Whenever most people wistfully think back about their grandmothers and in particular, her cooking, as the angelic harps of memory play and the silvery clouds of memory part, they are usually left with beautiful culinary remembrances such as “Man alive, my grandmother made the best fried chicken in the world!” or “You know what I miss? My grandmother’s tamales! No one made them like her!”
And while I’ve never met anyone who’d admit it, there’s just got to be someone out there who, when they think back, immediately makes a disgusted sneer and bellows “Ugh, my grandmother’s food was the absolute worst! Her potato salad once gave me intestinal worms! I’m pretty sure she got most of her recipe ideas from the back of Wacky Packages!”
In other words, not all grandmothers are great cooks.
The same goes for small-town diners. Maybe it’s because we’re inundated with so much chemically-castrated, corporate-designed, mass-produced foodstuffs in our everyday lives that anything with the absolute slightest tinge of checkerboard-patterned small-town home-cooking paints a very false sense of home-grown nostalgic yearnings for a time we were never honestly around for.
Not always, but sometimes.