Culinary Poll #52: Horrid and Horrible Happenings

[Daniel Rogov]

It is said that the grave of Edgar Allan Poe is haunted for once a year for more than 50 years, a man appears, he dressed entirely in black, wearing a black fedora and a black scar, using a cane. He enters the cemetery, walks directly to Poe's grave and always leaves behind a bottle of Cognac and three red roses. Despite having been seen on many occasions, attempted photographs have all come out as blurred as if they had been exposed to radiation and all attempts to encounter the man have failed as if he had vanished into the night shortly after leaving his gifts.

In honor of Halloween let us leave ghosts behind for a moment but let us describe the single most horrid, horrible or out-and-out ghastly thing that has ever happened to us in a culinary manner. As in the similar wine poll, our experiences may include things that happened in reality, in your imagination or even in a dream.

[Dave R]

Scrapple

[Salil Benegal]

Cafeteria food. Two semesters of it as an undergrad in Chicago before I moved to an apartment and started cooking for myself.

[Dave R]

And just speaking in general, any food I have had while hospitalized. Hospital cooks must be the ones that were not good enough at cooking to even get a job in a dorm cafeteria.

[Carrie L.]

Scrapple

HA!!!!!!!!!!!
Agreeing with gusto. And, it was the first trip accompanying my ex husband (then boyfriend) to meet his parents in Pennsylvania. I can still feel the crunch between my molars. Ewwww.

[Carrie L.]

Okay, my real entry is something that happened when I was about 18 after a family trip in the Florida Keys. We caught tons of seafood. Spiny lobster, grouper, snapper, who knows what else. My Dad and brothers cleaned and fileted everything and put it into our RV's freezer. We then drove to Miami International, parked the RV there and boarded a flight to the Virgin Islands for more fun. While there, we had heard news reports of a decomposing body being found in a trunk at MIA, but I digress...
When we arrived back in Florida a week later, we opened the door to the RV to the most horrific smell. Well, what we first thought was a decomposing body that someone had stashed, turned out to be all of our lovely seafood. Apparently, we had a leak in the freon line or tank (can't remember the details now.) The goulish part of this is that all that was left of the seafood was a bunch of sqirming maggots and flies. Definitely the stuff of nightmares for a teenaged girl.

[Alan Wolfe]

I love scrapple. Not quite as much as bacon, but a lot. We can't get it here in WV very often, and when available is not the best brand. It's a shame. Pepperidge Farm is a good brand. It's the crunch, that crusty browned outside that makes it so tasty, and there's lots of it when sliced about 1/4 inch thick and gently fried until crispy.

[Carrie L.]

It's the crunch, that crusty browned outside that makes it so tasty, and there's lots of it when sliced about 1/4 inch thick and gently fried until crispy.

I was assuming the crunch was bone fragments.

[Alan Wolfe]

Ground-up hooves and teeth maybe? But I agree, you wouldn't want to watch it being made.

[Karen/NoCA]

My fiancée and I were invited to the home of a married couple for dinner. My beloved was blown away by the stuffed Cornish games hens the hostess served. I was very jealous, because I knew nothing about cooking and besides, this girl constantly flirted with my guy at social events we both attended. After we were married, I decided to cook those game hens and found the exact recipe in my 1963 Better Homes and Gardens we received as a wedding gift. I followed the recipe to perfection, and when I pulled those lovely browned birds out of the oven I was very proud of myself as I served my new husband his dinner. When he was pulling the wild rice out of the cavity, his fork grabbed a bag full of parts and as he picked it up, he said, "what is this doing in here?" I was terribly embarrassed as I knew nothing of the bag, much less the parts.
To this day, I can still recall stuffing those birds and wondering why so little rice fit into the cavity. The other embarrassment was that my hubby was the former owner of a meat cutting and processing plant prior to our marriage.

[Matilda L]

The Indian market in Cusco...

Items for sale were piled high, way above head height, almost to the roof. The first stalls sold clothing, knitwear and woven goods including those Peruvian hats with the side pieces like spaniels' ears. Then there were flowers piled in profusion, bundles of herbs, carved wooden spoons and utensils, leather shoes, jewellery, figurines, dried beans and grains, fruits of all kinds in huge quantities, vegetables - including many we were not familiar with.

