What food features in your earliest memory of eating?

Cheesy footballs.

Crying after my tonsillectomy (age 5) because I had to have pudding and ice cream and couldn't have the spaghetti and garlic bread that everyone else was having.

Porridge, cooked by my Dad on the stove at our holiday house...while Rocky Burnett's 'Tired of Toein the Line' played on the radio. I think I was about 4 or 5.

spotted dick

Farley's Rusks

an iridescent arby's sandwich

boiled eggs mashed with butter and pepper

have a very specific memory of my mom making me eat everything in my bowl which consisted of rice and bamboo chunks - remember gagging over trying to keep the bamboo down

cheerios. my parents used to try and keep me from getting in the kitchen and making a mess when i was ~5 or 6. i foiled their attempt by somehow finding a way to climb up and over something i can't really describe now and then spilling cheerios all over the kitchen.
at that point i think my parents knew what kind of stubborn lunatic i was/am.
also remember having a falafel from a stand near Cantor's deli in LA as a 10 year old and putting hot sauce on it and having it blow my head off. that began my love of very spicy food; like food that can make you cry when you eat it

Swordfish, beef stoganoff

All the marshmallow bits out of a box of Lucky Charms @ ~4. I dumped the whole box into a pink plastic mixing bowl super early one morning (only the test pattern was on the tv) before anyone else was up. Sat behind an upholstered chair in the living room and ate all the pink hearts, then the yellow moons, then the green clovers. I poured all the cereal back into the box. Don't remember if I got in trouble for it, but did have to eat bowls of the denuded oaty bits until the whole box was gone.

Another early memory is thinking about how my dad made really astoundingly good spaghetti sauce, but that was the only thing he made. Mom did all the cooking except for this one item, and I wondered if Dad was secretly the better cook of the two of them.

I remember soggy cereal, maybe Rice Krispies.

I'm not sure when that would have been. My childhood before age 9 or 10 is a blur. Other people always seem to have such precise memories of theirs.

Jaq that's a great story, my mom stopped buying Lucky Charms cause I'd pick out the marshmallow bits and then try to ignore the oaty bits

my first eating memory is milk-sodden cereal in front of saturday AM cartoons while my folks slept in. probably Post Honeycomb or Cheerios

Two smells:
apple juice and peanut butter in a lunchbox
cereal soaking in milk

Both v smelly

Eating a pancake in my family's basement kitchenette – a squirrel comes to the window well – feed the rest of the pancake to the squirrel!! And then part of a green bell pepper! Earliest memory.

Cream of wheat but German style. It's called Grießbrei and was served with cinnamon sugar and lots of butter. SO GOOD. My dad used to make it for me for breakfast a lot.

Or my fave snack my mom would make - english muffin with butter and American cheese put under the broiler so that the cheese got bubbly and a bit brown.

I cant think of real early food memories (ie pre-schooltimes) which seems unusual. I do rememver being forced to eat mashed pumpkin once and crying at the dinner table cos I hated it, must have only been 5 or so at the time.

I remember eating weetbix in milk in hostpital and being annoyed because they didn't make it like we did at home (we had it mushed up in warm milk with brown sugar, the hospital just served whole weetbix bricks in cold milk with plain sugar). That was at age 7.

Fish fingers and baked beans

Also remember throwing an absolute shit fit because I was fed carrot soup without any ham in it, so that must have been a regular thing

Ah yeh plenty of early memories of fish fingers and mashed potato, sitting in front of Dr Who/The Goodies at 6pm.

I also remember being horrified at a huge industrial aluminum can of beets that Sister Hyacinth was moving from one counter to another. I had sneaked back into the kitchen and I saw the huge blocks of orange cheese, the coffee can container of peanut butter, and the beets. Sr. Hyacinth let me look at them though, and that was nice of her.

green grapes
apple cider
cinnamon doughnuts

Hot dogs and ketshup...ketshup doesn't taste like it did when i was a kid with brand new taste buds.

