's and 50's, but we always ate good. My parents had survived the Depression in Chicago, so as WWII was beginning, they moved to a farm in Michigan. My Dad said he never wanted his family to go hungry again, and he figured on a farm they could grow their own food. And they did. We always had lots of fruits and vegetables, plenty of beef, pork and chicken. And almost always more milk and eggs than we could use.

Rusty

I grew up on green beans that were cooked on a slow back burner on the stove, all day. They always were cooked with some ham hock and a bit of bacon drippings. My mother's were good, but my grandmother's were the thing of which dreams are made. I don't want any other vegetable cooked that long - prefer them a bit "crisp", but oh my, southern green beans are just bliss.

I'd give anything for my Moms homemade ox tail soup-I have no idea how she made it,but it was a guaranteed meal thru the week in the winter

She also made apple crisp and butter tarts....I can do those,altho not a lot like my Moms,but tasty just the same.

Anglophilia, I agree about the green beans....sometimes my mother would put "Irish potatoes" in them, and sometimes silver queen corn, sliced off the cob. So good!

My Mom was a good cook and I often make some of things that were favorites growing up. Her home made cole slaw, pasta sauce, macaroni & cheese and roast w/browned potatoes are a few, but my favorite part about those memories is how animated she could get while she was making them.

Ahh, silver queen corn!! I remember stopping at a farm stand on the way home from church (in the next town) to get that. So good and sweet! Also greasy beans from that stand, the only kind my grandma and mom would buy.

Not exactly a comfort food (that makes me think of homemade macaroni and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup), but the thing I miss are my mother's icebox cake (chocolate wafers and real whipped cream) and Boston cream pie.

My mom was a good cook. My favorite dishes of hers': chicken & rice, lasagna, curry, sushi, chili.

Mom's family was in the business of growing Perdue chickens so of course her fried chicken was a standout that I dearly miss! The most comforting food she fed me was tuna salad with baked beans on the side. Sounds bizarre and if I didn't grow up eating it, I would probably think someone lost their mind with that combination...

We also were dirt poor so there were no elaborate dishes for us. Mom was a plain cook but she could do some things well - fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy (or potato salad) on Sunday. Sometimes we'd pack it up and take it to the "pasture" which was simply a cow pasture owned by Dad's boss and we'd spread our feast out on a blanket on the ground and eat. If Dad had an extra dollar, he'd stop on the way and buy a gallon of ice cream for 99 cents. If he was really feeling rich, a six-pack of Pepsi. Bottles, of course. After our feast, us kids would run up and down in the grass and wade in the creek.

Mom could make a great goulash from hamburger, elbow macaroni and homegrown tomatoes, tall fluffy cinnamon rolls with lots of gooey brown sugar on the bottom and minimal icing, and a lemon meringue pie she was extremely proud of. After I watched her make the meringue once, I wouldn't eat it. But the lemon part was good and she was great with piecrust from scratch.

My grandma, Dad's mother, was a very plain and unimaginative (English) cook. But her sugar cookies were wonderful. We lived with grandma and grandpa for a short while when I was a kid and when we got off the school bus and ran inside to smell her sugar cookies - bliss! I make her recipe now and it is probably my most memorable comfort food. Tall, soft and cakelike - she didn't use any icing, but I do!

I was so interested in reading about everyone's comfort foods, and their mother's cooking, I almost forgot one food that says 'childhood' and 'comfort' almost like no other can, and it's due to my dad, Mom would have no part of it. Very simple, a sandwich of buttered pumpernickel bread with Limburger cheese and paper thin slices of onion. A light sprinkling of onion powder will do if a really good onion isn't available. Or, second choice, the buttered pumpernickel with Liverwurst and thinly sliced onion. Yum! !

I can just see everyone holding their noses and making faces, but it's something I grew up with, and I love it to this day. I can't get any of the main ingredients here, the closest place is 50 miles away, so I don't get it very often. But any time I have occasion to go to that town, you can bet your boots I'll bring home a supply!

Rusty

what a great thread!! so many interesting stories and comfort foods!

my grandmother lived with us growing up so we had two cooks in the family!

my grandmother was the baker, mom - not so much

comfort foods; green beans and potatoes cooked for about 4-5 hours, delicious! lentil soup, pasta fagioli soup, potato and eggs frittata, peppers and eggs fritatta. although we didn't call it a 'frittata', just potato and eggs/peppers and eggs and ate it mostly during Lent, with bread and a salad. we eat peppers and eggs often, just delicious. sauté red peppers till softened with olive oil and garlic, S&P, add scrambled eggs, cook till set. can add locatelli cheese, provolone or american.

baked goods: ta dah's cookies, pizzelles, easter bread - toasted with butter

we did not have a set dessert after dinner, if u wanted something sweet, we just ate whatever was available. although one dessert my mom made was "ice box cake". pure heaven!!