Revelation of the morning

[mrissa]

All those years I wasn't eating parsnips? It appears I wasn't missing much. I had hoped for them to be golden and earthy and sweet and strange, and instead they're kind of whitish, once you peel them, and flat. Like Bunnicula'ed carrots. Although now that I've peeled them and a couple heads of garlic, my hands smell interesting, like I could add some curry powder and really have something, so maybe it'll all work out in the end (even though I don't intend to add curry powder until I get to a different soup entirely).

I keep trying foods I didn't like in the past, in hopes that I will like them in the present, but I seem to have hit a plateau on that after my early-twenties bitter-food tastes kicked in. I also keep gradually trying foods I've read about and never had. That's only going slightly better. I'm due to try orange marmalade again, just to see if Paddington had it right after all. Blancmange is actually not very good. I still haven't had mead, so I can't tell you. I hope it's better than parsnips, though.

Have there been foods that were "like in books" in your life? Did you like them in real life?

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I've spent my entire adult life trying to recreate a soup served in one of Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall books. There's very little description of what's in it, only a description of the flavor. That book was such a comfort to me as a kid, I think I keep hoping I'll make the soup that's the ultimate comfort food.

Have you read Serve It Forth (http://www.ffbooks.co.uk/x0/x2662.htm)?

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

A protag in a book I read once made herself a snack of French bread with pesto, covered with brie and toasted. I had to try it because I love brie, but I love it much better just spread on the bread plain.

Parsnips...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Parsnips can do wonderful things in soups where their flavaor can glimmer as an underlaying base on which other things build. By themselves, they're not exactly stars of the vegie world.

Re: Parsnips...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Into soup with other things is exactly where they have gone. Carrots and onions and rosemary and garlic, cilantro, white beans, tomatoes, broth. Plenty of other things. It smells promising so far.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'd always thought Turkish delight, so lovingly described in the Narnia books, would be, oh, like the stuff inside a Heath bar. But when I finally found some I nearly gagged, it was so cloying and nasty.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I thought I didn't like brie, but then allochthon took us out for a lovely hazelnut (or maybe macadamia?) crusted thing, so now I'm not sure any more.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't read that. Huh. My.

I'm pretty comforted by several of our soups.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, my land, Turkish delight is the absolute worst example of something in a book that sucks in real life. I was appalled when I found that the whitish lumps one of my relatives made for Christmas were really called Turkish delight. I had already had the mythical sweet and disliked it and didn't even know it!

If I was going to get theological here, I could talk about the time I tried being bad in kindergarten and decided I didn't like it. But as I am not CS Lewis, I don't have to.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Snarf!

I, alas, had no trouble being bad in kindergarten and first grade. But those stories now just rivet the fifth graders, for some reason. They will actually beg me to "tell us again about the time you changed your report card!"

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. The main think your post reminded me of was Iceland. The obvious things* but also, I do not think I will ever forget Ben buying a chix for me to stew for my birthday that year. As a treat. It was so far far different than chicken here that I think I cried, and it cost a huge amount. So, then we laughed. Ben and I were good that way.

You could pay him enough to even look at the fish here, or the lamb, or coffee, or....

(*and spec rutabagas.)

scusie

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

that should read, "couldn't pay him."

[ckd]

My understanding of it (probably from papersky) is that you have to consider that sugared sweets of any sort were ambrosia to people who'd been living with rationing for years.

Or they could have been the equivalent of "special" brownies.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

We decided the enchantment must have added a lot to it, the grocery-store version of Turkish delight not being very impressive.

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. You can make it pretty tastily at home by just putting half a stick of butter on top of a round of brie and microwaving it a minute, then covering the whole thing with slivered almonds. Yummy!

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah!! Isn't that stuff *awful*? I had that same experience and forgot about it till you mentioned!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a whole day of deliberately being bad. Luckily I had sensible parents; my father sat me down at the end of the day and said, "What's going on here?" I said, "I decided to try being bad." He said, "Well, how did you like it?" I said, "I don't like it at all!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Bwa! That link is hilarious! "Even in the present, decadent age drinking beer for breakfast is viewed as being over-done." Oh yes, because the current age has the largest alcohol consumption ever! The ahistorical POV of these people would be hilarious if it wasn't so alarming. Okay, so it's hilarious even while being alarming.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

If you want to borrow it just let me know. It's a fun read, with lots of good recipes.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

LOL!!!

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

Golden and earthy and sweet and strange is rutabagas, I think, not parsnips.

Foods I sought out because of books and that lived up to my hopes: lemon curd; scones with clotted cream and jam.

Foods I sought out because of books that turned out to be a letdown: cucumber sandwiches; full English breakfasts.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, lemon curd, lemon cuuuuuuuurd. (Also nice: lime curd. Raspberry curd. Any other curd I've ever had. Mmmmmmmm, curd.) Also scones with clotted cream and jam are lovely, though the kind of scones I make tend to be the American coffeehouse kind with Stuff in them.

Cucumber sandwiches are more along the lines of refreshing than interesting, in most of my experience, and I have no idea what full English breakfasts are like, but I always found the book descriptions appalling rather than appealing: all that meat! or fish! or eggs that, my mother explained, did jiggly/runny things!

