We would NEVER have called it SOS, and we all loved it! Creamed chipped beef on toast, with the cream/white sauce made from scratch. I don't make it because all the chipped beef these days is made from "pressed" meat scraps and loaded with salt. Totally not the same!
The Good: My mom was a pretty good cook, and we had some great meals. She was renowned for her macaroni and cheese (white sauce made from scratch, turned into amazing cheesy goodness) and I am proud to say that my cousins (who are older than I) say I make it "exactly like Aunt Betty's!" She also made what she called chicken fricassee, but I can't find anything like it. It was chicken pieces, onions, carrots, celery, and cubed potatoes baked in a chicken cream gravy. Delicious! Other favorites were chicken cacciatore, eggplant parmesan (paper-thin eggplant, battered and fried, layered with homemade tomato sauce and mozzarella), Swiss steak, shepherds pie, tuna noodle casserole, American chop suey. She always made pie crusts from scratch. Mushrooms baked in cream and butter. Grilled cream cheese w/sliced green olive sandwiches. We weren't picky eaters, although it wouldn't have mattered as we were a "it's dinner, eat it or go hungry" family; no way was my mother serving alternate meals!
My dad grew up during the depression, 9 kids, no father, so they ate some pretty interesting stuff that he liked, so cooked for us. We all loved kidneys, and he made a mean kidney stew; if we were just having kidney, it'd be lamb kidney. I love lamb kidney, and it's impossible to find. Beef heart, cut in squares and marinaded in a fiery red rub, served with mashed potatoes. Chicken livers, gizzards, and hearts, sautéed in butter (I still eat the "guts" when we buy whole chickens... love them). Deep fried pickled tripe. Beef liver was not a favorite, but it wasn't bad, cooked with bacon and onions. He also made what he called "Mutchie Cutchie" which was basically leftover meats and veg, diced up, heated up in spaghetti sauce and served over toast squares. He used to make this for breakfast some Saturday mornings, and let my mom sleep in. I now realize that he was just shaking down the fridge for whatever was leftover from the week and dumping some Ragu on it, but when we were kids we thought this was AMAZING and would beg him to make it!
The Bad/Ugly (hard to separate the two): Creamed salt cod. Pickled herring. Tongue. I liked tongue when I was little but by the time I was 13 I couldn't stay in the house while it was cooking, it smelled so bad! And for me, for some reason, lima beans. Swallowed them whole, like pills. I don't mind them now, but hated them when I was a kid.
Neither of those will ever happen - it's totally not a thing here. I've never once in my life seen it on a menu in a Canadian restaurant and it isn't even common to find loose sausage meat in Canadian grocery stores. The only place I've run into it is on the aforementioned breakfast buffets when we visit the States, and I've never tried it because it just doesn't look appetizing or healthy or breakfast'y to me.
