Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads…
I’m not too fond of the goo.
I don’t eat the guts either.
Yeah, scrapple isn’t that different than a sausage without the casing, but people who will eat a pound of processed goop as long as it comes in a styrofoam box won’t touch it.
I love all of those. I even love the really cheap sardines in a can on plain saltine crackers. My mother and I love anchovy and double jalapeno pizza unlike everyone else in the world apparently. You would be surprised the number of time we called in that order to various places only to show up to pick it up and they didn’t even start to make it because they thought it was a joke order. Please, any place that will make a pizza with cooked pineapple is never going to tell me that I am the one with odd tastes.
My current on is habanero or the closely related Scotch bonnet peppers. My local supermarket only carries them about half the time and the cashiers never know what they are or what someone could possibly want with them. They are on the very high end of the heat scale but I put them on anything I can and consume an average of 7 a day. You get used to them over time. One of the bag boys claimed that I was lying once because “nobody can eat those things” so I just plopped one in my mouth, chewed it slowly and told him how great they were before I walked out. I hope he tried to replicate that stunt in front of his friends because the result is going to be quite different for someone that doesn’t eat them regularly.
My husband thinks I’m crazy for liking milk toast. My mom used to make it for me when I wasn’t feeling well; I liked it then and I like it now.
Butter some toast (preferably whole wheat), sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, lay it in a plate, and then slide in some whole milk to come about halfway up the toast. Eat it with a spoon while the exposed part is still crunchy. The part down in the milk is pleasingly soggy and yummy.
Tony is my favorite cartoonist! He also did an absolutely hilarious strip about Skunk cheese. Perfectly sublime! I loved it so much I bought the original.
Edit: My wife bought it for me. She’s okay!
There’s an awful lot of cuisine that’s basically built to answer the question, “How do we eat this leftover bit?” My theory is that, right or wrong, many people find their family or cutlure’s recipes comforting but have a hard time accepting foreign methods, even when it’s not so different, as long as it isn’t presented as special or “elite” . On the flipside, if a foreign method is presented as something elegant, then it’s easier to accept.
After all, you’re not just eating some rubbish but a hand-crafted dish, made by guys you call Chef in a white poofy hat and everything! Of course, the reality may be that the Artisanal Applewood-smoked salsiccia with gouda-infused polenta ain’t all that different from Aunt Ethel’s sausage and grits.
Even though I’m not French, I like horse sausage and by that I mean sausage made from horse meat. Delicious!
Beef liver and Lima beans (My favorite meal as a kid)
Gefilte fish
Tongue
The one time I tried lutefisk, it seemed pretty good to me.
Those that like it will tell you that it is made from SCRAP[DEL]PLE[/DEL].
Those that DON’T like it will tell you that it is made from [DEL]S[/DEL]CRAP[DEL]PLE[/DEL].
Put it this way, it’s the parts of the pig that weren’t high enough quality for sausage. :eek:
Well, the correct way to cook scrapple is to slice it (I prefer on the thin side, maybe a quarter inch), dredge in flour, and fry it until crispy on both sides. Crispy on the outside, with just a bit of mushy in the middle. Nothing like what you are describing - no way you’d need a spoon.
Scrapple is my classic “eww” food - I can never make it while my wife is in the house (she is a heathen from New England, where they don’t even know how to spell hamburger correctly).
While on vacation in Scotland I discovered a new “eww” food - haggis. Now I love me some haggis, neeps, and tatties. For some reason didn’t gross my wife out as much as scrapple does.
The black pudding with the full English breakfasts I can do without. I choked down half a piece the first day, then started getting my breakfasts “hold the pud”.
Hey - my wife is out of town this week - I’m off to the store to get a block of scrapple. Woo-hoo!
This test my mother’s training, who taught that you NEVER tell a host/ess you don’t like what they are serving. I visited some Orthodox Jews, and ate Sabbath dinner with them, and gefilte fish was on the menu. I took the smallest piece, tried it, then ate just a little more while kind of messing it up on the plate. The rest of the dinner, especially the challah, was great.
[quote=“Marvin_the_Martian, post:51, topic:757905”]
Well, the correct way to cook scrapple is to slice it (I prefer on the thin side, maybe a quarter inch), dredge in flour, and fry it until crispy on both sides. Crispy on the outside, with just a bit of mushy in the middle. Nothing like what you are describing - no way you’d need a spoon.
Marvin, I cut my scrapple a little thicker… 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. My mother always did the dredge in flour prep before frying, but there is really no need for flour. Someday give that a try. Just slice it and throw it in the pan. It slightly changes the flavor of the outer crust… for the better in my opinion. It also eliminates the time, trouble and mess that dredging creates, and trust me, it will cook up exactly the same way. You know how it goes, you let it fry till it can slide around in the pan, which tells you it’s time to flip and brown the other side.
