This morning I woke up early and wandered downstairs to find you in the kitchen as usual. I took you in my hands, ‘Hey you…’ I trailed off gazing with big, love crumb eyes.

 I feel like a teenager with a heart-wrenching case of puppy love. My feelings for you are strong because you are so new to me. My head acknowledges, rationally that I am just experiencing the ‘honeymoon’ phase of our relationship, but my heart, oh my heart spins in circles wanting simply to consume you! I can’t seem to get enough. 

I’ve found the swarthy love I have been searching for ALL MY LIFE. In a grocery store, of all places. Sure, my husband doesn’t like the idea. He says it stinks. My kids, too for that matter. But their reaction is to be expected I guess. They just don’t understand. They have no grasp of depth of my feelings.

Yesterday after breakfast with my amour, I went to kiss my huband goodbye as he dashed out the door to work, only for him to quickly move his face to the side so that my kiss hit his cheek rather than his lips, ‘Eck—you smell of Marmite’ he said with an uncomfortable wince.

 Marmite! Who knew I would come to love a wasted yeast by-product so unconditionally?

 My husband may not have eyes or the palate for Marmite, but he does have more in common with it than he realizes. This fudge-colored smudge of a spread tastes exactly like my husband smelled throughout his college years—the bottom of a warm, drained beer keg the morning after a clamorous fraternity party. Let me emphasize that this is a quality much more becoming of a condiment than a hung-over, unkempt twenty-two year-old in his second senior year at university.

 But Marmite is supposed to taste like fermented, old beer because that’s pretty much what it is. Marmite is made when the good lads at the Marmite factory in Burton-on-Trent in England, trot over to their neighbors, Bass Ale and collect the wasted yeast from the brewery. This is the basis of an unusually nutritious (high in B vitamins and riboflavin), salty and sticky food product. (I say ‘product’ because I’m not sure how I feel about actually referring to Marmite purely as a food)

 I had heard about Marmite and its rather uneven reputation before moving to England. Every British person I’ve known has stood staunchly in one of two camps. Like all things worth having an opinion about, (politics, religion, Pee Wee Herman) when it comes to Marmite, Brits do seem to fall into only two categories—love or hate. I think most people hate it, but those of us who love that sludge of spread, love it deeply and madly. A smear over toast in the morning with the paper-thin piece of mature Welsh cheddar makes my heart sing (and my breath stink—seriously, like feet). Chased by a strong cup of coffee and I am flying solo for the rest of the day. Independence is good.

Maybe my initial attraction to you Marmite was precisely because you are the underdog, because most people not only don’t like you, but actively avoid you. Maybe the first time I brought you home with me, a little bit had to do with wanting to seem like I didn’t care what your reputation was—you were the bad one and I was determined to like you. But now it’s become so much more than that. I don’t like you Marmite, I love you. And I am in this for the long haul. I want to see you every morning at breakfast for the rest of my life. The end. To hell with the naysayers! I’ll stand on my dining room chair loud and proud and shout, ‘I love a yeast by-product scraped from the bottom of a brewer’s ale kettle!’ 

Forking Foreigner: Blood Sausage

Blood sausage—there, I said it. That is as gruesome as this post will get.

 But I wanted to put it out there, blood sausage. It’s not something I grew up thinking about, certainly not eating. In my small town in the middle of Ohio, Wonderbread and tuna salad ruled, not this deeply cultural food found in equally uneventful, small European villages.

Boudin Noir in France, blutwurst in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, black pudding in the UK, and in Spain it is named morcilla. Regardless of the country, they are all made from the similar ingredients: pork, herbs, spices and one key ingredient—pig’s blood. Yes, they may dress the name up, make it a bit more palatable, but take just one look at the deep purple sausage and there is no mistaking what, indeed it is.

We moved to Europe seven years ago and up until that point I had managed to avoid blood sausage for the most part. There were references to it in charcuterie class in culinary school of course, but that amounted to no more than the answer to a multiple choice question on a final exam. 

When we moved to Switzerland in 2003, blutwurst was displayed in every butcher’s shop window. It lay snugly shrink-wrapped in the supermarket meat case. It hung from the ceiling of specialty sausage-making shops. I became used to its presence, but resisted actually trying it.

Have you seen how it is made? I don’t want to talk about it. I said that mentioning the term ‘blood sausage’ was as gruesome as I would get, and I’m sticking to it.

Then a couple of years ago we moved to the UK and found black pudding; it sounds so benign, like something your granny would place down in front of you on a lace doily, in a pretty, glass cup for dessert. It’s not. It’s sausage made from the blood of pigs.

