From Good Dishes from Tinned Food (1939), Ambrose Heath
Note - admittedly not molded food this time, but too good to keep to myself.
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 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 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.
There's been a lot of talk lately about what's unconstitutional and what's not, but Slate's got a question the Founding Father's never thought of: Can prison food be unconstitutionally bad?
Apparently there's a prison food so disgusting it's been the subject of numerous lawsuits. Nutraloaf, or Nutri-loaf, is a combination of vegetables, cheese, bread and raisins that can be eaten without utensils by prisoners who can't be trusted with knives. It looks, to put it indelicately, like someone ate Thanksgiving dinner, regurgitated it into a square pan, then froze and sliced it. It's often served to inmates who have misbehaved, a culinary equivalent of solitary confinement.
Prisoners in at least seven states have sued, claiming that Nutraloaf is a cruel and unusual punishment. They've lost. The Slate writer makes his own Nutraloaf, following recipes from several states, and declares California's meat-filled version the best.
So there you go kids, another reason to stay out of jail!
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.
Bored at work? High tolerance for grossness? Check out this B3TA (a juvenile, crude and quite hilarious British "arts" site) message board on "the worst thing you've ever cooked or eaten." The board is closed for posting, but there are 20 pages worth of responses. Some are almost certainly made-up, many are obscene, others so British they may be nearly meaningless to American readers (Bovril? Walkers crisps? Fry-ups?). But a lot of them are pretty darn funny.
Outstanding responses include turkey-wrapped sheep brain, roadkill badger, maggots meant for fishing bait and a chunk of cigar.
As for me, I'm going to have to pick the soggy tripe stew I ate in Argentina. Tripe is fine when all the stomach-y flavor is well cooked out, but this tasted of wet dog and gym socks and old burps, with the texture of snot-slicked rubber tubing. You?
"No matter how beautiful its carmine and orange stalks, the sight of a bunch of chard in my organic bag always makes my heart sink." -- Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries
A boyfriend once told me that if I ever wanted to make him cry, I could serve him scrambled eggs on a Wednesday night in the winter. I had no particular interest in making him cry (though that changed later on...), of course, but I asked him why. He wasn't especially keen to elaborate, but it had something to do with childhood, and his mother having choir practice, and his now-estranged father taking over kitchen duties the only way he knew how.
My best friend's husband is only now, at 35, accepting small wisps of mayo on his sandwiches after an incident 25 years ago involving his older, stronger brother, a spatula, and a family-sized jar of Hellmann's. My own grandfather, the child of immigrants who settled in a small Pennsylvania town, refused garlic for the first several decades of his life for fear of, in his words, "smelling Italian". It breaks my heart to know that, and it absolutely underscores the massive emotional impact that certain foods can have on us.
Food is uniquely powerful in that besides our multi-sensory involvement with it, it also becomes part of us. While other aesthetic details -- songs, smells, etc., may imprint themselves on our memories of situations both joyful and otherwise, they're not as likely to, well, make you feel like you're gonna hurl. It goes deeper than an aversion to taste or scent or mouth-feel. Food certainly warms the soul, but it can also make it heave.
My trigger food? Tuna-noodle casserole. And no, I don't wanna talk about it.
What are the foods that hit you where you live? Let it out in the comments -- we're here for you.
I always keep an eye out for new and limited edition candies when I'm at the store. The candy companies love putting them out and, frankly, most of us know what the originals taste like. It's interesting to compare old and new to see what works and what doesn't. But even I will admit that things are getting a little out of hand when you can venture into what was once the candy aisle and see that not only has it been replaced entirely with different kinds of limitededitionHershey'sKisses, but that it has been expanded to cover four aisles, making room for all the other new varieties of old candies.
How far can manufacturers and retailers go with this trend? Cotton and Sand , getting more than a little annoyed with the overload of not-so-special releases, came up with some as-yet-unrealized (thankfully!) candy bar concepts that poke fun at the overwhelming selection candy consumers now face. Kit Kat Malt Liquor sounds like the best of the bunch, but I think I'll pass on Vegetable Skittles, Seafood Gumbo Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers Bacon Bars.
When you think of the human body in relation to food, chances are you think about the fact that food is what keeps the body going. This is not the only way that the body and food can beconnected, however. Nyotaimori, for example, is the practice of dining on sushi off a naked body and, especially considering that the "plate" is usually an attractive woman, it is an expensive experience. The practice is relatively popular in Japan when compared to its occurrence in other countries, but it can be found elsewhere, too.
Not wanting to loose points for originality, the Japanese have come up with another way to associate the body and food. In this rather disturbing mashup, a sculpted human body is placed on a dining table where people can "operate" on it, eating what they find inside. Unlike Operation, this body actually appears to bleed, as well.
