Avocado Ice Cream

Guacamole: it’s a lovely onomatopoeia — describing the thick and glossy texture produced when mashing buttery avocado, either in lumpy chunks or smooth and creamy. Mixed with a squeeze of fresh lemon or lime juice to preserve its pale green color, it can be made more or less piquant with the application of hot sauce, cilantro, garlic and tomato. It goes perfectly with a salty crisp corn chip or ten or twenty.

Guacamole is the perfect summer concoction, a blend of salty and sweet that makes for a great appetizer — hang on, did you say ice cream? Surely I heard you wrong. Maybe the signal’s corrupted or something. Let me move to the other side of the room. I’m talking about guacamole, what are you talking about? Ice cream? No: guacamole, you know, the stuff you make with avocados. Stop saying ice cream.

No, no no, this is crazy talk. There is no such thing as avocado ice cream. Truly. That would be insanity. Besides, the only acceptable flavors of green ice cream are pistachio and mint chocolate chip, everyone knows that.

What, you can prove it? No way. Look: let’s have a friendly wager. I bet you a week’s pay you cannot produce an actual printed recipe for avocado ice cream, from a real published recipe book. Yes, I said a week’s pay. Are we on? Good.

This’ll be the easiest money I ever make….

Meta Given’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking, J. G. Ferguson Publishing Company, 1947

Frying Tonight

Ah — the English Chippie. 

Whether lit like a fluorescent beacon on the high street or perched on a windy bluff on the seafront, it beckons customers like a siren with its alluring aroma of frying cod and big fat chips, peas and malt vinegar.

Condensation fogs up the window; the floor is scuffed linoleum; a selection of fizzy-pop sweats in cans in the glass-front case; a big board behind the counter lists your choices: cod & chips, plaice & chips, haddock & chips, onion rings, mushy peas — the same in every chippie, anywhere. The door is always open, and a bin outside is stuffed with the detritus of a day’s trade: squashed-up balls of greasy paper, napkins and plastic forks. It’s as irresistible as anything on a fine dining menu, but more evocative and probably more romantic too, in its way.

When you’re about to tuck in to your steaming hot packet of crisp battered fish, still huffing air to cool the vinegar-soaked fat chip you popped in your mouth — still hungry, knowing the rest of the meal is still ahead of you — this is the moment you silently offer up a prayer of thanks to whomever first accidentally dropped a fillet in the egg — then uh-oh, the flour — then dammit! the pot of boiling oil. Oh well, you might as well eat it….

This skillet of whole cornmeal-coated rainbow trout fried in bacon drippings “hot enough to make the tails curl” bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the above.

Easy Skillet Meals, Better Homes and Gardens, 1972

Also from this book: All Fired Up

Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen’s epic opus is 5 minutes and 55 seconds of pure crazy-ass genius that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and remains to this day one of the most complex recordings in popular music, having been recorded over three weeks on so many overdubs the tape was nearly worn through.

You have to have an enormous, swaggering pair of cajones to think you can get away with singing it in concert if you are not Freddie Mercury; those who do and can pull it off are rewarded handsomely by a raucous crowd of happy hand waving headbangers judging every single note.

The song’s impenetrable lyrics have been subject to much speculation, ranging from the most jargon-entwisted academic intellectualizing to Mercury’s own admission that they were just “random rhyming nonsense.”  

Until now. Here, for the first time, is the culinary catalyst upon which “Bohemian Rhapsody” was surely based. To wit:  Homes and Gardens’ monstrous book Meals With A Foreign Flair’s section on “Stout German Fare.” 

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Behold the glory that is the Hausplatte, a veritable symphony of meat served on a wooden trencher alongside tankards of beer. It surely is a meal for someone teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown who thinks that “nothing really matters.”

MAMA just killed a man,

Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead

MAMA, life had just begun,

But now I've gone and thrown it all away

We are eased in to the opening movement (in which the protagonist confesses to murder, says he doesn’t want to face the consequences, and wishes he’d never been born at all) by the Duchesse potatoes edging the platter, keeping all the meat in and providing an ever-present context for the meal’s theme. Who among us would not wish they’d never been born when faced with his dish? Who would not be driven to shoot someone in the head?

