Agree 100% with @MagicEyes - I make one of Alton Browns about every other year:
Note though, this is made with quality nuts, dried fruit, and ample spices (and a LOT of booze). The ones @Gatopescado mentions are likely the mass market full of day-glo “froot” and other crap that are indeed nothing more than decorative and nearly inedible. It’s kind of like a real wreath, made of fresh evergreen branches smells aromatic and evocative. A store-bought smells (and is most likely is) plastic. So cheap mass produced imitations to evoke the image of the tradition.
Then again, brandying a fresh fruitcake every two days for 2-3 weeks is a chore. Worth it in the end though!
I heard a woman talk about how her daughter had baked a fruitcake, and when it said, “Soak the cake in brandy”, she poured brandy into a bowl, took the cake out of the pan, and turned it into fruitcake soup. Oops!
It sure is. My grandmother could make delicious fruitcake. She’d start making her Christmas one in October, and while it was a lot of work (and a decent amount of brandy), she always said it was worth it when she saw how much everybody liked it at Christmas.
And when my father met my mother in the former Jugoslavia, he said to her: “Nejedem ribe, nejedem ptice, i nejedem iznutrice” (I had to quote the original – it rhymes). This means: “I don’t eat fish, I don’t eat poultry, and I don’t eat entrails”. He holds very firm to this. In fact, he mostly eats vegetarian options.
I will gladly eat the first two, but generally avoid entrails. You won’t see me ordering liver ‘n’ onions. I keep an open mind, I will eat haggis and liver pate, but dishes that are based around a big chunk of organ are not for me.
Some of the things people mention upthread seem to me to be more a matter of personal taste than things that are “not food but are treated as food”. Giblets and offals are IMO better candidates for this. The worst meat I ever had was when I tried some (sheep? pig?) brains that my grandmother had cooked for herself, when I was about five. The only way I can describe the taste and texture is like eating a Martian.
I now live in the Czech Republic, where people eat entrails and offals more often than in North America. One dish that is common here that I just can’t get my head around is tripe soup. Basically this is like eating a thin brown sauce with pieces of gummy tripe sunk in it. I know people who love it, IMO it is one of the most superfluous dishes on the planet.
I associate the consumption of these things with want and poverty – note that both the country from which my family comes and the country I now live in are former Communist countries, where in the past there were shortages. People are creatures of habit. Why do you think my grandmother bought brain for herself in Canada, which was eaten by no one else in the family? I know an elderly couple here in Prague, good friends. The husband has a relatively wealthy background – rental properties were restituted to his family after the fall of Communism. The wife comes from poverty – her parents were forced to leave the city and become peasants when Communism came due to their undesirable political background. Her father died when she was small and her mother was too ill to care for her and her sister, so they eventually became wards of the state. She says that she is still happy to eat very simple Czech dishes (e.g. “dill sauce”, served typically over bread dumplings, with a hard-boiled egg or maybe a small piece of meat thrown in), even though she no longer has to, but her family doesn’t care for such fare.
About a decade ago, I binge-watched TV reality shows about border security in Canada, the UK, and Australia. There was a remarkable episode where, in a post office in a major Australian city, the customs officers X-rayed a parcel from an Asian country and all these little skeletons appeared in the image. They opened the parcel, and what do you think they found inside? A ration of dried rats. For obvious reasons, this shipment had to be destroyed. It really makes you think, though. Someone moves from a land where perhaps one needs to eat “anything” in order to survive, to a place like Australia where nothing is in want, and still they find it desirable to have someone ship dried rats to eat from the old country. Just shows how much people can be set in their ways.
Quick comment on Brussels sprouts. As in the quote above, I thought they were gross when I was served a plate of them as a kid. As an adult, I have had them in smaller portions and find them fine when they’re not the dominant ingredient. I actually like them when a few of them are used as soup vegetables in e.g. beef soup. The boiling also softens the flavor. I would say the same thing about peas - I sometimes had to eat a whole plate of them for dinner as a kid and dreaded it, but when they’re in soup or a small side portion, they’re OK. I find that some “gross” foods may be OK when consumed in small amounts. Extreme case in point: if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s mayonnaise. Of any variety whatsoever. I gag at this sauce and can’t understand its wide appeal among people. But I will eat Caesar salad, the dressing of which is basically diluted mayo with anchovy added. The fish flavor offsets the eggy flavor of the “mayo” and the vinegar or whatever dilutes it to an acceptable level.
My ex-wife actually had a way to make them palatable. No idea what it was, but they were actually tasty, and I enjoyed them. Hated them when I was a kid, and Mom boiled the crap out of frozen Brussels sprouts.
