Does age affect your taste in food?

I have a favorite meal I put together when I have unexpected guests. Since unexpected guests at meal time are always family members, I sometimes even make them cook their own meal. I ask them to choose a favorite pizza from my freezer and bake it when they are ready to eat. The younger guests enjoy it more than some of my more time consuming recipes, and I don't have to spend all my time cooking or cleaning up when we have company here.

When I was growing up I had never even heard of pizza. The first time I had any acquaintance with the pie was on the annual Easter trip my sister Ellen and I took to visit our first married sister in the New York area during the weeklong vacation from school. Since Kathryn was working as a dietician at a big department store she left some of the sightseeing to her husband whose job allowed him more free time during the day.

We were walking down a sidewalk to the Chinese restaurant where we were to meet Kathryn for the evening, when we passed another restaurant where a man was standing in the window throwing pizza crusts up in the air, catching them and throwing them up again. We had no idea what he was doing, but of course our brother-in-law had the answers. I did not get to taste the pizza that night because we were being shown another ethnic food at the Chinese restaurant. But my curiosity was aroused. However it was several years before I actually ate a pizza. Through my college years pizza did not seem to be the mainstay it is today. When I was a young mother I don't remember pizza being served along with the fish sticks and pot pies I used for hurry-up meals.

It was a big treat when we lived in Versailles and a Pizza Hut came to town. All of our kids were grown and gone and I was working for the church. Lester's secretary and I would run out to the highway and get a Personal Pan Pizza for our lunches and we tried different flavors and both ended up favoring cheese. That was the first time it had become part of my meal planning. So I was nearly to retirement age when I first became a regular pizza lover.

Going the other way some of the foods that I really loved when I was a child I would not enjoy at all now. Sucking salt off of a piece of ice was a big treat for me then. In fact I even liked to suck on the salted ice cream we could buy for making homemade ice cream.

A more healthy habit was to climb up in the Jonathan apple tree and eat the apples right off the limbs whether they were ripe or not. I still like apples, but I prefer them quartered and well washed before eating them. I still have fairly good teeth but biting into a whole apple does not appeal to me now.

I also liked to eat the core of a cabbage head with some salt on it. I rarely buy a whole cabbage today because not everyone likes slaw and I don't use enough for just us before it gets old. I don't think I have tried eating the raw core recently but I have a feeling that would not be something I would want to get dibs on right away before anyone else gets it. But I sure used to be in on the race to claim that prize.

`For some foods it is the way I cook them now compared to what I liked as a child that causes the difference. For example, Mama fixed me soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. I serve Lester and myself poached eggs for lunch. Another item is putting celery in potato soup which I still love, but since Lester does not like celery in any shape or form I make my soup with just the potatoes and a little cheese. Mama would not have put cheese in it, but I think I would have liked it all my life.

My favorite ice cream when I was a child was the little brick of orange ice, chocolate and vanilla ice cream in three broad stripes through the pint or quart. I can't even find those combined flavors now, but I know we serve larger helpings of any ice cream now than we did when I was a child. We had no way to keep ice cream in those days so we ate all of whatever anyone brought in right away. That slice of those three flavors looked mighty good to me, even if it wasn't a very thick slice.

When you compare my mother's figure at 87, which was as long as she lived, and look at my body, I think maybe I might have done better without learning to like pizzas and just licked salt off of ice pieces.