Loading ...Thank you Bas for pointing out the spam page. That song, as the page opens, is just…. stunning. Really. I’m stunned.
As I sit here eating my double fudge brownies, hot from the oven, topped with rapidly melting cookies-and-cream ice-cream and chocolate sauce, I ponder Bas’ love of pickles. Pickled what? exactly? Here in the US, if one says pickles, one means pickled cucumbers, whether dill, sweet or here in the south, Bread-and-butter pickles. But in england if you say ‘pickle’, its that awful sludgy stuff, some sort of pickled vegetable matter that comes in a jar that is scooped out with a knife or spoon and spread on sandwiches and crackers.
Now I like pickles but not pickle. I especially like kosher dills.
You can also get pickled eggs or pickled peppers in chip-shops and kebab shops in England. Usually from those big jars that look like they’ve been sitting there since the second world war.
Speaking of the second world war, the guy who ran our local chip-shop, a fellow by the name of Big George, was once tossing potatoes into the potato-slicer, and heard a rattling sound. He stopped the slicer and found a WW2 hand-grenade. Still live, no less.
I’m still sort of in shock from that spam song. But the purest Spam art form has to be the haiku.
Oozing and trembling
You fall out of your can, SPAM
And soon out of mine
-Bill Dye.Pagans dance and cheer
around a Stonehenge of SPAM.
Vegans disappear.–Little Anderson
What is heaven like?
It’s all the SPAM you can eat
No–wait, that was Hell–Wild T.
Have a look at the Spam Haiku Archives - you’ll find nearly 20K haikus about Spam. A hell of a lotta people have a hell of a lotta time on their hands.
And R the P told the story of how he ate spam-sandwiches with mayonaise and a cookie. Ugh.
I don’t remember eating a lot of Spam as a child. We had the Velveeta, but not the Spam. Remember those pear-salads? Tinned pear halves on a bed of lettuce, topped with mayonnaise and velveeta cheese. Wanna know the last time I had one of those?
A week ago.
It should be one of those things one reminisces about, some laughable concoction from days gone by. For me, its a laughable concoction from a week gone by.
And last night, Bea bit me on the ass. I just had to throw that in. I’ve suffered various torment at the hands - or claws, as the case may be - of the Bea, but thats the first time she ever bit me on the ass. She wanted food, of course, and biting is her way when she wants something. I fed her. Not Spam - she’d have really bitten me if I’d fed her spam.
Buy me a beer!
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This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 8:52 pm and is filed under animal, edible. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Oh no!! We have great pickled stuff in the Netherlands! Augurken, zilveruitjes, Amsterdamse uitjes.
Those are really delightful and fresh, and have a nice ‘bite’.
As we do have raw salted herring with chopped onion; with white bread.
And cheese of course.
People in the US just like to pickle cucumbers and call them pickles. As a baby, pickles were my favorite food. We have home movies of me sitting in a high chair enjoying the deliciousness of a Kosher dill. In fact I had no idea that “Kosher” had anything to do with Jewish people until I was much older. I thought it was a type of pickle, the delicious type. Anyone expecting the explosion of flavor that is a Kosher dill pickle and instead chomped into the horror that is a bread and butter pickle knows what I am talking about.
Bread and butter pickles are vile.
In Manhattan, there is a pickle store on 34 street near Madison avenues. You walk by and see giant barrels filled with different types of pickles. I always passed by it on my way to the 6 train, but never partook. Maybe in honor of Bas’ love of pickles I’ll have to stop and buy one.
I absolutely agree about the foulness that is bread-and-butter pickles. And worse than eating them is the smell of the house while grandma (or whomever) is making them. My god, talk about stinking to high-heavens. I’d rather be tear-gassed. And I know, because I have been tear-gassed before. A far more pleasant experience than sitting in a house where bread-and-butter pickles are a-brewing.
I’m glad pickled food-stuffs in the Netherlands are ‘delightful and fresh’. Obviously that tradition didn’t make it ‘cross the channel to England.
Speaking of stinking food preparation, Mojo and I were talking to a coworker of his from the north who has joined a co-op type deal where you get a parcel of land far away from your house and grow your own veg (only in the north right?) and she was all excited about collard greens–who knows why. She was shocked to hear they made the house smell like sweaty feet when you cook them.
Tip for all you collard cookers out there, a whole pecan, shell and all, in the water will cut the smell.
And this relates to pickles because there is that pickled pepper sauce people put on collards. And jalepenos are almost always served pickled in the US as well.