Peaches. Definitely peaches. When I was a kid, it was always served with evaporated milk, making the juices a nasty, congealed mess of a substance. Never really understood the appeal of evaporated milk, especially when the other tinned milk product - condensed milk - is so sweet, unctuous and awesome.
It was a long time before I knew fruit cocktail came out of a can. I never saw it until it was already suspended in a matrix of "red" flavored Jell-O. My favorite part of that was the Cool-whip on top. Thanks grandma. No one ever made desserts by combining other packaged desserts into finely balanced meta-desserts better than you.
The grapes consistency was always a wild card. It's funny because I'd eat them first as they were my least favorite.
As long as we're bringing up Elmer's glue, wasn't one of the small joys of childhood to peel that stuff off your fingers after shop class? It really is the little things...
Peaches FTW! As an aside, at Thanksgiving and Xmas we would add whipped cream and marshmallows to this stuff to make what we call down here "heavenly hash", though I understand that northerners call the same stuff "ambrosia salad." The more you know!
My grandmother used to can her own spiced peaches in really big mason jars. Everything about canned spiced peaches is wrong.