For years, I steadfastly refused to even try a pork rind. Even the name put me off, I think. Then when I was trying a low carb diet, I finally gave them a try. HEAVENLY PORKY BACONY GOODNESS! I am careful to eat them among my own kind, however, lest I evoke the “ewwwwws.” Braunschweiger is another food I refuse to try until someone begged me and I was hooked. Maybe I should try scrapple for the Pork Trifecta.
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Yes, I know. Southern BBQ “hash” is scrapple in its embryonic form…eaten soft, unfried, and later in the day than breakfast.
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I first visited Scotland two years ago and discovered that I LOVED haggis, too!
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I agree on the black pud. I’m not fond of any blood sausage, really. It doesn’t really taste of anything. WHITE pudding, however, is delicious. It tastes like haggis and scrapple! (Meat and organs and fat, minus the blood)
Ok, I’m from Pennsy, but not from scrapple country. I have had it though, and from people who made it themselves.
No flouring, but you fry it twice. Crisp the first side, flip it and crisp the second side. Squish it down and the soft middle will ooz out all the sides. You want to fry this too, so flip it until crispy, then flip it again. Nothing to be eaten with a spoon here, what you wind up with is a flat piece of crispy, fried pork goodness. It’s wonderful with some maple syrup on a plate with pancakes and fried eggs.
Pork rinds are awesome and I don’t why anyone would think they are anything but that except for religious reasons. They are basically a more natural and arguably, more healthy, version of other common snacks in the puffed snack category. If someone won’t eat pork rinds but they will eat Cheetos, that says something hypocritical about them. If they were invented today and marketed differently, they would be considered a triumph in avant garde gastronomy that would be sold from only the most pretentious hipster food trucks before they were rolled out to Trader Joes and then Whole Foods.
My weakness that I get called on frequently is Tijuana Mama hot pickled sausages. They are sold in gas stations all across the country for my benefit apparently because I have never seen anyone else buy one. Some of them have been sitting in their display box for years judging by the dust on the package but that is no worry. Like Twinkies, they never truly go bad because they are already very well embalmed. I don’t even want to imagine where the name comes from because the hot, vinegary taste has very strong notes of the douche from a Mexican prostitute after a really busy night but there is something oddly appealing about the things. The ingredient listing gives hints of what you are about to experience but even that doesn’t do it justice.
“Mechanically Separated Chicken, Pork, Flavoring, Soy Protein Concentrate, Salt, Corn Syrup Solids, Less than 2% of: Beef, Paprika, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Red 40. Pickled in Vinegar, Water, Salt, Red 40.”
Here is one review:
“I love these so I had to order a pack to take with me while camping. While I was out in the woods my friends and I decided to try roasting some on the open fire. It was when the smell floated around in the air that we began to notice a set of red eyes peeking out from the trees. One of my friends were high and ran into the tent, leaving just me and 2 others to deal with whatever it was. Turns out it was a wolf, but it stood on two feet. Thinking it wanted the sausages we had we threw it all at it and surely enough it snarled them up and went on its way. Couldn’t be more thankful to these sausages.”
In other words, they are awesome and much better than their competitor, the Firecracker. I love the Tijuana Mama.
Braunschweiger vs. liverwurst is a regional battle, in my opinion.
Growing up in Cleveland, the liverwurst I got was smooth and creamy and spreadable. You would spread it over sour seedy Jewish rye, put thin slices of onion on top, and eat it open-faced with cold beer.
Liverwurst in a New York delicatessen is denser, and can be sliced on a commercial deli slicer. Almost as dense as bologna. You put individual slices on the bread like any other cold cut.
In places where Hard Liverwurst is the rule, and you want the spreadable Cleveland-style liverwurst, you buy “braunschweiger” in individual tubes and cut into it yourself.
Liverwurst probably deserves its own thread.
I just remembered that I can buy delicious spreadable liverwurst in the Polish delicatessen sixteen blocks from my house in Brooklyn.
What probably matters is if you buy your liverwurst from a sausage maker who is Polish, German, Ukranian, Czech, or whatever.
There’s been a lot of talk here about sausage, which I love. Polish Kielbasa is the only one that has me saying eww to myself, every time I give it a try. I buy Hillshire Farm’s brand. Maybe that’s the problem… I could be buying the wrong brand. Or maybe it’s the ways I’ve prepared it. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. I tried just frying it. It was horrible. YUK! It was filled with nasty tasting juices. So next time I boiled it, changed the water, boiled it again, changed the water, boiled again, then made slits in the skin and fried it till browned. It was cooked to death… the nasty juices were miraculously all gone, along with flavor of any kind. Anybody got tips on how to properly prepare Polish Kielbasa? I’m sure it wonderful when it’s cooked right.