There are certain colors that food just isn’t supposed to be, particularly blue and black. Admittedly there are some black foods that most people don’t have a problem with, such as licorice or caviar. But when a food that isn’t normally black suddenly is? It’s really hard to convince yourself that it’s OK to eat – some sort of primal response to Bad Food. Someone brought these black devilled eggs to a Halloween party we went to, and it seemed to take the guests quite a while to work themselves up to trying them. Once they did, though, they disappeared rapidly.
regrettable food
The Chiffon Chicken Pie Adventure
I said I would do it, and here it is: the winner of the Regrettable Food survey, Chiffon Chicken Pie, straight from the pages of The Sunday News Family Cook Book published in 1962. Please tell me I never have to make this again.
The ingredients were not necessarily promising, but didn’t include much “fake food”, and thankfully no MSG. I bought Ritz crackers for the first time in years, and had to hunt a bit to find pimientos. We already had gelatin on hand, as I sometimes use it in mousse cake. I bought a value pack of chicken thighs (no way was I going to use quality organic chicken for this) and roasted them, picked the meat off and made stock from the bones, but I could certainly have bought precooked chicken meat and canned stock, which would probably have been more authentic.