Free Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies by Michael Dane Page A

chicken
and oyster…
    If that sounds like a
big bowl of ‘yikes,’ how about ‘pickled pigs feet’? That has the bonus of being
both vile AND gelatinous! Incidentally, the fact that something’s ‘pickled’
doesn’t offset the fact that you’re eating feet . And ‘codfish balls’ ?
Write your own joke for that one.
    The oddest thing I
learned from the Piggly Wiggly Cookbook is that people in the twenties
used something called Fluffo, which, as best I can tell, was whipped, aerated
lard. I have a feeling that may have been the actual cause of the Great Depression.
    I could see myself
trying some of these ‘vintage foods,’ on a dare, or as a contestant on ‘Fear
Factor.’ I won’t be cooking any of them, and I probably won’t see them
as the ‘special’ at any restaurants I’m likely to visit.
    But there are two things
I frequently see on menus that I will avoid like . . . jellied chicken.
Those would be eggplant and beef liver.
    Eggplant would be fine,
except for its taste and its texture. I guess for most people, there is one
food item that they not only don’t enjoy, but actually don’t understand .
For me, it’s eggplant.
    There’s an ‘eggplant
recipe database’ online with 3,116 recipes, or, as I refer to them,
‘ways to disguise eggplant.’ Now you can try to trick me by adding other words after it like ‘parmigiana’ and ‘catalana’ and ‘creole,’ but at some point, I will get
to the eggplant part, and I will not enjoy it.
    As far as liver goes, let
me first admit an inconsistency. I have no problems with a little schmear of
chicken liver on a sandwich. I have issues with a big slab of cow organ on a
plate.
    People will tell me,
“You just haven’t had liver the way I make it,” to which I usually respond, “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to
eat it no matter how it’s prepared, since it’s the organ that processes
toxins out of the body.”
    If you’re on a
masochistic search for ‘food’ you’re not supposed to eat, you need to go to a State
Fair. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of people stand in long lines in
stifling heat for the opportunity to stuff their pieholes with items they would
never eat outside the fairgrounds.
    Usually this is because
of humanity’s strange obsession with food on a stick. I can’t picture a
restaurant offering deep-fried butter or chocolate-covered bacon on a
plate for ten bucks, but put that crap on a stick, and we’ll buy two of each!
    I’d also like to take a
moment to tell potential state fair vendors something: ENOUGH WITH THE
CHEESE! . I like a smidge of gruyere as much as the next guy, but at last
year’s State Fair, I think there was a booth selling cheese-filled cheese.
    It’s the weird
combinations you find at a State Fair that bother me. Let me explain. Chocolate
is good. Bacon is good. That doesn’t mean chocolate and bacon are good at the same time .
     I mean, sex is good,
and bicycling is good, but I wouldn’t recommend having sex ON a bicycle. Just
stop screwing with the natural order of things. What’s next—lamb soda?
    There is one bizarre
food hybrid that makes sense to me. I have to give credit to the visionaries at
Domino’s Pizza, who sell something called an ‘Oreo pizza.’ It’s the size and
shape of a pizza . . . and it’s made out of Oreos.
    This idea obviously
came from someone in their marketing department who smokes pot, because only a
stoner would think, “I really just want to eat a bunch of cookies, but I’d like
to pretend I’m having an actual meal.”

 
    How would you like to
create the next trendy State Fair food item? It’s easy—just use the following handy
chart!
     First, choose one item
from each column . . .

    Now
use the two food items in any order, along with one of the following phrases:
    “dipped
in,” “wrapped in, “ or “stuffed with”
    Then decide how to serve
it:
    “on
a stick” or “in a cup”
    Now, who wants Broccoli
Stuffed Alligator On a Stick?