I Made Mitt Romney’s Absolutely Cursed Ketchup Salmon. May the Lord Forgive Me.

Mitt Romney is not a foodie. That was made abundantly clear over and over again during his two-decade political career—his record overflows with horrific crimes against good taste, to the point that I’m surprised he’s not been tried at the Hague. For instance, Romney has said that his favorite sandwich is “peanut butter and honey,” and that hot dogs—as in, the Frankensteinian amalgam of beef and pork gristle, brutalized into a preservative-rich tube—counted as his “favorite meat” (as in, like, better than steak, or pulled pork, or even, I don’t know, chicken thighs). When Romney was on the cusp of the 2012 Republican nomination, he told reporters that his wife prepares little “meatloaf cakes” for his birthday dinner every year. Meatloaf cakes! Apparently, these are small saucer-shaped meatloaf patties, glossed with a brown sweet sauce. “The reason he likes [the sauce is because] it’s brown sugar and ketchup,” said Ann Romney, to the New York Times.

“And that’s what I like,” replied her husband.

Romney, of course, was the first CEO of the hugely successful consulting firm Bain & Company and is still one of the richest sitting senators in congress. (OpenSecrets estimates his net worth to be somewhere around $175 million.) He has rubbed shoulders with high society throughout the entirety of his adult life and managed to rebound from his failed presidential bid to become a respected bipartisan figure in the hearts and minds of liberal idealists—what with all his BLM advocacy and frequent criticism of Donald Trump. However, Romney did always carry one congenital flaw throughout his public aspirations; the man was forever a little too weird for national political success. It is one of the greatest paradoxes in modern electoral history, a circle he could never square. Here is a savvy, wealthy, good-looking man from the pristine enclaves of the Boston suburbs, absolutely chowing down on a cupcake-sized wad of meatloaf, probably while in a private jet. (In that sense, Romney has plenty in common with countless other GOP lifers, like Scott Walker and John Cornyn, who frequently put their nauseating epicurean instincts on full display.)

This week, Romney confirmed that he won’t be seeking reelection for his Senate term, which is expiring in 2025, likely marking the end of his public life. But just before he’s gone for good, he offered us one last kernel of disorienting food gore, reminding us, once and for all, why he was never fit for the Oval Office. Here’s the outgoing senator, in an excerpt of the upcoming biography Romney: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins.

Computer, enhance.

That’s the Romney experience in a nutshell. It’s emblematic of so many unsettling qualities—a primal fear of new flavors and cultures, an elemental mistrust of the ocean, and most flagrantly, a lifelong belief that everything goes better with ketchup. To truly know the man, you must absolutely desecrate a prime cut of Alaskan salmon in front of the TV. So that’s why, during last night’s grocery run, I asked the fishmonger for a pound of wrapped filets and a bottle of Heinz, ready to internalize the dark essence of Romney.

If you want to be extremely charitable, ketchup and salmon is not a total mismatch of flavor profiles. There are countless variations of seafood-and-tomato stews across the Mediterranean (although most of those tend to be made with shellfish, or cod, or tilapia), so perhaps you can interpret a salmon filet slathered with ketchup to be something akin to the saddest bouillabaisse ever, or a terrible disfiguration of the Adriatic good life. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I pan-seared a resplendent pink cut—coated with salt and pepper—until it was delightfully flaky, with the scales crisping off at the edges. I love salmon, and this would’ve been a great meal in any other context. Unfortunately, the tools of catastrophe—ketchup bottle and eight-pack of potato buns—loomed like a specter of death on the nearby counter. I actually felt remorse when I prepared the plate.

The verb used by Coppins in the excerpt is smothered. Romney smothers his fish with ketchup. It also mentions that Romney doesn’t like the taste of salmon, which seems to imply that the condiment here must be applied at a large enough dose to totally eradicate the subtleties of the fish—leaving only the processed, high-fructose tang of sugary tomato in its wake. I endeavored to follow Romney’s instructions to the letter, so I excised a hunk of the filet that could fit neatly onto the circumference of the bun, and covered it with a veritable ketchup soup. I squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed until all of the salmon’s appetizing pinkness was hidden in red glop.

“I can’t watch you do this,” said my girlfriend, who was sitting at the kitchen table and trying to get some work done. “Like, I genuinely think I might throw up.”

I get where she was coming from. The sandwich didn’t exactly smell bad. It didn’t reek of dead flesh, or rotten food, or digestive material—all the usual stuff that might make someone hurl. Instead, when I brought the meal to my mouth, it simply looked wrong. Sinister. Almost evil. Whatever the opposite of a Platonic ideal form is. Here was a freshly cooked Alaskan filet dripping with refrigerated ketchup, mashed between a squishy, supermarket roll.

You could change any part of that equation and generate something far more appetizing. What if the fish was instead swimming in a nice, grainy mustard? Or a blast of spicy aioli? Hell, even some plain-jane Hellmann’s mayonnaise would be more appropriate. If it must be ketchup—as Romney says it must be—why not swap in a hunk of sourdough? Or a ciabatta? Anything to give the sandwich a bit more verve. Instead, my plate looked soft and overripe, an affront against God and man. I don’t think a piece of fish has ever been disrespected more.

It somehow tasted worse than I expected. My girlfriend kept her eyes glued to the window during my consumption, in the same way you might stare at the ceiling while getting blood drawn. The sandwich had the opposite effect on me than it seems to have on Romney. The gobs of ketchup did not obfuscate the fish; instead, it robbed the salmon of all of its wonderful qualities—the oiliness, the seaborne tartness, the lean fat—leaving only a pellet of dank ocean funk encased in slimy, vibeless, tomato product. It felt like eating a lunchable. The bite marks taken out of the bun revealed a tragic cross-section; there was the salmon, still gorgeous—a scintillating medium-rare—lingering under layers of sin, peeking out like a trapped miner. To think that one of the most powerful senators in Congress eats this thing to unwind! Sometimes you read about the archaic beliefs of the founding fathers—like how doctors removed liters of George Washington’s blood to cure a cold in accordance with 18^th-century medical practices—and you’re left wondering how those with such fundamentally crude understandings of the world are the same who shape society. This is the exact same sensation I had while eating the Mitt Romney’s ketchup-salmon special.

Can we please get some normal politicians? It’s gone on like this for too long. When Romney announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, he called on both Donald Trump and Joe Biden to step aside for new leaders to emerge. That literally can’t happen soon enough. A better world is possible, one where the levers of power are not bestowed to infirm octogenarians, psychotic real estate developers, and of course, men who can only eat salmon when it’s dunked in ketchup.