I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me

He's just a poor boy from a poor family,

Spare him his life from this monstrosity

Easy come, easy go, will you let me go

Bismillah! No, we will not let you go

(Let him go!) Bismillah! We will not let you go

With a sudden change in tempo, the thudding of a lone piano introduces us to a hysterical dialogue between the protagonist and his demons, here represented by the myriad artery-bursting array of animal proteins that form the plate’s centerpiece. The sausages, as Scaramouche, appear ready to do the Fandango in one’s mouth, while the boiled beef plays the part of Galileo, trying to tell the truth about meat’s essential nature. The weinkraut in the middle are surely Bismillah, the Arabic god with whom the protagonist enters a crazed dialogue begging for and denying his freedom. Before all hell breaks loose, Beelzebub, the devil himself, appears in the form of pig’s knuckles anchoring this sordid tale at both ends.

Beelzebub!.. has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me

Once any diner has commenced engorging him or herself in this orgy of meat, the music, and heart races. One can hear it begging:

Oh, baby, can't do this to me, baby,

Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here

Once safely removed from the table and no longer a threat, the diner slouches in a chair, sated, greasy juice dribbling down his or her chin and soaking into the napkin tucked into a collar. Eyes rolled back, is it any wonder the song ends with this final sentiment?

Nothing really matters, Anyone can see,

Nothing really matters,

Nothing really matters to me

Any way the wind blows.

The metallic chime of a gong — the bell that tolls for thee — finds echo in a long and gratifying burp.

Meals With A Foreign Flair, Better Homes and Gardens, 1963

Also from this book: Sweet-Sour Pork, Vive La Cuisine Franglais!

Stuffed Onions (And Peas)

Have trouble getting the kids to eat their peas? Have they reached that awkward stage between delighting in their greenness and roundness and the discovery that they can be flicked all into every corner of your dining room when your eyes are averted, and a full-on tantrum if any of the peas so much as touch another item on their plate?

All hope is not lost! This ingenious method of hiding the peas in the hollowed-out center of an onion is a sure-fire way of pulling the wool over their eyes. They’ll think they’re just eating a plain old onion, yet in the meantime they will have consumed an entire serving of peas! The piquant flavor of barely cooked onion masks the taste of peas like a dream — and since everything is spherical, it all feels the same once you put it in your mouth.

Works once — works twice — works every time!

Microwave Cooking Fruits & Vegetables, Publications Arts, Inc., 1981

Flights of Fancy: Songbirds

The French have a way with bureaucracy: they generate a lot of it, and a large percentage involves laws regulating the finer things in life: sex and food. They understand completely that the point of such endeavors is to make one more like the other. Hence, a certain forgving attitude towards the taboo leads one to create one’s own point of no return, which is surely sexier to knock up against than one imposed by the State. By deeming it illegal to pay for, yet perfectly legal to consume, the ortolan, they create a loophole just large enough or the tiny songbird to fly through. Françoise Mitterrand, the former President, combined all of these in his person: both as a bureaurocrat charged with maintaining the law, a man who openly maintained both wife and mistress, and as a gourmand, whose last meal (of ortolan) demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the very laws he oversaw.

Another thing the French do damnably well (and with as much constricting oversight) is language. Thus it is that one of Auguste Escoffier’s many recipes for Ortolan is the divinely named Slyphides d’Ortolans. Not for him the pedestrian nomenclature one usually finds on the menu; no Roasted Songbird with Pineapple Juice for him. Instead, he calls upon the sylph, those fairy-like wisps of femininity who are composed of and inhabit the air. The ballet Les Sylphides has no plot per se, just delicate ballerinas flitting about a bloke they fancy. It’s a very French type of story. A bit like the wee ortolans flying over Landes before the traps are sprung.

Once netted, the hapless ortolans are fattened up in the dark. Death comes for them at the bottom of the glass of Armagnac in which they are drowned. They are then roasted whole so that none of their fats and juices escape until popped into the mouth of a lucky diner, head, tail, legs, wings, guts and all. Crunching their tiny bones scratches the insides of one’s cheeks, so that the diner’s own blood mingles with the bird, enhancing its flavor. The perfume is said to be worth the effort, and is often cited as the reason this whole affair takes place with one’s head hidden beneath a large napkin (all the better to trap the aroma), though romance and superstition claim it is necessary to hide the disgraceful act from God.