And THEN, we came to the meat section. There were no recognisable cuts: shapeless lumps of meat were piled a metre high on boards. Next, there were various unnamed and unnameable items piled on the benches. Entrails. Livers. Tripes. What looked like bulls' testicles. A skinned and blackened goat's head. Bulls' muzzles: just the nose, lips and front teeth. Two bulls' heads dripping in a basin, with most of the meat stripped off and the horns still on. A bucket of live frogs. A large dead octopus (... and so far from the sea).

No refrigeration, no covering. There were not that many flies, but what flies there were, were free to walk on this stuff at will. This was at three in the afternoon, and it had been there all day, and was drying and browning at the edges and not smelling completely fresh. It was ghastly. Shocked me to my lily-livered middle class western core.

[Barb Downunder]

Sitting in the lunch room at work, a colleague was eating a piece of chicken and we commented that we had never seen rice stuffing in chicken before, she said ? what rice stuffing? and then it began to move......

[Charlie Dawg]

The scariest food story that happened with me began long ago, when I was still a little kid, but old enough to remember.
Every summer my grandparents would rent a house, or rather a room in somebody’s house for a summer in some remote village, with no running water and thus the shower was a small surrounding outside in the back yard with a tank of water above that got heated by the day’s son. There was electricity in the house, as far as I remember. But the stove was an old, wood burning Russian stove, that would cook food during the day and by night it would give out heat to the whole house, not that you needed during the summer, but when few times we went back there in the winter, that very stove had a place that was used as a bad and it was the most comfortable place to sleep I’ve ever had in my life.

Oops sorry, back to cooking.

To make an omelet for breakfast, I remember going straight into the chicken coop and picking up couple of still warm eggs, while my grandfather would go to a neighbor to pick up a glass of still warm goat milk (I love goat milk). Diner or lunch was either growing in the back yard or walking in the front yard. One day, the woman of the house sent her son to get a chicken for soup. I was playing in the front yard at the time. He grabbed a chickens, picked up an ax and chop - the had fell on the side of a stump he used as a cutting table. But this is where the horrific part of the story only starts. After chopping the head off, he then threw the chicken on the ground and all of a sudden this headless creature started to run. It ran toward me and I was standing there frozen, paralyzed with fear. Thank G-d a dog saved my life, the mutt puppy that was living in the yard, apparently found running headless chicken to be somewhat of a toy and run to it and grabbed it before it got to me. Thank G-d because I would have probably died on a spot if it would run into me. The incident really affected my whole life. I am very much afraid of birds. As a child I had plenty of nightmares with headless or two headed chickens walking around, brrrrrr.

In the late evening, when son sat down, and it got cool outside we sat in the gazebo and had a most wonderful hearty fresh soup, the one only a farm/village woman can make. Nothing fancy, but the taste was amazing.

[Daniel Rogov]

Charlie, Hi...

A frightening experience for sure, but not all that uncommon. Indeed many decapitated chickens seem to be "running" and even flapping their wings after their heads and bodies have been separated. What may make it even more frightening is that the running chicken is actually quite dead

Truth is though that the chicken is not actually running. Fowl store a great deal of adrenalin in their muscle tissue and once the brain has been separated from the body that adrenalin generates a kind of internal electrical impulse, that in turn causing the legs to pump and the wings to flap for a short time Gruesome to see but because there is no brain connection the bird is feeling no pain.

What has evolved from this experience is the expression "running around like a chicken with its head cut off", that generally referring to people who are performing aimless tasks, often in a circular and meaningless manner.

If you think that's bad, try ordering the tiny little snails that are served, often in a deep brandy sauce, in Catalunia and are considered a specialty of Barcelona. If you see the snails seeming to move about on the plate, fear not, they are not dead snails coming back to haunt us but simply a reflection that those mini-snails are indeed not quite dead after the cooking. Death ol comes once they have been well chewed and are reposing in your stomach.

est
Rogov

[Charlie Dawg]

Hi, Daniel, I actually understand all of that now, especially because I am familiar with kosher Slaughtering. But try to explain that to a 5 or a 6 year old .

I’ve slaughtered few chickens my self few times, but to prevent the above experience I tied their legs and hang them on a hook, before cutting the throat. And you are right they do flip the wings as if they are trying to fly, though they are of course dead.

[Daniel Rogov]

To know how so-called modernity and horror can walk hand in hand, one must read the thread posted by Larry Greenly at viewtopic.php?f=14&t=27927

Best
Rogov

[Bill Spohn]

Have a container of milk leak into the carpet of the car on the way home from the store.

Toss out the carton and mop up most of the milk. Don't finish because you are going away for the weekend.

Park car in sun for two days. Come back. Open car door.Just about keel over, and then have to drive it home.....