In kindergarten, it was close to Thanksgiving, the teacher brought in pumpkin seeds and we roasted them in a toaster over. Then, we each got a baby food jar with cream in it and shook it until it made a butter ball. She then sliced up a bell pepper for us to try. I remember so clearly what it was like to taste the seeds, butter and bell pepper for the first tme. It was so refreshing.

*toaster oven

probably jello. they called it knox blocks. red or green

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3390/3524132909_4e6a13e6b2.jpg

whoa, sorry so huge ... probably looked that size when I was eating it

chicken

hot dogs. possibly cold dogs.

jaffa cakes i think
maybe rusks

JUNKET

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junket_(company)

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/73d25ac5-a1c0-4450-b8c8-e4cda3acaf4f_1.5021969c53de51a00c6522781eb2bd45.jpeg

my mum had some beautiful Family Circle magazines from the 60s, i remember being intrigued by the adverts for junket but i assume it's just blancmange and we had that on the regular

What an interesting question. I think I have no idea. None of the memories that I can dredge up from my childhood involve eating food, not until one particular memory from when I was 5. I mean I have older memories than that, but they don't involve eating.

My cheesy footballs memory dates back to when I was 3.

yeah, like io, i have no idea but damn what a great question

i think i've probably got earlier memories of adamantly refusing to eat stuff than i do of enjoying particular foods

Bones. I think a lot of asian moms gave their children bones to gnaw on.

fish sticks in preschool

mom's sausage lasagna
dad's fried smelts
artichokes and grilled chicken in spring

dad's shrimp tortillas

also in preschool - a can of planter's pretzels that sat tantalizingly on a shelf. i waited and waited for the pretzels to make an appearance (i loved pretzels) only to find out a few years later (when i asked someone about the pretzels) that the can was stuffed with broken crayons. there were never any pretzels, or at least they had been eaten long before the can entered my classroom. later i learned that the can was right in front of the "mirror" aka window where parents could spy on their preschoolers. child is disillusioned, news at 11.

also i remember eating an orange chapstick in the produce area of our grocery store. that's not food, but i definitely ate it and remember doing so.

Aaaaaand you just reminded me of the day I hid behind the couch and ate my mom's Chap-It brand chapstick although I've now forgotten whether it was Orange or Cherry. It was very disappointing--smelled much better than it tasted. Plus my mom (of course) found out and it was probably her only chapstick, the poor woman. I think she was probably laughing too hard to get very mad at me iirc.

yes, it was very disappointing! i probably spit some out and got yelled at and that's why i remember it :-/

Memories of anything that early in my life all float around in a time untethered from sequence. I do recall graham crackers and juice in kindergarten, so there is an anchor there to a particular year. I was aged 4 when I started kindergarten. I also recall having grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell's tomato soup at lunchtime. I may have been a bit younger, but have no referent to what age I was.

I do recall graham crackers and juice in kindergarten,

me too. spread honey on those grahams

grilled cheese sandwich after preschool

totino's frozen pizza!!

these are all from being 4 or 5, idk if I have any memories from earlier except maybe Dad's porridge

Spam. I especially loved the jelly. ;_; D:
Sliced strasbourg and tomato sauce sandwiches
Bonox? I must have drank it when I was sick or something.
Dad's homemade porridge
Open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches

foldover-cheese. slice of american cheese on bread, microwaved briefly, folded over

Ha! that was my afterschool snack like every single day when I was a latch key kid.

I have a distinct memory of the taste of tapioca pudding which I'm pretty sure I only ever ate as a toddler

ooh kraft cheese on a homemade scone micrwaved til the cheese melts

bacon bits sandwiches
(not irl bacon, but processed bacon-flavored lumps that looked like gravel)

sausage sandwiches eaten while staying up late with my dad to watch ali fight spinks on tv.

The jumbo red crayons

spaetzle

i guess it's true what they say, the memory cheats

Windmill cookies at nursery school.

Crying after my tonsillectomy (age 5) because I had to have pudding and ice cream and couldn't have the spaghetti and garlic bread that everyone else was having.

― Irwin Dante's Towering Inferno (WmC), Tuesday, September 11, 2012 9:34 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Remember similar experience, though not what prompted it - tonsils are still there.