I just really love food! Food there, food here, food everywhere! No wonder “diet” isn’t in my vocabulary. But when I came across an article posted in The Huffington Post, I stopped for a while and asked myself, “Did you really eat that? Yuck!” I felt my stomach swirled in disgust.
#1. Blue Cheese is a moldy hardened milk curd. The final product is spotted or veined throughout with blue, blue-gray or blue-green mold and carries a distinct smell from various specially cultivated bacteria.
#2. Capers are pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa. These are distinctive ingredients in Italian cuisine and are commonly used in salads, pasta salads, meat dishes and pasta sauces.
#3. Chitterlings are usually the small intestines of a pig. Though they don’t always come from pig (can also be from other cattle) and cooked in many ways, they are still intestines. And when they’re not thoroughly cleaned, they can spread diseases.
#4. Cottage cheese is curdled milk chunk. They are made from milks with different fat levels and in small-curd or large-curd preparations.
#5. Escargot is a dish of cooked land snails. Snails are typically purged, killed and removed from their shells before they are cooked with garlic butter, chicken stock or wine, and then placed back into their shells with the garlic butter sauce for serving.
#6. Fish Sauce is a salty fermented fish liquid. Fish and salt are mixed and after a long process of fermentation, the fluids float to the top. This staple ingredient often used as a condiment.
#7. Foie Gras is a crammed liver of a duck or goose. They are usually extracted from these force-fed birds to produce “fatty liver”.
#8. Gelatin is a protein extract from animals’ skin and bones. The process of extracting collagen may take up weeks before it can be converted to gelatin.
#9. Haggis is a sheep’s organs pudding. Sheep’s pluck (heart, liver, and lungs) are minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and encased in the animal’s stomach.
#10. Head Cheese is jelly made with flesh from the head of a calf or pig, sheep or cow. The cleaned head of the animal is simmered to produce stock and when cooled, the stock congeals because of the natural gelatin found in the skull.
#11. Hot Dogs are made from leftover meat. The meat that goes into hot dogs is usually whatever’s left over after those choice cuts have been removed—tiny trimmings, fatty bits, tough sections, and other pieces of meat that aren’t big enough, tender enough, or attractive enough to be sold on their own.
#12. Kimchi is a fermented vegetables. A mixture of a variety of chopped vegetables are allowed to ferment underground in jars for months giving them a strong and recognizable flavor.
#13. Kombucha is a tea fermented by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. The SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) eat most of the sugar in the tea, transforming the tea into a refreshingly fizzy, slightly sour fermented (but mostly non-alcoholic) beverage that is relatively low in calories and sugar.
#14. Rocky Mountain Oysters are are bull calf testicles. Sheep and pig testicles can be used too. They are often deep-fried after being peeled, coated in flour, pepper and salt, and sometimes pounded flat.
#15. Scrapple is a mush of pork scraps. And sometimes, to avoid waste, scraps of meat left over from butchering, not used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple. The mush is formed into a semi-solid curdled loaf. Slices of the scrapple are then pan-fried before serving.
#16. Steak Tartare is a seasoned and minced raw beef. This meat dish is often served with onion, capers, seasoning, and raw egg yoke.
#17. Sweetbread is either fried of grilled calf throat. Sweetbreads are soaked in salt water, poached in milk, after which the outer membrane is removed. Once dried and chilled, they are often breaded and fried.
#18. Tripe are animals’ stomach. They are usually made from only the first three chambers of a cow’s stomach: the rumen (blanket/flat/smooth tripe), the reticulum (honeycomb and pocket tripe), and the omasum (book/bible/leaf tripe).
#19. Veal is a young cow’s meat. Though veal can be produced from a calf of either sex and any breed, most veal comes from male calves of dairy cattle breeds.
#20. Yogurt is a bacterial fermentation of milk. The bacteria used to make yogurt produces lactic acid, which acts on milk protein to give yogurt its texture.
