r/mildlyinfuriating • u/marcus_dobre_lover • Sep 01 '26

I just wanted a hot dog Mom bought 150 lemons.

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She randomly comes back with a butt load of food items once in a while

Any lemon recipe suggestions

\she’s 44, for people asking her age\.

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336

u/carloscitystudios Sep 01 '26

Makes perfect sense to my American mind, seeing as how Poland is a tropical lemon growing nation

392

u/portabuddy2 Sep 01 '26

Citrus rarely made it to Poland before like 1800's and when they did it was mostly oranges. And only on Christmas. Any bacia or Gadgi will tell if someone cracks an orange it always reminds them of Christmas.

Lemons where even rarer so when they Arrived you would preserve them as best as you could. Poland is know for their rich honey. Strong spruce, birch and clover honey's are prized.

That mixed with grain alcohol and this strong honey. Then it makes sense. Trying to extend something that is so rare, came so little and passed so quickly.

154

u/carloscitystudios Sep 01 '26

Honestly learned something here about human behavior. Thanks a bunch

7

u/DoseOfMillenial Sep 01 '26

How we don't currently appreciate the abundance we actually have today?

7

u/GallusWrangler Sep 01 '26

Hey, don’t speak for everyone. We grow lots of food on our property and are super appreciative.

3

u/Swimming_Mountain811 Sep 02 '26

Luxury without pleasure seems pretty common

1

u/more-cilantro Sep 02 '26

Seconding this, came here out of jealousy over the 150 lemons(we only got green ones over here), got a short yet bountiful read on human behavior and sociocultural insight for bonus.
Loved the last sentence especially. I really resonate with the effort put into the preserving of something fleeting yet precious, it's one of the joys of life.

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u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 03 '26

Believe it or not oranges were not the most common citrus in America when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. It was a special treat to get them at Christmas. The church would hand out a bag filled with oranges, nuts and hard candy the Sunday before Christmas after nativity ceremonies.

EDIT: Not the most common in rural Appalachia and, at least where I’m from in the 70/80’s citrus fruits were usually only available in grocery stores during season.

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u/Troutalope1 Sep 01 '26

Boxes of oranges from FL and Vidalia onions from GA were also Xmas gifts from family when I was growing up in the Midwest.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '26

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17

u/Willsagain2 Sep 01 '26

To wear on your belt. It's very fashionable.

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u/rsm6130 Sep 01 '26

My mom actually looked forward to Vidalia onions. They’re her favorite.

4

u/Pikanyaa Sep 01 '26

Those are tears of joy, right?

2

u/Electrical-Act-7170 Sep 01 '26

Vidalia onions are the sweet onions grown in a single county in Georgia.

I hate onions, they give me hives. That'd be a sucky Xmas present for me.

1

u/atomicgirl78 Sep 02 '26

We got that too !

17

u/ElcidBarrett Sep 01 '26

When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s, my parents always put an orange in my stocking. I never quite got it, but it was apparently quite the treat when they were growing up.

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u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 01 '26

We could only get fruit in season back then so getting an orange at Christmas was like the holy grail.

3

u/Serious-Fun7379 Sep 01 '26

I swear that, and walnuts in the shell were part of the reason I was so desperate to move to CA from DC. NEVER looked back

1

u/Hiraeth1968 Sep 01 '26

Cue the scene in the Godfather of the Don buying fruit.

3

u/SpaceGypsy27 Sep 01 '26

elite comment

2

u/Double_Belt2331 Sep 02 '26

It's good luck

1

u/Hiraeth1968 Sep 01 '26

I was born in the late 60s. I remember my parents buying a box of oranges and grapefruit every year and keeping it in our front closet because it was cool in there. Those were the sweetest grapefruit I ever had. I, too, got an orange in the toe of my stocking each year.

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u/jupitaur9 Sep 05 '26

I got an orange (or tangerine) in my stocking too, in the 60s and 70s, so I think I am probably your parents’ age. Citrus was sort of available other times of the year, but it was plentiful and good around Christmas.