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to say regarding food, I just wanted to express that the reference to Bunnicula made me laugh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's a little alarming how far I'm not from a Bunnicula reference at any given moment, and yet I think that was my first one "out loud" in years.

Bunnicula was the book my gifted teacher gave me to outline when I was 7. Told me to figure out what each chapter was there for, how the author was showing us what we knew about Harold and Chester. It was the sort of thing people sometimes get told to do (with grown-up books!) in college. It was astonishing, revelatory, just exactly right, for her to suggest it. So those books are pretty close to my heart, though I haven't been back to them since I was 8.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Oh! Tomato sandwiches (like Harriet the Spy ate)--I liked them very much (and still do).

Watercress (as eaten by Louis in Trumpet of the Swan)--I used to think it was just OK but I like it now.

Parsnip is good in chicken soup. My grandmother puts it in there.

I am curious about creamed onions, because of Garrison Keillor's "Miracle of the Creamed Onions." But I have to limit my onion intake and my cream intake so there will be limits if I ever try it.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Oh! There's a cookbook out...I wish I could remember the name--in which someone figured out recipes for many foods mentioned in Roald Dahl stories, including Snozzcumbers.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It took me awhile to figure out that I was mostly disappointed with Hershey, PA, because it lacked Oompa Loompas.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I detest mead. But I love orange marmalade. Especially the English kind that comes in a white jar, that my grandfather was addicted to.

Clotted cream was even better than I had imagined from reading Enid Blyton and James Herriot. Other English foods have been disappointing, but perhaps I went to the wrong restaurant. I do like pork pies, even though nobody else I know does, and I wish more places served them.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I am the only person I have ever met who likes Turkish delight. Obviously, I don't meet enough Turks. But it's still not as good as Lewis described, nor is it light and flaky as he described. I think he must have been thinking of some pastry with filo.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't really like watercress, but I have very fond memories of it, because when I was a kid, my dad did research for his PhD in the Serengeti, and one day we went and visited some other researchers who were in the Ngorongoro Crater, and I went out with the wife of one of them and gathered wild watercress for part of our lunch. I was five or six at the time.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

*One exception - I like it in moderation on egg-and-cress sandwiches.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Mead is nasty. But I don't like anything beerlike in the least - I don't do bitter flavors. (I can do sour - I can drink certain brands of tequila, notably Cuervo, straight from the bottle).

I spent a semester in Wales eating British /cafeteria/ food, which is several times nastier than traditionally nasty British food.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I think it's lovely in salads, or with sashimi. But yes, with eggs it's very good (I like it scrambled with the eggs. Sorrel is also lovely in scrambled eggs.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Have you read Diana Wynne Jones' Witch Week? "Prawns in custard!"

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it was a long time ago.

The cafeteria at the school (Trinity College in Carmarthen, no relation to any other Trinity Colleges or Universities) specialized in bizarre salads. The one I remember most consisted of melon balls and teeny shrimp. That's all it was. No, they didn't go together in any way, shape, or form.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

The best way to eat marmalade, in my opinion, is to toast an English muffin, and spread it with butter, and then spread a fairly thinnish layer of marmalade over the top. The sweetness of the butter cuts the bitterness of the marmalade a bit, and the combination is rather nice. (I haven't eaten marmalade in years, though. English muffins with butter and marmalade were a favorite Sunday brunch indulgence of my dad's when I was a kid, but these days he's much more likely to go for smoked salmon and cream cheese on dark rye.)

The only commercially available mead that I've had has pretty much resembled a sweet, not-very-complex wine. Okay, but nothing to write home about. I've had homebrewed mead that was amazing - sort of like a cross between a hard cider and a good champagne.

Coincidentally, I was flipping through a cookbook yesterday and was thrilled to discover a recipe for blancmange. Imagine my bemusement when I discovered that it's basically a vanilla pudding made without butter or eggs. But the cookbook does add that if you make a blancmange with coconut milk, then you get a traditional Puerto Rican dessert called tembleque. That might be good, if you like coconut.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Allow me to introduce myself, I also like Turkish delight, though it is nothing like I imagined reading Lewis' descriptions. I imagined it to be like chocolate, only better.

I was adopted by a group of Turkish nannies when I was serving as a nanny in Boston. One of them was my roommate. They were all young women from Istanbul. We went on a trip to go see the autumn foliage and they were afraid to get out of the car because they were positive they would be attacked by some wild animal and never heard from again. I was dressed for our outing in jeans, hiking boots, and a sweater. They had their high-heeled city boots, incredibly tight pants, and polished leather jackets. One of them made an attempt to blend in by wearing a baseball cap, but it wasn't enough. We were stared at everywhere we went. We ended our car tour by having pizza at some out-of-the-way jukejoint.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I've always wanted to try Marilla's Raspberry Cordial from Anne of Green Gables. I imagine it must taste something like mead, but more raspberry.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do, too, although since I've never had mead, that ends up being very abstract.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Which I don't. Ah well.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

Me too!

[genevra.livejournal.com]

The Hearty Herdbeast Stew from The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern is the basis for the beef stew I make. My hubby loves it!

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

Parsnips are pretty yummy. MFD's mom had them alot when she was here visiting a while ago. I had always avoided them until then. Not bad though.