I'm just catching up with this Thrillist article from last December, but I'm guessing that the opinions within in haven't changed all that much. After all, how likely is it that the most disgusting food in a state changes from one year to the next?
I was prepared to be completely disgusted by ambrosia salad, deemed the grossest food stuff coming out of Alabama. It's canned fruit, coconut, mini-marshmallows and something like sour cream or Cool Whip to hold it all together. Then I thought about something similar that my mother used to make on Christmas Eve. Her concoction was canned fruit cocktail and walnuts in a scratch-made ultra-sweet cream sauce. There may have been mini-marshmallows in there. If so, I'm blocking them. Anyway, we all loved this fruit salad. My sister Trish made it a few years back when we did a nostalgia thang for Christmas Eve (kidney bean, mushroom, peppers and meatball casserole, baked ziti), and, while it wasn't the hit I remembered - and a very little went a long way - it was still pretty good. (The kidney bean-meatball casserole was its usual smash. My mouth is watering as I think of it now...)
But I'll take a pass on Alaska's akutaq (seal fat and wild berries). And why pick on Colorado for shredded wheat? Shredded wheat! It's just about my favorite cold cereal. I can't imagine why anyone would find it gross...
Naturally, the New England nominees interested me the most, the thinking being these are all states I've spent plenty of time in. And I really didn't want to run through all 50 states, so I mostly stayed close to home.
I've never had Connectcut clam pizza pie, which Thrillist thinks looks terrible but tastes okay. I think it looks just fine, and I bet I'd like it just fine, too. Even though I have to ask why anyone would waste good clams on pizza when they can have them in chowder, spaghetti with white clam sauce, or fried up (stomach must be included) and served on a roll.
Before I hit the next New England state, I had to pause at Hawaii to get my gag reflex going on SPAM musubi. I may have loved SPAM as a kid, but today's more refined tongue is burning at the very thought of it.
And since my mother hailed from Chicago, I stopped at Illinois, too, where Thrillist goes after gravy bread, which is bread sopped in gravy. While in this case gravy is beef juice, and I would prefer gravy-gravy sopped bread, this sounds pretty tasty to me.
Maine's entry is tomalley, which is the green, mushy liver and pancreas of a lobster. Not a fan, here, but when I was a waitress at Boston's Union Oyster House a million years ago, it was on the menu and people did used to order it. I'm guessing that everyone who once ordered that tomalley has passed on to the great beyond, given that they were mostly old geezers and that was 50 years ago. So there probably aren't that many folks, other than ultra foodies (the type that would find eating Lousiana nutria interesting), who'd be disappointed to learn that the FDA recommends against tomalley because of the potential for toxins in it.
As a kid, my favorite sandwich was - handsdown - the Fluffernutter: peanut butter and Massachusetts' own Marshmallow Fluff, on (what else) white bread. (Although some of my sibs swore by it, I couldn't stand jam or jelly on it.) The Fluffernutter had some close competition: PBJ (with grape jelly), tuna salad (the way my mother made it, not the way Ellen Walsh's mother made it for her 7th birthday party, with green pepper it it), and the Gus (bacon, lettuce, cheese, and dill pickle) which my brother Tom (a.k.a. Gus) and I "invented." (It's still a go-to.) But, back then, if I had to pick one, it would have been the Fluffernutter. I wouldn't care to have one now, and I can't think of any Massachusetts food that would be a candidate for our grossest. Sure, there's also no other food I can think of that turns to cement when you get to the bottom of the jar. But JUST YOU DON'T GO PICKING ON FLUFF!
And what can anyone possible have against grapenut ice cream, which was named New Hampshire's grossest. Sure, you can break a tooth on one of those bits of grapenut in there, but I love grapenuts ice cream. Then again, I'm a fan of New England ice cream flavors in general. Maple walnut. Maine black bear. I even like frozen pudding ice cream. It's quite hard for me to believe there isn't something nastier that comes out of the state of New Hampshire, especially if you head north...
Although Thrillist calls it "insanely delicious," Rhode Island's chop suey sandwich - the kind of chop suey that comes out of La Choy cans with some pork tossed in, on a hamburg bun - sounds pretty dreadful to me. Even worse, though, was a sandwich I once saw my grandmother - surely one of the worst cooks to ever walk the face of this earth - serve my Uncle Charlie: American Chop-Suey (a.k.a., hamburg and macaroni, with bacon, in tomato soup), refried in my grandmother's never-off-the-stove skillet, on white bread. I love American Chop-Suey. In fact, I made some just about a month ago. I just don't love it on white bread, after it's been swirled around in the grease in my grandmother's cast iron frying pan.
Vermont gets it for raw milk. Errrr, no thanks. That Louis Pasteur was a pretty smart guy...
No Fluff in the house, and there probably never will be, so I'm off to make a PBJ.
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