And maybe that is my hang-up—the fact that it is made mostly from blood. I mean, I am a card-carrying carnivore, I happen to love leberwurst (pig’s liver made into a paste). And, the last time we were in Scotland, my husband and I ordered Haggis (sheep’s heart, liver and lungs—for God’s sake—that are minced, mixed with herbs and oats then stuffed into its own stomach and boiled for three hours—sorry, I said things wouldn’t get more gruesome, but I think I just turned that corner) anyway, we ordered haggis and loved it. Maybe it was because we had just come from a whiskey tasting on empty stomachs, but it seemed pretty good at the time.

Strolling the sausage section of my local grocery store (and most grocery stores in the UK do have a section devoted entirely to sausages) I began to think, what up Holly Hypocrite? You’ll eat a sheep’s innards, and a pig’s liver, but not its blood? And you call yourself a foodie?

So I bought what is supposed to be the best brand of black pudding, brought it home and cooked it up for breakfast that Sunday morning. We had an official ‘Full English’ that British weekend brunch consisting of black pudding, bangers (sausages), fried eggs, grilled tomatoes, grilled mushrooms and fried bread (…and Alka-Seltzer).

In my life as an eater, there have been just a handful of foods that I simply could not swallow. My motto is, try everything, swallow most, spit-out few. Black pudding joined the ranks of the select few. And it’s not that it tasted bad—it didn’t, it tasted mostly of the herbs that seasoned it, but even the thought of it now… it makes me shudder. I couldn’t do it, that morning at breakfast I couldn’t swallow the black pudding. My husband, on the other hand, cleaned his plate then finished my black pudding, as well. He’s even requested it several times since then (but bare in mind that this is a guy who travels often to Asia, digging into plates of unrecognizable things that are still moving when he puts them in his mouth, so his opinion doesn’t really count.)

A friend of ours named John, (who sounds exactly like Sean Connery), loves black pudding; he grew up eating it and adores it. Savours it. I asked him to come over, eat a plate of black pudding and explain to me why he loves it so.

He got as far as holding a forkful of warm black pudding to his nose and smelling its essence. Eyes closed and inhaling deeply, he let out a satisfied sigh then said, “It smells of old socks.” And he meant it.

I told him to enjoy (!), turned around and did the dishes.

So the mystery continues. Thousands of years ago, when animals were slaughtered for food, blood sausage was also made, and enjoyed, not just by one exceptional culture, but in most regions in Europe. It is no less loved now that it was hundreds of years ago, when eating meat was a great luxury. And it transcends socio-economic divisions. Rich or poor, it doesn’t matter; eating blood sausage is a cultural thing. For many devoted Europeans, enjoying it is simply in their blood.

Forking Foreigner: Percebes

Look at these monsters. Take a good, long look. They are called percebes, gooseneck barnacles or stalked barnacles. People all over Europe have the nerve to swear on their grandmother’s sight that these frightening, gnarled-claw crustaceans are not only edible, but delicious, too. Never mind the fact that percebes fetch more money than lobster per pound; you’d think that after looking at these beasts, nobody in their right minds would consider chewing on one. You would expect a foreigner who happens upon these reptilian toes in a foreign country to turn on her heel and head in the opposite direction in haste.

And that is exactly what most rational people do—they walk away. I, on the other hand bought a pound of them for my children to eat. We were in Paris at the time. Had we been in America I could have been arrested for child-abuse.

I bought them from a reputable-looking fishmonger just a few blocks over from the Louvre. I speak enough French to ask ‘Ou est le Poste?’ (where is the post office) and ‘Mes souliers sont orange, et ses chaussures sont bleu’ (my shoes are orange and her shoes are blue’) but I was struggling to negotiate a mid-afternoon seafood snack with this guy. The kids were clambering for food at a fevered pitch. Anxiously I stammered out, ‘Feed-moi, vite!’ feed me quick! But, looking back, maybe I said, ‘Feed me feet!’ because that is pretty much what it looked like he handed over to us; a bag of mutated feet.

Those two years I spent repeating remedial French in high school were not paying off the way I had hoped.

 The fishmonger watched me (as I butchered his language) with a look on his face residing somewhere between boredom and irritation (I can’t say I blame him). Looking at me through his round, wire glasses, he chuckled a little bit and discharged a huge scoop of the aforementioned creatures into a clear, plastic bag.

