Inspired by my recent question about why Valerian smells so bad…
I take Valerian capsules every night to help me sleep. They smell like Satan’s asshole. They smell STRONG. They’re so strong that my hands smell bad after taking them and I have to go wash my hands. And yet, every night I put them in my mouth and swallow them.
What stenchtastic things are you willing to put in your mouth?
Bad smells make me gag. the strong vitamin smell from multi-vitamins can make me gag (I hold my breath to actually get them down of course). I cannot eat stinky things.
I have vague memories of reading somewhere about a wedding tradition in France. Apparently on the morning after the wedding the bride and groom drink a concoction of chocolate and champagne that smells indescribably terrible but tastes delicious.
I wish I knew more about this tradition – I’d love to try it.
I’ve eating some delicious but nasty smelling french cheese before, and I’ll do it again happily.
Seriously, I purchased the cheese, put it in my car and then went in a shop to purchase a gift (I was attending a Wine & Cheese shower). 30 minutes later when I returned to my car it REEKED like dirty feet, but damn was that cheese tasty.
There’s a wine and cheese place on Michigan Avenue called Eno’s that I’ve been to a couple of times. I had often heard that cheese that smells bad tastes great. They had a sampler of their more odoriforous cheeses, and that’s what I chose.
Well. I only remember one of the three cheeses offered, and not by name. It smelled honestly something like shit. Not exactly like shit. But something that reminded me of shit.
No problem, right? It ought to taste like heaven, right? Here’s the thing, in a story like this the cheese should either give me an orgasm, or make me vomit in front of everyone.
It did neither. It was strictly meh. I would not order it again.
And I didn’t even get a good story to tell out of it. For a cheese that smells like shit that’s really lame.
Asafoetida (hing, a.k.a devil’s dung…seriously) by itself is pretty awful, but I eat it in certain dishes. I don’t even cook with it myself except by using prepared spice blends, which isn’t at all the way I cook. But I’m not keeping that stuff around in pure form.
Is this about what we think smells bad, or what other people do? Because I don’t think I’ve eaten anything that I thought smelled bad and liked it. I don’t think moldy blue cheese smells bad, or pig guts, or stinky tofu, and I love those things. But licorice smells like a candy cane ice picked into your brain via your sinuses, and I can’t even think about putting the crap into my mouth.