Peas were fun. I liked them, and still do, but when I was a kid, they were fun to flick across the table at my sister when Mom and Dad weren’t looking. Sis didn’t complain really; she enjoyed flicking peas at me too.
Mayonnaise. It completes a BLT sandwich. You know that a diner is really a diner if it does a BLT and includes mayonnaise automatically. I don’t mind asking for it if it is not included, but a BLT without mayonnaise is like a day without sunshine.
If cucumbers are chopped in salads, they’re usually peeled. Thinly sliced, the peel is left on, for the color accent, I think.
My family always peeled cucumbers to eat as a snack. Later, when I bit into a cucumber without peeling it out of sheer laziness and I didn’t die, I got used to eating cucumbers like an apple. Cucumbers actually taste better peeled, but I’m usually too exhausted to bother with such niceties.
Persian cucumbers have skin that doesn’t taste bitter. Also they smell really good. My mean ex-boss used to tease me because I said something about how good the cucumbers smelled.
I love the type of seaweed used in Nori for sushi and those roasted seaweed snacks-- sort of nutty, with a hint of the ocean, and full of umami flavor.
I don’t think the study is necessarily baloney or any other cheap cut of over-processed meat, but as always, one can read too much into it. It basically seems to say that Japanese, eating a great deal of nori and other seaweed, develop enzymes that help them digest it and thus eat a great deal more of it. It certainly doesn’t say that North Americans can’t or shouldn’t eat nori.
I love sushi, and while I prefer the nigiri style, I like maki, too, which are sushi rolls often wrapped in nori. At a sushi restaurant we once attended (it has since moved and become considerably more upscale and expensive, not that it was ever cheap to begin with) multiple courses of omakase were always finished off with a traditional hand roll, a large piece of nori formed into a cone and stuffed with rice, chopped raw tuna, and various garnishes. It was delicious and I never had a digestive problem with any of it. I don’t know if the nori was raw or toasted, though. It was definitely crispy.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that at all; merely that studies show it may offer less nutritional value to North Americans. I myself don’t have any problem digesting it in the sense that it causes any digestive discomfort, and in fact I eat it all the time. Whether I’m getting much actual nutrition from it, or it’s mostly just harmlessly passing through me, I have no idea. I’m probably at least getting enough iodine.
That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s true in a good way! Raw oysters taste of the sea, but with an interesting flavour and subtle texture that most find quite pleasant, but obviously not all. I consider raw oysters on the half shell to be a fine treat.
At a good sushi bar I’ll even eat things like urchin and eel. But one thing I cannot abide is escargot, a fancy French word for garden slugs that I’m sure was first served as a prank. Garden slugs are pests, not food. Please don’t tell me about the anatomical differences between slugs and snails. I don’t care. They’re both slimy and repulsive.
But I do enjoy a fine variant served as an appetizer by a local restaurant. They use escargot dishes to serve garlic shrimp, immersed in garlic butter and covered in melted cheese, with fresh-baked bread rolls for soaking up the sauce. All the taste of escargot, minus the slimy slugs!
Nor do most Japanese, per the article (bolding mine):
Wondering whether the enzymes were unique to Japanese individuals, Czjzek’s team compared the microbial genomes of 13 Japanese people with those of 18 North Americans. Five of the Japanese subjects harbored the enzyme, but among the North Americans, “we didn’t find a single one,”
Yeah, I accept that there’s obviously something about them that can be appreciated, since they are obviously hugely popular, but on the occasions I have tried them (and from very good places) they simply don’t register as food to my palate; the flavour was interesting, but just like eating a mouthful of beach.
In North America, the fish is considered practically vermin, though there are avid fishermen and the like who will eat it. In central and Eastern Europe, however, it is widely consumed.
Again in the Czech Republic, the traditional Christmas Eve meal is carp, and it is usually made like schnitzel, in a batter. It typically involves a lot of picking through with one’s fingers, and separating the oily flesh from the many sharp bones, large and small, that are inside.
I will not touch this dish. I would not have the patience to separate the bones from the batter and the meat, and I would fear ingesting a sharp bone. In general, I would not eat the meat of a carp.
However, I will eat carp soup if it is carefully strained of the bones to the broth. A rather bland fish soup, but palatable.
And I will be very happy to eat Hungarian fisherman’s soup (halászlé, or alaska čorba in Serbian), the broth of which is carp-based, but which may include other kinds of fish thrown in, and which is enriched by a lot of paprika and eventually other spices.
Raw oysters taste of the sea, but with an interesting flavour and subtle texture that most find quite pleasant, but obviously not all. I consider raw oysters on the half shell to be a fine treat.