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u/70ms Sep 01 '26

That probably depends on where you live - in SoCal there are citrus trees everywhere. Parts of Los Angeles were once orange groves and Sunkist is still headquartered in Valencia. The original Sunkist building is viewable from the freeway in L.A. and it’s always been really cool. My mom’s house had a lemon, juice orange, and navel tree in our small backyard in the 80’s. :)

2

u/ER_Support_Plant17 Sep 01 '26

Same for most of FL back in the 80’s, not sure about now with that citrus disease killing off so many groves

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u/70ms Sep 01 '26

Apparently the citrus industry in Florida is over because of citrus greening disease. They got it first, and California took steps to try to keep it out, but it just delayed the inevitable and now it’s starting here. I’m worried for my little potted variegated Eureka lemon tree. :(

I read “The Sixth Extinction” a while back, and one of the ways we’ve accelerated it is with the spread of invasive species (citrus greening is spread by an invasive insect).

4

u/thedreadedaw Sep 01 '26

What part of America? I bought 10 lb of oranges to feed my kids and we'd pick them off the trees when we went to visit family in California. Plus they've been growing a kabillion oranges if Florida for ages. Didn't you ever see the movie Trading Places or hear Anita Bryant advertising them?

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u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 01 '26

Appalachia, rural North Carolina. There was no way we were ever driving to Florida let alone California, the family car was lucky to make it to Church and the grocery store twice a week. I’m more fortunate now, I can buy all the oranges I want.

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u/thedreadedaw Sep 02 '26

So it's not that they weren't common in America. In fact, in the vast majority of America, they were relatively inexpensive and in every store. I live in a very rural area in Washington State and then in urban areas, as well as other states that do not grow them and every store had oranges. No one was driving to California or Florida to get them. Thousands of trains and trucks transported them all over the damn where.

1

u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 03 '26

Not the most common in rural Appalachia and, at least where I’m from in the 70/80’s fruits were usually only available in grocery stores during season.

5

u/thenaughtydj Sep 01 '26

Plus one for the frozen concentrated orange juice 😂😂

Apparently Dan Ackroyd is working on a sequel, but that was 2024. Still no news about that one. Imo it should be called Trading 2 Places though.

3

u/Dirt-Repulsive Sep 01 '26

Child hood memories get a large orange every Christmas in stocking , no other times…

3

u/DigitaIBlack Sep 01 '26

So what was the most common citrus

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u/FuckYouVerizon Sep 01 '26

tomatoes of course.

3

u/MechanicalTurkish Sep 01 '26

I love potatoes

3

u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 01 '26

I said rutabagas

3

u/Boring_Intern_6394 Sep 01 '26

Limes are native to the Americas. I would guess them?

2

u/ER_Support_Plant17 Sep 01 '26

Really? Is that the reason Mexican mayonnaise is made with lime juice?

3

u/applespicebetter Sep 01 '26

When I was a kid in the 80s in Maine it was still a tradition to get an orange in your Christmas stocking every year!

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u/clutzycook Sep 01 '26

Yes! Mine too! Ours was a paper bag that was about 1/3 peanuts and had a red delicious (yuck) apple, an orange, and usually a Snickers bar or a Hershey bar with a few hard candies thrown in for good measure.

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u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 01 '26

The red delicious was the worst. We got Brazil nuts, and walnuts which I thought were amazing.

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u/AdDelicious5161 Sep 02 '26

The Brazil nuts were my favorite. They reminded me of coconuts.

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u/AnguavonUW Sep 01 '26

They were but not in your area for whatever reason. Most metropolitan statistical areas (a civil engineering term for large cities)and the towns directly adjacent to them, where the bulk (90+%} of the country's population resides, had easy access to oranges. They were more expensive, relatively speaking, then vs now. So that might be part of the reason, too

2

u/slleslie161 Sep 01 '26

It really depends which region you grew up in.

2

u/Realistic-Leave9393 Sep 01 '26

I grew up around that same time. We barely had oranges in our house but I always thought it was because we couldn’t afford them. So looked forward to the last day of school before Christmas break because we got a bag with lots of goodies, one apple and one orange. Yum!

2

u/CrotalusHorridus Sep 01 '26

Did you grow up in Appalachia?

1

u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 01 '26

Yes, rural North Carolina. The world seemed a lot smaller then.

2

u/emmapeel218 Sep 01 '26

My uncle grew up in pretty serious poverty and said that his fondest memory was the year he got an orange for Christmas. It was his only gift and the only orange he had that year--the only fruit that didn't come from whatever they could grow at their house.

This also makes me think of "The Sweet Smell of Christmas" book that has a scratch & sniff orange in the bear's stocking!