Today (January 26th) is Australia Day and one way that some of our friends down in summery Australia are celebrating is with Vegemite gelato.
The combination sounds slightly horrifying to anyone who doesn't already love Vegemite, the salty brewers' yeast paste that, like Marmite, is popular on toast in many parts of the world, but for those who enjoy its flavor, the combination is proving to be a popular seller for its creator. Gherardo Deflorian is from Italy and has a gelato shop, Gelateria Cremona, in Brisbane. Not a fan of Vegemite himself, he thought that the flavor would be unique, a little controversial and a bit more interesting than the same old flavors that everyone uses. He had to have his customers taste the gelato in progress, as he just couldn't stomach the concoction himself, but it has been met with positive feedback from gelato (and Vegemite) fans who say that "it reminds them of when they were little and they had Vegemite on toast with butter."
The idea behind most food websites, food blogs included, is to write about good food. Good recipes, excellent restaurants and tasty products are among the things frequently written up on these sites. Wild Recipes has a slightly different goal, however. The site is dedicated to the weirdest, most outrageous - by which they usually mean disgusting - foods that people actually eat.
Old fashioned scrapple, Rocky Mountain oysters, head cheese and brains are all included on the site, but there are far stranger dishes than the ones that simply involve cooking the less appetizing bits of animals. For example, how would you feel about a Spam milkshake (pictured) with anchovies, mustard and beer? Or would you be likely to put a few slices of Cheddar cheese in your morning coffee then "slurp down the glob of melted cheese" once you've finished off the liquid? Granted, the cheese coffee is unappealing in a way that is different from the "oysters," but that doesn't make it any less disgusting.
Most of the entries have recipes should you be so inclined to try them and there are seven pages of dishes to choose from, and just about all of them are accompanied by a story describing how the submitter first came across the dish.
I don't honestly think that the KFC Famous Bowl looks appetizing. It is a bowl containing layers of mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, fried chicken pieces and shredded cheese. The idea is that, unlike most fast food meals, it actually has the same components as a real homestyle dinner. Why you would want to have all those things mushed together is clearly a matter of personal taste, but it is safe to say that you are much better off combining your own homemade ingredients than buying KFC's concoction, even if the fast food chain is eliminating trans fats from their recipes. Homemade will taste better and will probably be less fattening. A regular Famous Bowl has 720 calories and 34 grams of fat. The nutritional content of a homemade one will depend on your personal recipes for each of the components, but if you want to go really low-fat, you can always try Hungry Girl's KFC-Ya Later Bowl. At 285 calories and 6.5g of fat, her madeover bowl has less than half the salt and almost half the carbs of the original.
If you are looking for ways to beat your lunchtime fast food cravings (and stories about E. coli aren't enough), take a look at Court TV's list of the ten worst things found in fast food meals. Since it's Court TV, you can guess that they're not talking about trans-fats, either. Their list includes the following items, though you'll have to check out their list for the full details on each item, as well as info on any subsequent lawsuits:
In 1995 an Alabama man found a condom in a burger at a McDonald's
In 2004, an Ohio man found some skin (part of a thumb) in and Arby's sandwich.
In 2005, a man found the whole finger - a different one - in some Kohl's frozen custard.
The employees at an Oregon Jack in the Box, "for their sole amusement," added a variety of disturbing things (acid, soap, phlegm, human hair and staples) the burgers of at least one couple.
A Virginia Beach firefighter found two used bandages Quarter Pounder at McDonald's in 1994 (My roommate in college found one in the pizza at the cafeteria, but that didn't make the list).
A Tennessee man (allegedly) bit into a hypodermic needle in a Big Mac in 2000.
There are four more disturbing "found" items on CourtTV's list, but, frankly, six is really more than enough for me. And you can bet that I'll be looking closely the next time I hit the drive-thru on a road trip. Better safe than sorry!
There's been a lot of talk lately about what's unconstitutional and what's not, but 
A boyfriend once told me that if I ever wanted to make him cry, I could serve him scrambled eggs on a Wednesday night in the winter. I had no particular interest in making him cry (though that changed later on...), of course, but I asked him why. He wasn't especially keen to elaborate, but it had something to do with childhood, and his mother having choir practice, and his now-estranged father taking over kitchen duties the only way he knew how.
When you think of the human body in relation to food, chances are you think about the fact that food is what keeps the body going. This is not the only way that the body and food can beconnected, however. 
Today (January 26th) is 
The idea behind most food websites, food blogs included, is to write about good food. Good recipes, excellent restaurants and tasty products are among the things frequently written up on these sites. 
If you are looking for ways to beat your lunchtime fast food cravings (and 
10 More Dirty Restaurant Tricks
5 Things You Didn't Know About Turducken
10 Catchiest Food Jingles We Love to Hate
