Fifties foods

So, there's some foods I just never got.

My parents are awesome and fed me great things. But it was a very, very California kitchen. Chez Panisse-inspired. Lots of avocados and Mexican and Caribbean and various asian foods (coconut milk, hello!). But until I moved out I had never eaten:

Anything with molasses in it except gingerbread
collard greens, grits
rhubarb
turnips (or really any root vegetable that wasn't a potato or carrot or beet)
mangos (curiously enough. I didn't know how to pare a mango at all until this year, when I bought one and had to look up how to cut it online.)

To add to that, my mother wasn't a big baker -- she cooks marvelous things, but baking just isn't her thing. My grandmother taught me how to make pies and it turns out I have a knack for pie crust. But on the whole, sweets were limited to a big bowl of ice cream or sometimes store-bought cookies. And frankly -- I'm pretty sure I have still never eaten a vegetable out of a can other than hominy (why did we eat hominy when I was a kid? I honestly don't know. It doesn't seem to fit in with the other things we ate. But to this day hominy is a comfort food to me, prepared right out of the can with butter and salt) and olives (which are not really vegetables) and garbanzo beans. Sometimes I go into the supermarket and marvel at the fact that they can asparagus -- what in the world will they think of next?

So I'm trying to learn how to cook those things I never ate. I'm going to make rhubarb pie, as soon as I get over my fear of it (okay: I'm not even sure I could properly identify rhubarb in a lineup. I just know it's one of those things that a lot of other people seem to have eaten, and it figured prominently in some of my favorite children's books so by hook or by crook I'm going to learn how to cook it). Turnips -- I actually really like turnips in stew, I've discovered. And today I made this molasses coffee cake, which is just like heaven in a pan. I really adore it and frankly, I love molasses now -- I've learned more about it and I just want to put it on everything. The bitter-sweetness is something I had just never encountered anywhere until this year, when my roommates somehow acquired a metric shit ton (that is a scientific measurement, right there) of dark molasses and I felt obligated to learn to use it.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about all this. Unfortunately most of those things above are pretty wintery foods, but I can at least play with molasses recipes, and if we have a cold snap it would be nice to make root vegetable stew. And mangos are of course something interesting to play with: I wonder how they would bake up?