The more observant among you will have noticed that this is all a very clever magic trick for turning actual birds into mythical women via semiotics (both are “Les Sylphides” and made of air, like ideas and language), which incidentally is about as French as it gets.

Ma Cuisine, Auguste Escoffier, 1934

θεοβρῶμα

Know what that means? Here’s a hint: it means chocolate. (So much for hints.) More specifically, when translated from the Greek, it means theobroma, or food of the gods. In 1753, when Linnaeus was classifying everything in the world, he added cacao, a word derived more phonetically from the Nahuatl term cacahuatl handed down via the Spaniards who first brought it back to Linnaeus's neck of the woods.

But why is chocolate so revered? 

Apart from sheer deliciousness, one of its active ingredients is the alkaline compound theobromine, which keeps humans awake and horny, but kills dogs and cats. This is why you give your sweetheart Valentine’s Day candy, but avoid giving it to your pet. If you plan on seducing your human partner, by all means ply them with a lovely bit of single-origin dark criollo chocolate with a fine snap and silky mouthfeel. If you plan on seducing your pet, you need psychological intervention, and no amount of chocolate can help you.

Not all chocolate is food fit for gods, however. Some of it is the food of hucksters and hoodlums who make a low-quality product they lobbied hard to name “chocolate” even while replacing the cocoa butter with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Naughty, naughty. The gods smite you for trickery like that. The FDA, siding with the gods, shot the Hershey Company down on this one, but some evil has unfortunately slipped through.

The Hershey’s Chocolate and Cocoa Cookbook manages, somehow, to make everything in it look mournful and full of dread — as if each cake, mousse and pastry were patiently awaiting their turn to be sacrificed on an alter of 1970's era wallpaper complete with a perfunctory sprig of plastic flowers. This is chocolate, people! 

Behold this cake above that looks like it was designed to be served at a wake — its own. Just be sure not to feed it under the table to Fido.

Hershey’s Chocolate and Cocoa Cookbook, Ideals Publishing Corp., 1982

Also from this book: Double Dipping

The Magic Roundabout

In 1973 Great Britain joined the European Community, a precursor to the EU, and all hell broke loose. Specifically, a slow kind of arithmetic hell broke gradually loose as it dawned on normal British people that the weights, measures and currency they had adhered to for many hundreds of years were now deigned stupefyingly nonsensical by their new Euro cousins, and that in order to enjoy all the Continent had to offer in terms of armloads of cheap wine and pastry procured by day trippers to Calais, it would be necessary to convert to the damnable Metric system.

Naturally, this impertinence to the beloved Imperial system was resisted vehemently in an attempt to cling to the very stuff that made British people British: namely, their bloody-minded oddness. Why describe a person’s weight in kilograms when you can use stones? (1 stone = 14 lbs. 1 lb = 16 ozs.) What the heck is a centimeter and aren’t inches and feet obviously better units of measurement for building things? (1 foot = 12 inches.) What does 18 degrees feel like, and would you have to don a cardigan? (Freezing = 32 degrees.) You could hold a pint of milk in your hand, but could you carry a litre? How many kilometers to the litre can you get for 60 pence? Shillings, guineas, pounds and pennies all morphed into new coins based on multiples of ten instead of 12 and 20. It was madness. CLICK HERE.

Thus is was that the government had to crack the whip and demand that for a period of time, both Imperial and Metric units had to be displayed on most everything you could buy. If you fell afoul of this law, a Belgian woman would be deployed to your place of business to give you a good seeing-to. Some things made the transition and some didn’t. You’d still order a pint of beer in a pub, though what you’d actually get would be whatever that is in whatever liquid is measured in in metric. Just thinking about it makes you drunk.

All of which is to explain why this appalling recipe from Dougal’s Cook Book has both Imperial and Metric units: it was published in 1973. It’s a recipe particularly unsuited for children’s tastes involving a raw cabbage and a snail. Have you ever smelled raw cabbage? I need say no more.

