Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (12 page)

“Before we get
started…what would you prefer to be called? Can I call you Marj?”

“That’s
fine . . . Just don’t call me oregano. It’s
really
irritating how often
people mix us up – sure, we’re the same
genus
but c’mon, we’re ENTIRELY
DIFFERENT SPECIES!

Anyway,
I’m
obviously
milder and sweeter than oregano. The only thing we have in
common is the antioxidant thing, and that’ll be passé soon.
”

“You’ve made it clear
that you want to distance yourself from your cousin, but isn’t it true that
oregano used to be known as ‘wild marjoram?

Aren’t you, in fact,
trying to have it both ways? Isn’t it your hope that, if someone runs out of
oregano, they might reach for
you
instead?”

“That’s
outrageous! Look, I’ve always been open about my family. I don’t deny that my
legal
name is ‘
Origanum marjorana,’
but that’s not how I define
myself
.

After
all
,
I’m also a member of the mint family, and some people say I remind
them of thyme. These are all just labels. Do labels really matter?”

“Well, actually we—need
the labels so we know what’s in the different jars—

“But
do we ever
really
know what’s in
any
jar? Nobody knew I could
talk
,
because nobody cared. Well, now I’m giving an interview! I don’t hear oregano
talking!”

“On a less . . . confrontational
note, how long have you been in the seasoning game? I know you’ve been around
since at least 2008, because that’s when I got most of my spices. But I
understand you’ve been around longer than that, am I right?”

“First,
let me correct you. I’m an herb, not a spice. A lot of us are, we just get
stuck with the spices because nobody makes an ‘herb  rack.’

As
to your question, lemme just say that, in ancient Egypt, I was used to appease
the gods during embalming. THE GODS THEMSELVES, I TELL YOU! Anyway – yeah, I’ve
been around a while.”

“Many people believe
you have healing powers, and it’s said that you can cure dozens of conditions from
sleep apnea to tonsillitis to anxiety, in addition to assuaging grief and
deflecting bad luck. Do you support these outlandish claims?”

“Look,
I may be a plant, but I’m not stupid. Of course I can’t cure somebody’s
tonsillitis. I was
just
talking with my friend Rosemary about these
whack-job aromatherapy people.”

“I
think it all started with one loony-tune herbalist in the sixteenth century,
who claimed that smelling me “mundifieth the brayne.” Not that some people
couldn’t benefit from a little brain mundifying . . .

So
I’m not claiming to be medicinal, alright? I
will
say that if you use me
as part of a nice rub on some leg of lamb,
that
might cure a lot of your
ills. Oh, and if you find me on top of a grave, the dead person is guaranteed a
good afterlife. That one’s true.”

“Some would say that
you’re too sensitive, and that may have led to your image problem. How do you
respond?”

“I
don’t think I’m overly sensitive. Sure, I don’t do well with frost, or even cold,
and I prefer well-drained soil, but who doesn’t? And I really need full sun
exposure. And, I need a lot of room to spread out. Other than that, I think I’m
pretty easy going.”

 “Let’s get back to the
subject of cooking. At the moment, you’re thought of as an unusual spice—sorry,
herb
—but you’ve been popular in the past. How do you plan on regaining
your popularity?”

“If
people knew how versatile I am, we wouldn’t have to have this discussion.”

“Trying
French cooking? There’s a little thing called
herbes de Provence
that
you can’t even DO without me.

Feeling
like sausage? Hell, in Germany I’m
known
as the ‘sausage spice.’ I know
I’m an herb, but you can’t tell the Germans
anything
. And if you’re into
British food, you can always try me with goose and chestnuts.

Just
. . . try me on something. Please. I’m getting desperate. At least try me in
some meatloaf, would ya?”

There you have it. A
revealing, even heartbreaking look at one herb’s fight for respect. But on a
deeper level, isn’t marjoram speaking for all of us?

I have accumulated a
small library of weird old books, mostly from thrift stores, and was delighted
to remember some vintage cookbooks in my collection. I thought I’d look through
them for some ideas.

 After all, it’s not
like food has changed much in the last hundred years. We eat pretty much the
same stuff our grandparents did, right? It’s just the technology that’s
changed, right?

