If you really want to make your Halloween party guests squeal, raise the gross-out factor of the foods.
This Halloween concoction, meant to resemble kitty litter just might take the cake with the gross-out gourmets. And don't worry, those are Tootsie rolls.
Professional chefs prepare and enjoy a huge variety of different foods, some familiar to the rest of us, some beyond our usual pantry options, unless you're prone to stocking huitalacoche ( aka corn fungus), beef cheeks and tomato foam.
But even though they possess adventurous palates and have the opportunity to try ingredients and dishes from far and wide, that doesn't mean they like everything they eat. They all have one or two foods that just don't do it for them, their own personal food Kryptonite.
Slashfood asked some of the country's top chefs which edibles top their "thanks, but no thanks" list.
Rachael Ray
The ubiquitous Rachael Ray is famous for transforming all kinds of foods into 30-minute meals, but she has a serious aversion to mayonnaise. "Mayo is a four-letter word to me and I avoid using it when I can. It's all about that texture. I even make a no-mayonnaise potato salad is perfect for picnics since you don't have to worry about spoiling."
For me, it's cured fish or perhaps cold, leftover dark-meat chicken, gnawed bare-handed and shared with my minimally patient dogs.
For my husband -- who can't tolerate the smell of the pickled herring I down like a rabid porpoise -- it's almost inevitably the nearest Chinese joint's chicken and mixed vegetables sauteed in brown sauce, chased by a bourbon Old Fashioned, muddled from the unpretty orange that tags along in the delivery bag. The cocktail, I can fully support. The gloppily sauced crinkle-cut carrots have featured prominently in several of my nightmares.
Deborah Madison: People eat what their spouses don't like a lot of the time. A number of men said of blood sausages, 'My wife doesn't like blood sausage, so when she's gone that's what I cook.'
Slashfood: How did you get started on this topic?
DM: Many years ago, I was invited to go with Oldways Preservation and Trust -- which is a food think tank out of Boston -- to a lot of Mediterranean countries. I got to bring my husband, who's an artist, and he was just a little awkward, I think. He didn't really know people but knew of them so he started asking this question kind of as a way of breaking the ice. He kept a little notebook and I never knew about this until I found it when we were moving a few years later.
SF: So many of the people you interviewed have common experiences -- they'll make a big steak or have herring. And then there were some that didn't fit the mold. What was the strangest thing you heard?
Read more about solo toast, herring and margarita mix after the jump.
Perhaps this is just indicative of the sort of folks with whom I keep company, but I've known at least half a dozen people who've used a brain can as comedic decor, and it's certainly been the butt of jokesaround the blogosphere. I cannot, however, recollect any of 'em actually popping the top and feasting. My husband's Aunt Frances, though, couldn't get enough of them as a kid in Plymouth, NC, and told me how she'd hover right by her mother in the kitchen so she could gobble down brains and eggs straight out of the hot skillet.
Who am I to argue with Aunt Frances? I picked up the can in the picture above at Harris Teeter over Christmas in North Carolina, and fixed myself some brains and eggs for breakfast this morning. Picture after the jump.
From 60 Ways to Serve Ham (1930), Armour and Company
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
From Good Dishes from Tinned Food (1939), Ambrose Heath
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
From The Heinz Book of Meat Cookery (1930), HJ Heinz Company
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
From The Silent Hostess Treasure Book (1931), Knox Gelatine
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
From The Best of Taste: The Finest Food of Fifteen Nations (1957), The SACLANT-NATO Cookbook Committee
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
From 500 Snacks: Bright Ideas for Entertaining (1941), Culinary Arts Institute
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
A while, back, I wrote a post on emotionally-based food aversions -- both my own (tuna noodle casserole), and those of loved ones (scrambled eggs, mayonnaise, garlic). Little did I know this was going to open up Pandora's icebox. More than 75,000 people weighed in on our "What food hits your yuck button?" poll, and the comments thread is at the time of this writing, 1668 strong and counting. It seems that folks have just been looking for a place to spill their long-stewing food loathings, so we've counted down the top 20, weighting them for poll votes, number of mentions in comments, and level of vitriol incurred.
Want to keep the conversation flowing? See the initial post, or hurl forth in the comments below.
My husband and I have similar tastes in many things like music, decor, 19th century English literature, mayonnaise brands, etc. It makes for pretty smooth sailing day to day, but there are a few notable exceptions -- namely that if given a jar and a fork, I'll gobble down marinated herring like a rabid porpoise, and the very sight of cured fish sends him swimming as far upstream as he can get.
In the interest of marital accord, I hold off my pesce-centric binges for times when he's out of town or at his office on a weekend, and I was very amused to learn that other friends of mine make the same sort of bargains with their partners. One friend has a similar anchovy pact with her husband, another's wife goes into a broccoli rabe munching frenzy when he's away for a day or two, and my very own grandfather acquiesced to my grandmother's wishes that he only eat Limburger outside of the house. His compromise? He set up a cheese-eating outpost in their backyard.
Do any of you have culinary agreements with a partner, family member or roommate due to their repulsion or yours? Are there any foods that trump the bonds of love or friendship? Share 'em in the comments below.
"I wanted to be The Girl Who Is Not Afraid To Order Tripe And In Fact It Makes Her Even Cooler And All The More Sexy Because She Enjoys It. Alas, it was not meant to be." Carol at French Laundry at Home
Hear, hear!* I don't know about you, but this sort of rationale is what made me a foodie. I was a fairly picky eater growing up. I wasn't so bad that I'd eat PB&J for every meal, but if they weren't like the usual meat-potato-veggie triumvirate, or something else I'd eat normally, I'd get testy. If you were at the Mexican restaurant about 25-years ago where a little blonde girl went nuts because her beef was shaved instead of ground, that was me.
But then I got older, moved to the big city, and shed many of my food inhibitions. I hated it when my friends gazed at me in disappointment whenever I wouldn't try anything. I couldn't say no when someone slaved over a hot stove to bring me a meal full of food I didn't like. Soon, eating became an adventure -- discovering new tastes, learning about the foods, making meals fresh and fun.