My husband was standing to the side of me. I looked at him, his eyes widening, silently pleading with me No, not those—not THOSE! His face made an impassioned, silent scream, as he furrowed his eyebrows and stared directly at the harmless, cooked prawns. He mouthed the word ‘crevette’, but I ignored him. It was too late anyway, we had barely the vocabulary to piece together the request of food, there was no way we could backtrack now summoning enough French to say ‘We’ve changed out minds and actually don’t want the tiny crocodile claws, thank you’-- without looking like twits.

Before handing me the bag of primordial toes, the fishmonger was kind enough to wordlessly demonstrate how to eat the barnacles. Grabbing the nail end, he pinched the bit of meat at the other end, twisted and pulled a sort of slug-like looking thing out and popped it into his mouth. Chewing with his eyes closed, he smiled. ‘It tastes of… the sea. Enjoy!’ he said in perfect English (forking Frenchman).

Don’t judge a book by its cover (or a crustacean by it’s clawed foot)

I grew up eating steamers (soft shell clams). I’ve been told that some people find them off-putting. If by ‘off-putting’ they mean that they feel uncomfortable with the manner in which one must slide the coarse, condom-like membrane off the freakishly phallic clam neck before tossing into one’s mouth, then I can see their point, but I’ve always adored them. The clam is sweet, with textures varying between a velvety soft belly and a firm, chewy neck. It was as a teen, eating steamers and raw oysters in the Cape that I developed this theory: If a food is horribly ugly or smelly (this applies mostly to cheese), but still remains popular with locals then it must taste good. I mean it’s got to have something going for it, right?

I trotted my children out to an empty bench in Jardins des Tuileries, carrying my bag of percebes like a prize. My husband grimaced and shook his head in defeat. We sat down and my three year old contemplated the percebes for a moment then asked as a matter of fact, “Are these turtle legs?” I told her no, handed her one and she gobbled it down. After the first hesitant taste, so did the rest of us.

We all hunkered over the plastic bag in the springtime sun, sucking and slurping, twisting these critters that spent their lives clinging to the side of Spanish sea cliffs, free from their claw-like home and savouring their meat, sweet like scallops and at the same time salty like the sea, and reminiscent of oyster.  

They were sublime.

As seawater streamed down our hands and forearms, my little girls tried in vain to lick their elbows; an attempt to catch the last bit of briny flavour.

It was the best meal we had in Paris.

Forking Foreigner: Rollmops

Introducing a new element to Finding Tasty-- the Forking Foreigner. In this weekly column I will discuss, quite emotionally at times, new foods I find, as a foreigner traveling around England, Europe, even back in the States. If it's is new (to me) and unusual (to most), I will eat it and discuss. Sometimes I like the weird foods I eat, sometimes I do not. But I will always give an honest, if not dramatic, recount of the experience.

Rollmops

What the fork, England? You had me going for a while I’ll give you that. What with your characteristically quaint fish and chips (fried up the old school way—in beef drippings—like fast food places in the States used to, until they caved to the food-do-gooders), and historic steak and ale pie, just like King Henry VIII used to eat (pie crust so fantastically flaky because, again, it’s made with suet, psst—that’s beef fat), and your cheddarific Welsh Rarebit (okay, granted this one is from your neighbour Wales, but that’s a detail I can overlook), and surprisingly delicious crackling (pig skin fried until light, salty, crispy and eyes-rolled-in-the-back-of-my-head scrumptious).  I was living the gastronomic dream in Ye Olde food porn.

Then, last week you bamboozled me with rollmops—rollmops! Originally from Scandinavia (need I say more?) it’s herring, skin left on, then soaked in a sweet and sour brine for a couple of weeks until horrible.

Are you having a laugh? I trusted you, England. I thought that you would supply me with only familiar, comforting, fattening foods; foods that, although ultimately leading to my obese demise, would successfully see me through the worst bouts of PMS, or lonely binge eating. I mean, you invented roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and beef gravy (a meal that, in case you didn’t get enough beefiness with your roast beef and beef gravy, made sure that you got more beefy-goodness in the beef drippings used to make the Yorkshire puddings)— for crying out loud!

I was so naïve. Browsing the breakfast buffet line at that posh restaurant Saturday morning, I never thought in a million years there would be anything as unpleasant as a sweet-pickled and preserved herring lurking amongst more refined Kippers and Abroath Smokies. No label, no nothin’; just ostensibly reliable white fish fillets, rolled and glistening on the silver platter beckoning me to add them to my already heaping over-priced breakfast plate.

I didn’t even have to put on my ‘I’ll try anything once’ hat—to my unsuspecting eyes this was as conventional a breakfast as one could hope for.