When
I looked at my 1927 Piggly Wiggly Cookbook, I had the idea to do a “Julie and
Julia” sort of project, where I cook all the recipes in the book.

I
didn’t get much farther than the ‘jellied chicken and oyster consommé.’ That’s
wrong on so many levels. Jellied chicken . . . jellied anything in soup . . . chicken
and oyster…

If that sounds like a
big bowl of ‘yikes,’ how about ‘pickled pigs feet’? That has the bonus of being
both vile AND gelatinous! Incidentally, the fact that something’s ‘pickled’
doesn’t offset the fact that you’re eating
feet
. And ‘codfish
balls’
?
Write your
own
joke for that one.

The oddest thing I
learned from the
Piggly Wiggly Cookbook
is that people in the twenties
used something called Fluffo, which, as best I can tell, was whipped, aerated
lard. I have a feeling
that
may have been the actual cause of the Great Depression.

I could see myself
trying some of these ‘vintage foods,’ on a dare, or as a contestant on ‘Fear
Factor.’ I won’t be
cooking
any of them, and I probably won’t see them
as the ‘special’ at any restaurants I’m likely to visit.

But there are two things
I
frequently
see on menus that I will avoid like . . . jellied chicken.
Those would be eggplant and beef liver.

Eggplant would be fine,
except for its taste and its texture. I guess for most people, there is one
food item that they not only don’t enjoy, but actually don’t
understand
.
For me, it’s eggplant.

There’s an ‘eggplant
recipe database’ online with
3,116
recipes, or, as I refer to them,
‘ways to disguise eggplant.’ Now you can try to trick me by adding other words
after
it like ‘parmigiana’ and ‘catalana’ and ‘creole,’ but at some point, I will get
to the eggplant part, and I will
not
enjoy it.

As far as liver goes, let
me first admit an inconsistency. I have no problems with a little schmear of
chicken liver on a sandwich. I have issues with a big slab of cow organ on a
plate.

People will tell me,
“You just haven’t had liver the way
I
make it,” to which I usually respond, “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to
eat it no matter
how
it’s prepared, since it’s the organ that processes
toxins out of the body.”

If you’re on a
masochistic search for ‘food’ you’re not supposed to eat, you need to go to a State
Fair. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of people stand in long lines in
stifling heat for the opportunity to stuff their pieholes with items they would
never eat outside the fairgrounds.

Usually this is because
of humanity’s strange obsession with food on a stick. I can’t picture a
restaurant
offering
deep-fried butter or chocolate-covered bacon on a
plate for ten bucks, but put that crap on a stick, and we’ll buy two of each!

I’d also like to take a
moment to tell potential state fair vendors something:
ENOUGH WITH THE
CHEESE!
. I like a smidge of gruyere as much as the next guy, but at last
year’s State Fair, I think there was a booth selling cheese-filled cheese.

It’s the weird
combinations you find at a State Fair that bother me. Let me explain. Chocolate
is good. Bacon is good. That doesn’t mean chocolate and bacon are good
at the same time
.

 I mean, sex is good,
and bicycling is good, but I wouldn’t recommend having sex ON a bicycle. Just
stop screwing with the natural order of things. What’s next—lamb soda?

There is one bizarre
food hybrid that makes sense to me. I have to give credit to the visionaries at
Domino’s Pizza, who sell something called an ‘Oreo pizza.’ It’s the size and
shape of a pizza . . . and it’s made out of Oreos.

This idea obviously
came from someone in their marketing department who smokes pot, because only a
stoner would think, “I really just want to eat a bunch of cookies, but I’d like
to
pretend
I’m having an actual meal.”

How would you like to
create the next trendy State Fair food item? It’s easy—just use the following handy
chart!

 First, choose one item
from each column . . .

Now
use the two food items in any order, along with one of the following phrases:

“dipped
in,” “wrapped in, “
or
“stuffed with”

Then decide how to serve
it:

“on
a stick”
or
“in a cup”

Now, who wants Broccoli
Stuffed Alligator On a Stick? Show me a kid who
wouldn’t
want to try
some Trout Wrapped in Licorice! Even Grandma might try a cup of Almonds Dipped
in Duck Fat!

MYSTERY DISHES

One
would think that, if I were taking a picture of something, I would
also
write down what it was. Since I don’t, I have a lot of pictures of . . . food.