2

u/Linda-Eskin Sep 11 '26

My dad‘s grandmother had a farm in Roan Mountain, Tennessee, right along the Doe River. My dad spent a lot of time there in the summers (mid 1930s-1950s). The ET&WNC railroad ran through town and right along the edge of her farm, next to the river. 🚂 I don’t know if he remembers this himself, or heard stories about it as a kid, but during the winters the engineer, Sherm Pippen, would get oranges and toss them to kids along the line. 🍊 (I wonder now if that was on Christmas Day or something, because the kids had to know to come out to meet the train.) My dad said that was probably the only fresh fruit they got all winter.

We went back there to visit family in the mid 1970s and I was surprised to see that the grocery store in town carried almost no produce. They had a few heads of iceberg lettuce, individually wrapped, but almost nothing else. At first I thought they all must just live on bacon and eggs (and one could easily get that impression), but I realized later that everyone had a home garden, so people weren’t generally buying vegetables at the market.

Not related to that in particular, but with both of my parents growing up in the Midwest (Detroit and Chicago), oranges in winter were a rarity. We all live in San Diego area (for almost 70 years), and I have several orange trees in my backyard. But to this day my mom (92) always puts an orange or tangerine in all of our Christmas stockings every year. 💖

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u/Negative_Fruit_1800 Sep 12 '26

Oh my god! Roan mountain is not far from my hometown! The rhododendron are so beautiful when they bloom, it’s so beautiful there. My dad is 83 and still keeps a big garden. This year he grew green beans, corn, potatoes, and onions. Usually a few other things. He cans a lot of beans. Living in LA I get nostalgic thinking about my childhood in the foothills of North Carolina.

1

u/AdDelicious5161 Sep 02 '26

I’m 68 and I remember those days. It’s hard finding the hard candies now.

1

u/Thorne8148 Sep 05 '26

Wait..is that why my parents filled my Christmas stocking with oranges and walnuts? I never understood that. I never even liked oranges.

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u/_Failer BLACK Sep 01 '26

Wtf is bacia and gadgi?

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u/barmiro Sep 01 '26

I think they meant "babcia" and "dziadzi" (some regional form of "dziadzio" maybe?), but gradually misspelled over the many generations since anyone in their family actually spoke any Polish

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u/MechanicalTurkish Sep 01 '26

Wtf is babcia and dziadzi?

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u/Btkdiva Sep 01 '26

Grandmother and Grandfather

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u/DummyDumDragon Sep 01 '26

I miss the good old days when you could rent a pineapple for parties.

You can't do that anymore.

Seriously, go out and try and rent a pineapple from someone for your next party and they'll just look at you weird and say things like "...what?!" and "fucks wrong with you?!"

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u/portabuddy2 Sep 01 '26

That has to be the worst depertiation of any item in history. At the hight of the pineapple craze one would cost somewhere into the 100's of thousands of dollars. Now it's 3/$2

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u/ER_Support_Plant17 Sep 01 '26

I love that bit of history. Fruit rentals

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u/LongjumpingDebt9247 Sep 01 '26

This is amazing to see how you spell "babcia" and "dziadek" and how automatically I knew who are you talking about when you've said about their experiences with oranges.

I'm in my 30s but from rural area and oranges were still quite rare when I was a kid. They still remind me about Christmas, although I can get them all year round now. But before children would have them in their lunchboxes around December time and in the moment someone opened orange we used to say "it's already smells like Christmas here"

3

u/portabuddy2 Sep 01 '26

I'm 40 and it was the same for us in the late 80 and early 90's. Much like parts of northamarica, Canada specifically. Poland was very much on ration cards coming out of socialism. So you where allowed x loves of bread, x eggs, x kg of flour. Etc etc. oranges where not on the list. Haha.

My mother got a job at the post office in the late 80's in Poland. So we were allowed a phone! Our own land line. How special. :rolls eyes:

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u/Shadowpriest Sep 01 '26

Yep oranges were a very popular gift to give around the Christmas season from my parents telling me stories of growing up in Hungary. My folks carried on that tradition on December 6 (Mikulás Nap aka St Nick's Day) so our cleaned and polished boots or dress shoes by the door/window that day would have candies, nuts, and oranges.

American kids thought it very strange but that have me a little mini holiday to enjoy some sweet treats and a tasty orange.

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u/porp_crawl Sep 01 '26

Oh! So that's why chocolate oranges (orange foil covered spheres that you break into smaller individually foil covered slices) for Christmas is a thing.