I was like a lamb being led to slaughter.

I slid the rollmop (don’t even get me started on the name) onto my plate beside two always-dependable bangers and made my way to table. Saddling down beside my daughters, contentedly dipping their toast soldiers into their soft-boiled eggs—loving their breakfasts— I had a bite of sausage (squish-Yum!), a corner of buttered toast (crunch-Mmmm), then cut off a piece of rollmop and brought it confidently into my mouth. Instantly, I was assaulted by the acrid taste of vinegar, followed by the one-two punch of saliva-inducing sweetness, and finished with the taste of fermented fish.

I literally gagged. I have never, ever, in my life gagged from food. Instinctually, without thinking (I was in fight or flight mode now) I spit the rollmop into my white, linen napkin and gasped for air. My little daughters just stared at me, wide eyed and shocked. ‘Oh my God,’ I uttered, breathlessly as I flailed for my water glass, ‘I can’t get the flavour of low-tide out of my mouth.’

A few days later I went to lunch with my tall, British friend, Jonathan. I related my story to Jonathan assuming he would lend me some much deserved sympathy, but no. “You’re mad!” he screeched like a woman. “Rollmops are brilliant! Best eaten with a proper pint. Biting through that fleshly, little lump of fish is like a juicy, taste explosion!” I shook my head in disbelief (I had always thought Jonathan to be a rational man). He continued, “If you don’t see the virtues of rollmops, you need to have your head examined, mate.’

That was the last time I spoke to Jonathan. He is dead to me now. Not because he insinuated that I was insane, but because he loves rollmops.

So, way to go England! Pip, pip cheerio! After being assaulted by you’re plebe the rollmop, it will take some time to win me back. As long as Spotted Dick is a genuine dessert option in this kooky country, I’m not sure if I will ever be able to bring myself to trust again.


Got an unusual food in mind that Forking Foreigner should try? Would love to know about it! Leave me a comment!

Forking Foreigner: 6 British Foods I Will Never Eat Again

A million years ago when it took days (if not weeks) to chase an animal down in your barefeet, kill it with your handmade bow and arrow, eviscerate and butcher it with the shard of shale that one of your six wives whittled, and then figure out a way to preserve the meat without the use of refrigeration or salt, it made sense to eat really gross foods—that is sort of all you had and you were lucky to get it.

But a while after World War II ended, after England got back on its battered feet and charged, stiff upper lip into the modern world (full of indoor pull-chain loos and cramped under-counter refrigerators), one would presume that eating the remnants of slaughtered animals, the stuff that should only be used in tinned dog food would have ended with a collective sigh of relief.

It’d be a safe assumption, right? Wrong. Call it a cultural thing, but the Brits still eat some questionable grub.

In the first eighteen months of living in their country, being a food writer, I thought it best to try some of the foods that foreigners make fun of. Here’s a list of those foods I tried that I will never put into my mouth again.

1) Rollmops Not originally British, but the fact that they have embraced them so, makes it all the worse. Herring, skin intact, soaked in a sweet and sour brine until awful, then wrapped around an olive or onion. Served cold or room temperature.  Tastes like low tide.

2) Tripe The lining of a cow, sheep, pig or deer’s stomach. Have you seen­ this stuff? Culinary tip number 342: Stop reading any recipe that begins with, ‘boil for 2-3 hours to tenderize and clean’.

3) Black Pudding Sounds like something Mrs. Doubtfire might set down in front of you after a nice English supper. It’s not. It is sausage made from the blood of pigs. The flavour isn’t all that bad, it’s just the idea that you are eating blood (and the iron taste that clings to the back of your teeth 30 minutes after finishing).

4) Jellied Eels At least no one is trying to sweeten up the name—this is what it purports to be. Fresh water eels cut into rounds (never mind about the skin and bones), then cooked in a fish stock and allowed to cool in the gelatin that results naturally from their bony serpentine bodies. It’s like eating a snotty snake.

5) Cockles in Vinegar Cockles are small clams that are cooked and chucked into a vat of vinegar. Cockles = Good. Cockles + Vinegar = Gag.

6) Brawn Also known as ‘head cheese’. This is a case of dressing up the name so that young children will eat the head on their plate. Made from a calf, cow, pig or sheep’s head, the brain is removed (these people aren’t Barbarians, after all) and it is boiled. As it cooks, the skull releases copious amounts of gelatin. The head is picked of its meat sometimes chunks of heart may be added, then the meat and skull gelatin are mixed together and set. Eaten by the slice usually as luncheon meat. Just the idea of this is a show-stopper.