Foods My Mother Made Me Eat
exotic cooking or child abuse?
2007-09-17
By Eric Easter

I grew up in Baltimore. As with most industrial cities, its food is a product of its rich immigrant history. Unfortunately, Baltimore got all the hard working, shipbuilding, dockworking, steelmaking immigrants. The good food immigrants clearly decided to move elsewhere. Thus, the historically intertwined lives of Poles, Dutch, Germans, and Eastern European Jews and their black co-workers or servants begat a culinary tradition that is a mixed bag at best.

And so it was with my family. My maternal grandparents were domestics for a well known Eastern European family that owned one of the city’s signature deparment stores. As a result, that family’s food traditions are now ours. Which translates into a childhood full of food that came in shades of brown, beige and gray. Plenty of Black Baltimore families have a similar story, and they are just as likely to have killer recipes for sauerkraut and beef Stroganoff as they are steamed crabs and fried chicken.

My mother carried that European thing a bit too far, however and often went deep into the well of what’s considered fit for human consumption. That meant lots of ends and innards and plenty of improvised substitutes when money was tight. Becoming a parent has certainly put these things in perspective, but that doesn’t make them taste any better.

Here are the most egregious offenses:

BRAINS AND EGGS
What it Is: Forget Indiana Jones and the monkey. Think farm animals. Pig’s brains. Beef brains. Calf brains. Fried in bacon grease then scrambled with eggs. Yum.
What it Looks Like: Considering that a mess o’ scrambled eggs already resembles brains, the addition of grey matter to the mix is not as unappealing as you might imagine.
What it Tastes Like: The gag factor begins with the thought of what you’re eating, but ramps up at the texture level. There is actually little “taste” per se. The real problem lies in the mouth feel of biting into what feels like runny eggs mixed with mushy rubber band pieces. That, and the fact that one cup of this dish provides a whopping 783% of the recommended daily intake of cholesterol.
Ick factor: 10 out of 10

LIVER PUDDING (aka Ring Pudding)
What it Is:  Pork or Beef Liver and other assorted castoffs ground into paste with filler and squeezed into pork casings like a sausage.
What it Looks Like:  Something you avoid in a dog park.
What it Tastes Like: It’s liver. It’s pudding. Think about that for a minute.

SCRAPPLE
What it Is: Scrapple, for the uninitiated is the ultimate “rooter to the tooter” dish. Recycling gone astray. It also gets the prize for truth in advertising, meaning the “scrap” part in “scrapple” is literal. It’s a mixture of boiled cornmeal and pig snouts, heads, and other leftovers with a mixture of savory spices like sage and fennel.
What it Looks Like: A 3” x6” cellophane-wrapped cinderblock.
What it Tastes Like: If cut too thick and underfried, it tastes like Spam that fell on the floor of a barber shop.  But if kept under ¼ inch , charred to a crisp and served on Wonder Bread with apple butter or Welch’s grape jelly and cold glass of  ghetto-sweet Kool Aid, scrapple is about as sublime as cuisine gets. Soft, crispy, sweet, savory. People go to school to learn how to make combinations like that.
Ick Factor: 4 out of 10

BRAUNSCHWAGER (aka Liverwurst)
Pork liver pressed into a roll with spices. That’s not so bad, really. It’s just that when treated as a luncheon meat on bread with mayo instead of something to be spread on a cracker, the overall impact is frankly disgusting.
What it Looks Like: Potted Meat
What it Tastes Like: Marketing is everything. Call this stuff by its French name (pate) and Whole Foods could get $20 a pound for it. Something about that big red Oscar Mayer logo takes away any redeeming quality.
Ick Factor: 4 out of 10

CORNMEAL MUSH
What it Is: Just what it says it is. Cornmeal cooked as hot cereal like Cream of Wheat then finished off with butter and sugar (on a good day when you could afford butter and sugar). Otherwise served plain. A great meal if you and the Artful Dodger are planning a full day of purse snatching.
What it Looks Like: Jiffy cornbread batter.
What it Tastes Like: Hot Jiffy Cornbread batter.
Ick Factor: 2 out of 10. Can’t say it won’t fill you up, though.

HOG’S HEAD CHEESE
What it Is: The hog’s head part is accurate. The cheese part is a lie to suck you in. It’s boiled and seasoned pork parts molded in gelatin, generally sliced onto a cracker and doused liberally with hot sauce.
What it Tastes Like:  Depending on the ratio of gelatin to meat by-products, either Pickled Pig’s Ass-flavored Jello or Jello-flavored Pickled Pig’s Ass.
Ick Factor: 8 out of 10

ROCKY MOUNTAIN OYSTERS (aka swinging steak)
What it is: Bull’s testicles.
What it Looks Like: Bull’s testicles.
What it Tastes Like: They’re bull’s testicles, does it matter?
Ick Factor: 15 out of 10

YAK
What it Is: This is pronounced  “YOCK”, a street variation of its real Chinese name, Yat Gaw Mein. In its original restaurant form, it’s a pretty tasty noodle dish with shrimp or pork and a dark, oily, soy based sauce. In mid-Atlantic Black households, however, Yak is the official “we can’t afford Chinese this week” substitute. It’s made with Pennsylvania Dutch egg noodles, boiled eggs, last night’s pork chops, raw onions, the half dried bottle of LaChoy Soy Sauce from the cabinet and finished off with ketchup.
What it Looks Like: A late night dorm room accident. “Dude, your ramen noodles just fell into my Popeye’s.”  “No, Dude, your Popeye’s just fell into my ramen noodles.”
What it Tastes Like: If you’re hungry enough, it’s delicious and strangely, a pretty close approximation of the original. The ketchup is the sleeper.
Ick Factor: 1 out of 10

Now, my mother will either be slightly amused by this or cut me out of the will entirely. But since I’m not buying her a computer until Christmas I won’t sweat the former. And considering we were broke, I won’t worry about the latter.

Bon appétit!

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes on media, tech and politics for ebonyjet.com.