When we were out doing Field Training for the AF and had nothing else to eat unless we caught it, their taste improved a bit. 
Of course we’d fight over the better tasting ones.
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I think you’re right about that. My parents were big coffee drinkers and the smell does remind me of comfort and childhood and home (and also pancakes on Saturday morning!).
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When I was smaller, I couldn’t stand when my mother came up with new chorizo recipe ideas. For instance, she used to prepare chorizo and egg tacos, chorizo and bean stew, and pasta with chorizo and tomato sauce. Chorizo still has remained a product that I don’t eat, no matter in what form is served.
Lol, all those dishes sound great. Well, maybe the pasta one is a little strange, but I’d definitely try at least once. Our kids love anything with chorizo- Mexican or Spanish.
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Your mother could cook for me! I have to resist chorizo for my health.
At school, stewed prunes or stewed dried figs for dessert and they all had to be eaten. Fresh figs were a revelation in adult life.
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Oh no, I’d forgotten about having my mother insisting we drink prune juice! Oh that was just horrible.
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My husband and I are the same way. Love the smell, but the taste? We don’t even like coffee ice cream.
It’s a little odd to me that I eat almost everything, including most things named in this thread, with enthusiasm if they are well made. But coffee, which almost every adult drinks, is foul to me.
I tried for many years to learn to eat spicier food. I finally gave up; I love all the flavors of Indian, Thai, etc. but can’t handle authentic heat. I can learn to tolerate almost any flavor, but not pain!
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‘Krautrolaten’ aka…cabbage rolls. I like the insides but boy oh boy that soggy sloppy cabbage exterior was a gagger for me.
Oh and unpasteurized milk…straight from the source. Relatives in the old country used to just bring some in from the cow in the a.m. It would sit on the back of the stove - warmish all day. separated out into it’s parts, frothy with a yellowish hue…ugh…It’s the biggest reason I haven’t touched milk since I was five. I understand this stuff now has a cult following…ya’ll can have my share.
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Glad to find some fellow condiment-haters. Yuck to ketchup, mayo, mustard, any sweet salad dressing, sweet relish, and more. Yum to cheese, ranch dressing, hot sauce, dill pickles though.
Milk is gross. But I love most things made of it: ice cream (not vanilla…too much milk taste), cheese, butter, yogurt, yum to all that. Whipped cream is overrated imo, but Boston cream is the best.
I like food so much that I can’t post on a traumatic food thread without veering back to delicious things!
Holubkys (Slovak cabbage rolls) are one of my favorite childhood foods, but I’m not sure if they’re made the same way. We ate them all the time. I rarely make them because DH won’t eat them 
I was on a tour in Russia and there was a big pot of soup in the middle of our dinner table with what looked like a giant mushroom. I love mushrooms but it was awfully chewy for a mushroom. I wasn’t too pleased after I inquired about what it was.
We had Croatian cabbage rolls (Sarma) every Christmas when I was a child. About 4 years ago, I learned the family recipe for Sarma that my Mom and her sister used (both were immigrants from Croatia) was actually an Americanized version. Croatians use pickled cabbage and no tomato sauce in their version of Sarma. I now make the authentic version (thanks to a cookbook I purchased in Croatia).
One Croatian food that I hated as a kid was Blitva (Swiss chard and potatoes). I hated Swiss chard, but after years of not eating it, I started again when my husband began planting it in our vegetable garden.
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We American-ized our’s slightly after my Baba passed away; she used fermented cabbage, sausage, ground beef/veal/pork, paprika, caraway & marjoram. I don’t eat beef/veal, and I’m definitely not fermenting cabbage 
I still have some of my Baba’s handwritten recipes, but she didn’t speak English, and my Slovak was broken at best. One of the things I couldn’t stand as a kid was Sirecz (egg cheese). We had to eat it every year for Easter, and the texture made me gag every time.
When my mom remarried she could never again cook cabbage of any kind because my sweet stepfather was really and truly traumatized by the smell. He had been a WWII POW and that’s about all that they were fed in the POW camp. We couldn’t e en go to a restaurant where they served foods like cabbage rolls.
Of all things… burgers.
I used to eat them as a kid, had one that made me sick one time, and haven’t been able to stomach a burger since.
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Same with my FIL. Except it was turnips. After he returned to the US, my MIL cooked him turnips and he went into a rage, shouting at her to never cook them again.
My Romanian grandma made cabbage rolls - a childhood fave! Interestingly, the are called Sarmli - close to the Croatian Sarma!
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My stepfather was not someone who would ever be enraged. He just told my mom he really preferred she not make cabbage or go anywhere he could smell it. It wasn’t until the whole Abu Ghraib scandal and my stepfather started having nightmares that she understood that he’d been tortured. (In a somewhat amusing family story she then insisted he go the VA for counseling. He did under protest. After the first session he came home grinning from ear to ear. See said my mom isn’t it helpful to talk to someone about all of this. “Well” said my stepfather, “the guy just put me on full disability ( my stepfather was like 80 at the time) and I’m gonna get a big monthly check so yep, it was VERY helpful.” And he claims he never had a nightmare again. He LOVED to tell that story til the day he died at 93.
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My parents had a friend who was a POW in a Soviet camp. He didn’t have a food trauma, he had a spoon trauma. Apparently, holding on to your spoon was as much as your life was worth - you lost your spoon, you couldn’t eat the food and would die.
He went back successfully to practice as doctor, but whenever he left a place where he’d eaten, friends’ houses, restaurants, his wife had to stop him outside the front door and make him hand over the spoons he’d taken so she could give them back.
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