Looking Out: Some culinary combinations are truly questionable
Some foods just naturally go well together. Salt and pepper. Peanut butter and jelly. Pancakes and syrup. Steak and potatoes.
My guess is that everyone has their own secret favorite combination. They guard those secrets jealously. No, not jealously. They guard them out of fear of ridicule.
Take my childhood friend Rooster Croft, for example. When we would come into his house from playing, desperately in need of fuel for our young selves, he would grab a loaf of Wonder Bread, a jar of dill pickles and a bottle of mustard. We would sit at the table eating mustard and pickle sandwiches.
Rooster invented them, but all of his playmates developed a taste for them.
My father had his own quirky taste for a snack. He would remove a leaf of cabbage from the head, roll it into a tube and dip it deeply into a jar of mayonnaise. Down the hatch it would go.
Being a person who loves everything about seafood of all sorts, except for the smell, appearance, odor and taste, I cringe when I see my friends Sharky and Her Majesty devouring sushi.
A friend who’s name shall remain secret in order to protect him from great bodily harm actually puts ketchup on his eggs. Ketchup! On eggs!
“GET HIM! GET HIM!” shout the torch-bearing villagers marching up the lane to his house.
Then there are those people who mistakenly believe that salt should be put on raw tomato slices and on melon. Everyone is entitled to her or his own opinion, but behavior like that has no place in a civilized society.
It is with great pride that I can say with full honesty that I have no such gustatory quirks. Anything that others may see me eat that and think of as an odd dietary choice is a choice based on reason, not mental illness.
Take, for example, butter sandwiches. I have not eaten a butter sandwich since I was in high school, but every Friday back in those days I did. Given my already-expressed distaste for anything that lived in the water, the school cafeteria staff’s insistence on serving fish sticks every Friday for the benefit of any Catholic students sent me scurrying to the tray of bread and butter. Peanut butter was also available, but my finely tuned palate had not yet found happiness in peanut butter. But butter sandwiches? Oh, yes!
At home, I followed my mother’s lead for snacking. A slice of bologna wrapped around a dill pickle and a solid slice of longhorn cheese made a perfect hors d’oeuvre. What? You’re saying my mother was wrong! Fie on you.
Just in case you found the notion of butter sandwiches or mustard, pickle and cheese sandwiches unsavory, let me remind you that one of my other favorites was also the favorite of Queen Elizabeth, Will Rogers, Mother Teresa, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln and numerous notables in the Bible. Yes. Cold baked-bean sandwiches. A great way to use leftover beans.
The other day someone noticed that I put generous slugs of Tabasco Sauce on my macaroni and cheese. Mac and cheese is a staple in the diet of many people, just, if I am not badly mistaken, it was for Plato, Aristotle, Nimrod Minton and the Wright brothers. But macaroni and cheese without hot sauce? Surely the archival records proving that those men put Tabasco sauce on their mac and cheese have yet to be unearthed.
As for the pairing of fresh pineapple chunks with any kind of cheese, logic screams loud approval, so I need make no argument of my own.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Some culinary combinations are truly questionable
