Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

Shrimp Creole, out of the Betty Crocker cookbook. Shrimp with minute rice, tomato, green peppers and a touch of Tabasco sauce. Now and again I run into the recipe, and I am carried back to …

My most hated dinner meal.

I’ll admit I was a picky eater. I went through a “white” period in my tastes and preferences. Cottage cheese, mashed potatoes, and tater tots. I did not like vegetables. But I hated green peppers, overcooked green peppers, olive drab-colored peppers, the most.

Add to that the overcooked, rubbery shrimp and the minute rice. The Sixties and Seventies were an area of kitchen sacrilege. My mother was a good cook, but that recipe … that recipe was evil.

There is a Tiktoker who makes vintage recipes and critiques them, B. Dylan Hollis. I would like to see him make some shrimp creole and commiserate with me. I think he’d stop at the chewy, tasteless shrimp and exclaim loudly about the bitterness of it all

I know there are good things my mother cooked, but I can’t remember any of them. All I can remember is the bane of my existence, shrimp creole.