If you’re not British, you’ll also be wondering what that strange beast is with a chef’s toque on in the cover photo. That’s Dougal, star of a children’s television show that aired between 1965 – 1977 called The Magic Roundabout. The single most distinguishing thing about this show is that it was obviously all about the consumption of massive amounts of drugs and came from France. Dougal was fond of sucking on sugar cubes, after which he’d race around at top speed. It was a show for and about hipster freaks, and as such was beloved by a generation of innocent children who as adults cling to the memory of it with a nostalgia as passionate as that for the good old Imperial system.

Check it out HERE.

The Magic Roundabout has attained such an iconic place in British culture that an actual traffic circle in Swindon is named the Magic Roundabout, mostly because it is so unnecessarily complex that instead of meeting certain death when venturing into it, people tend to emerge dazed but unscathed, because they’d had to drive so slowly to figure it out. It is a feat of post-Imperial engineering that appears to have been designed especially to confound our European visitors as an exquisite revenge, except the joke’s on the poor people of Swindon, because no-one ever goes there.

Dougal’s Cook Book, Hamlyn, 1973

Terrible Terrine

Ever eaten a Patagonian Toothfish? It’s an ugly beast, you’d remember it. Don’t think so?

You’re wrong. You’ve had it. You’ve had it so much it’s now on the endangered species list, impaled on the hook of its own popularity when its unfortunately offputting name was changed by marketing whizzes to Chilean Sea Bass.

When something is unappetizing it’s easier to change its name than to change it: hence we have the lovely Dried Plums from the unlovely Prunes. We have Bob Veal instead of Newborn Calves. We have Jell-O instead of Gelatin.

Speaking of which, we have Terrine of Garden Vegetables rather than Leftovers. Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? How can you tell if a food’s moniker has been doctored? Look for obvious redundancies in its title. What vegetables don’t come from a garden, for instance? A terrine is a nice way of saying pot; the word tureen (something you serve soup in) comes from it. Terror, on the other hand, comes from the Latin terrere, meaning to frighten. Put the two together and Voila!

This one has been concocted from leftover crudités and gelatin. They suggest serving it with horseradish and a “lusty” wine. We suggest serving it with a blindfold.

Appetizers, The Knapp Press, 1982

Roast Opossum

When the apocalypse happens, and it surely will, your local supermarket’s meats case will empty pretty quickly as folks rush in a belated attempt to stock up on goods for their Apocalypse Cellars. Because these folks are very tactical, they will already have prepared for this eventuality by putting aside multi-packs of batteries, tinned goods, bottled water, ramen noodles, candles, matches, playing cards, and enough guns and ammo to ensure that any remaining humans are swiftly dispatched. All they will need to live the good life and re-emerge into a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland is fresh meat. Some they will consume immediately, and some they will hang from the rafters in a misguided attempt to make jerky.

The Opossum

What will the rest of us do when we turn up to find the shelves and freezer cases empty? What will we do for protein as we wait our turn in the enormous queue that will form to sort out who goes into which afterlife?

We will look to our Hillbilly cousins for inspiration and kick-it old school. We will trap vermin and make a tasty dinner of it. We will treat the lacerations it inflicts with Neosporin and Band Aids. We will take all of our antibiotics. We will learn to enjoy “peculiar” flavors and avoid looking at the opossum’s snarling singed face and tail as we tuck in. We will search about in the entrails for the liver which is the central ingredient in Opossum Stuffing. We will be sure to remove the skewers and / or stitches before serving. We will invite all of our condemned neighbors over because there will be enough for ten.

Bring it on, bitches! Bring it on!

Cooking for Young Homemakers, Culinary Arts Institute, 1964

Also from this book: Fried Brains, Fried and Baked, Crown Roast of Frankfurters, Rudolph the Red Nosed Pot Roast

Vomit

Despite what it looks like, these Springtime Potatoes are not an example of something you’d find in a vomitorium. People spew forth from a vomitorium, not chunks of radish and cucumber in a sour cream and chive sauce. This is because to vomere is to exit, usually from an auditorum. We expect people to sleep in a dormitorium because dormaire means to sleep. Same thing. Vomit is short for vomitus, which when it involves Springtime Potatoes covered in a radish and cucumber in a sour cream and chive sauce is really emesis, for which you should take an emetic. Marijuana is a powerful anti-emetic, and can be found in most dorm rooms. Vomiting should not be confused with regurgitation, which is merely when undigested food comes back up into one’s mouth. Got it? Good.

Fix It Fast Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1979