Revelation unlocked.

1

u/Infinite-Pin-7240 Sep 01 '26

So nasty tho, hate em to this day

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u/DaniekkeOfTheRose Sep 01 '26

Thank you for taking the time to share this. It was very interesting. This is precisely what I like about Reddit and many of its redditors.

1

u/J2thaG Sep 01 '26

Hell yeah, thanks for the lesson

1

u/4kBeard Sep 01 '26

Did not know Poland was known for it's honey. Now I gotta keep an eye out for it. Birch honey sounds delightful.

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u/portabuddy2 Sep 01 '26

The spruce honey is so strong. It's like honey dialed up to 11. Esp the kind from the southern mountains of Poland (tatra mountains) that neighbor Slovakia. It looks like deep dark wood. If you have a polish deli near you, they will carry it. Comes with a snap down lid. I'm sure I have one at the house.

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u/portabuddy2 Sep 01 '26

LOL I do. I bought this years ago to back sweeten a mead I made. But never did that. Good thing honey doesn't go bad. LOL it's now $28 :(

1

u/Megabyte_Messiah Sep 01 '26

Wow. I always enjoyed chocolate oranges, but never understood why I typically only saw them at Christmas. Is this related to why? I’m in Michigan which has a fairly large Polish community.

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u/portabuddy2 Sep 01 '26

This all goes back to the day of travel be wagon, horse and train. Even truck but when they where not that common. In europe the trade routs where solid! But you still had to wait for seasonal items. Some where super expensive and only given out by the church. Some simply put no one could afford. So back then when you got an orange that came the way from italy or even China. That was a thing.

It's like someone bringing you a moon rock today. In the days when distance counted in steps by foot, it's just as Un fathomable how far a moon rock came today. And in 100 years hopefully we will be saying the same for something from the nearest star.

1

u/Megabyte_Messiah Sep 01 '26

Half of us will be worried about something from the nearest star while the other half worry about oranges, again, most like 🙃

Thanks for the info!

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u/applespicebetter Sep 01 '26

That sounds absolutely delicious!

1

u/Satahe-Shetani Sep 01 '26

I'm sorry, but babcia and WHO? Gadgi? I'm Polish and confused. Or maybe you meant dziadek?

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u/Laurabengle Sep 01 '26

I feel like you know it’s authentic old Polish recipe when it calls for grain alcohol. I can poke fun at Poland because family came from Bohemia and the traditional stuff is very similar!

1

u/Away_Amoeba5554 Sep 01 '26

Beautiful explanation

1

u/Simple-Wrangler-9909 Sep 01 '26

That sounds so delicious

Makes me think of like a sweet lemony gin type of drink

1

u/ketra1504 Sep 02 '26

Not oranges, tangerines

1

u/Tasty_Sample_5232 Sep 05 '26

And tangerines... well, yes, when you only see something for the holidays, you want to take full advantage of it. Now you can buy them anytime, but back then they were only brought in for New Year's and Christmas. Cookies with crushed tangerine peel... You literally remove the excess white part from inside the peel and throw the rest in a meat grinder, grind it up, add it to cookie dough, and bake. Delicious and sad.

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u/portabuddy2 Sep 05 '26

Why sad?

Only sad part is kids these days hAve access to absolutely everything all at once. They can't make core memories like this of the taste and smell.

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u/IHaveNoEgrets Sep 01 '26

I mean, that's how they came up with this. Someone gave them lemons, and after a brief WTF moment, they just rolled with it and made booze.

3

u/emlgsh Sep 01 '26

It's a more recent modification of a traditional Polish spirit recipe involving pure grain alcohol and a bottle.

3

u/Jessika_Rarebit Sep 01 '26

I was surprised after visiting a few Western Europe cities to find out how common it is to keep a roughly sapling-size lemon tree in the home. Lots of healthy ones at farmers' markets. They smell amazing too.

I don't know why we don't have the same trend in the U.S., wish we did.

1

u/carolomnipresence Sep 01 '26

That's a secret, who told you?

1

u/YeshuasBananaHammock Sep 01 '26

Something something silk road!

1

u/Lucius-Halthier Sep 01 '26

Hey when life gives you lemons, you make liqueur

1

u/Laurabengle Sep 01 '26

Hey even in northern Ohio we can have fresh fruit year round in 2026 :)