Saturday, October 3, 2015

Pommes de terror

After some (mostly bland and kind of sad) apple sweets, this week we're going scary with savory apples.

Okay, maybe more sweet-and-savory first.

Remember the psychology class lesson about how the sense of smell is a huge component of what we consider taste? The teacher would blindfold some poor unlucky sap, tell them to plug their nose, and then make them eat bites of apple and onion to prove that the two are indistinguishable without one's sense of smell. Well, the Junior League of Indianapolis (in The Midwestern Junior League Cookbook, 1978) got the wrong lesson from that experiment:


The experiment is not an invitation to add onions to apples and brown sugar! At least, that's not what I understood as the takeaway, which is that you should never volunteer as a subject for a psychology class demonstration. Some people totally miss the point.

Okay, for honest-to-god savory apple recipes, we're returning to Thomas Mario's The Playboy Gourmet. Maybe he saw the typical apple-and-pork chop pairing as too pedestrian, so he fixated on another apple-and-meat pairing:


Apples and fish! Because who hasn't wanted to add apples and halibut to a potato salad?

If halibut doesn't seem sufficiently fishy to compete with the apples, though, there is always this alternative:


Potato salad with diced canned beets, apples, and herring tidbits! Hooray!

Maybe Opus from Bloom County has enough of a herring addiction to be excited, so I will leave this to him. 

Happy Saturday! And try to enjoy your apples onion-and-herring-free!

2 comments:

  1. Happy Saturday!

    Well, I love apples and I love onions. But together?! That makes my gut ache just thinking about it :P

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    1. It looks like it would be fine as a dessert with just apples. Not sure why they felt compelled to add onions!

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