A Christmas Story

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine" is the whole joke. Ralphie chokes down cup after cup of Ovaltine for weeks just to collect enough proof-of-purchase seals to join Little Orphan Annie's Secret Circle — only to decode her big radio message and find it's a Ovaltine commercial. It's one of the most quoted anticlimaxes in movie comedy, and it's the reason Ovaltine gets its own recipe below.

The soap-in-the-mouth punishment is never actually food. Ralphie gets a bar of Lifebuoy soap in his mouth for saying "the word," and later imagines his own future where he goes blind from soap poisoning — vivid, but there's no dish to cook from a bar of soap.

Jean Shepherd narrates the whole film as his own grown-up voice, and much of the family's daily food — the Old Man's coffee, the constant leftovers — is mentioned only in narration, never actually shown plated.