Chicken Cookies and Caramel Cuttlefish…Lunch Anyone?

Catching up on what my fellow T/S foodies had to say this week, I noted that I’m not the only one keeping a keen eye on what our transatlantic cousins are putting in their mouths these days. In case you missed Robin Dorian’s post yesterday, she brought our attention to Britain’s answer to recession indulgence: the strawberries and cream sausage. (Surely, the rationale behind this bizarre amalgam was to offer consumers two of the country’s best-loved summer treats for the price of one…)

Like Robin, my first response to said fruit flavored meat concoction was a guttural reaction not to be repeated in polite company – or in any company for that matter. But then I regrouped my insides and thought about what exactly it was that I found so offensive about this curious meaty link? It’s not as if this is the first time gourmands have paired up fruit and meat. Think duck a l’Orange, weiner schnitzel and loganberry jam, apricot filled tagines and of course that old favorite pork and apples. In fact, this combo is so pedestrian it’s virtually passé. As for the dairy element, that too has been tried and tested.

So while our senses are no longer perturbed by a piece of fruit when it turns up in our Moroccan stew because we’ve grown accustomed to it, our nostrils scrunch up in disgust when pork, strawberries and crème fraîche are squeezed into a natural casing. Why? Simply because it’s unfamiliar, it has never been done before? I recoil in horror, delving my hand deeper into a bag of caramelized cuttlefish chips, as I think about some of my most favorite foods that might never have been born had the brave souls who conjured them up abstained from pairing incongruous flavors or neglected to savor some seemingly sickening concoction.

Let’s retract for a minute to those caramelized cuttlefish chips. Tiny tentacle tendrils deep-fried until crisp then coated in a chili caramel coating. I know what you’re thinking. And it isn’t delish, I gotta get me some of that. But it should be. And if crunchy isn’t your thing, go for the paper-thin lacy sheets of dried cuttlefish sprinkled with granulated sugar that are sold in abundance in Malaysian movie theaters (and available right here in Chinatown). Forget popcorn, I’ll take desiccated, umami-filled seafood any day. Then there are the sandwiches filled with cheese slices and slathered with lashings of strawberry jelly that I recall from my school lunchbox. And don’t even get me started on those candy sweet, mouth-fillingly savory chicken flavored cookies. That’s right: chicken cookies.

You might be thinking that sugar has no placing mingling with anything that once ran on four legs or floated in the ocean. But the reason why this sweet/salty combo is so tempting is precisely because the body searches out sugar and salt in its desire for optimal nutrition. The caramel cuttlefish, its sugar-coated cousins and the chicken cookies satisfy our sugar cravings as well as offer the ultimate “umami” fix. Uma-what, you say? Umami is the fifth taste discovered about 100 years ago by Japanese food scientist Kikunae Ikeda and refers to the mouth-fulling, savory depth that makes chicken soup and well-made meatballs taste so scrumptious.

And so I suppose my point is this. Don’t let your gustatory caution close you off to a whole world of deliciousness. Embrace the chicken flavored cookie, then, tell me if you don’t like it. I’m opening the floor up the floor folks. Any fellow gastronomic buccaneers want to share their favorite unlikely flavor combos?