[Jenise]

A colleague who was in love with egg salad sandwiches brought one to work on a Thursday. He didn't eat it, but left it in his desk overnight figuring, wrongly, that the air conditioning would be enough to keep it cool and fresh. Over the course of the next day, an odor that was at first just mildly gassy built up over the day. We talked him out of eating the sandwich but there was no point putting it in the office trash--it needed to be removed from the building which he promised to do when he went home early around 3:00. Around 2:00, however, there was a bomb threat made to our building and everyone was evacuated. While outside enjoying the sunshine, a group of us talked ourselves into starting the weekend early and just heading to some bar.

Our colleague had not taken the sandwich with him. You can guess what the office smelled like when we returned Monday.

[Daniel Rogov]

Ghoulish is goulish and there is no escaping that. Thus, in keeping with the themes of Halloween in general and The Night of the Living Dead and the Silence of the Lamb in particular, two recipes for cooking people. I do, of course, suggest that if we are going to get into this we should realize that becase carnivorous animals are not usually very tasty (it is said they have a bitter taste), best bet for cooking is an at least relatively young vegan or vegetarian.


Marinated Leg of Person

1 leg, about 3 kilos
6 cups dry cider
1 kilo carrots, sliced thinly
8 medium onions, sliced thinly
16 juniper berries
8 leaves sage, chopped
1/2 cup butter
2 whole nutmegs, grated
salt and pepper to taste

Combine half each of the cider, nutmeg and sage with 2 of the onions, the juniper berries and salt and pepper to taste. Cut the leg into slices about 1 cm. thick and over these pour the marinade. Refrigerate, covered, for 36 - 48 hours, turning the meat occasionally.

Remove the meat from the marinade and dry with toweling. Strain the marinade and to this add the remaining cider.

In a large flameproof casserole melt the butter and, over a high flame, brown the meat slices on both sides. Remove the slices, lower the flame and add the remaining onions and the carrots, cooking until the onions are softened. Pour in the marinade and bring to a boil. Add the remaining seasonings, replace the venison, cover and place in a medium oven for 1 1/2 hours. Serve hot directly from the casserole. Serves 6 - 8.


Person Stew

1 shoulder of person, about 2 1/2 kilo), dressed and cut into serving pieces
1 bottle dry red wine
1 cup olive oil
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
6 Tbsp. each bacon fat and flour
2 large onions, chopped coarsely
1 large carrot, chopped coarsely
3 stalks celery, chopped coarsely
3 cloves garlic, chopped finely
6 shallots, chopped coarsely
12 juniper berries
12 whole peppercorns
2 whole cloves
2 bay leaves, crushed
2 Tbsp. parsley, chopped
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. each thyme, oregano, basil and rosemary
salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper to taste

In a saucepan combine the wine, wine vinegar, olive oil, onions, carrot, shallots, celery, garlic, cloves and all of the herbs and spices. Bring just to a boil, immediately lower the flame and simmer for about 10 - 12 minutes. Remove from the flame and let cool for 1/2 hour.

Put the cup-up shoulder and giblets in a ceramic bowl and pour over the marinade. Marinate, covered, in the refrigerator for 2 - 3 days, turning the meat several times each day.

Remove the meat from the marinade and dry on toweling. Strain and reserve the marinade.

Sprinkle the meat with salt, pepper and cayenne pepper to taste. In a skillet melt the bacon fat and in this brown the meat, slowly on all sides. Sprinkle over with flour, stir and continue to saute until the flour is absorbed and turns light brown. Add the strained marinade and simmer, covered until the meat is tender (45 - 60 minutes). Correct the seasoning, simmer for 5 minutes longer and serve hot. Serves 6.


Let us please keep in mind that my comments and the recipes were written as little more than a form of black humor. Reading and chuckling may be appropriate but considering the preparation of any of these dishes on anything but the intellectual level is both immoral and illegal. I will definitely not accept invitations to sample any of these dishes.

Best
Rogov

[Matilda L]

No fava beans? No chianti?


The Celts celebrated Samhain about this time, marking the end of summer and that part of the year when there is more light than dark, and the start of that part of the year where the nights are longer than the days. In Latin America, the Day of the Dead is a big deal, linking back to old ideas when people held ancestors in reverence and wanted the dead ancestors to pay a visit, because their presence was seen as beneficial. Modern-day Halloween might be an excuse to pretend we're scaring each other to death, but other parallel celebrations are much more positive and joyful.