Disgusting Food of Europe Map

Angela

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I needed a giggle, so...

http://brilliantmaps.com/culinary-horrors-europe/

Actually, some countries eat more than one of those things. My father so loved the maggoty cheese of Sardinia that he used to go to the harbor in La Spezia to meet the boats so he'd be sure to get some. YUCK! :petrified: My mother made him eat it outside. :grin:

Stereotype maps are sometimes funny, so long as they don't cross the line into racism, and you don't take them too seriously...

How Italians view the food of Europe:
http://brilliantmaps.com/italian-food/

Interestingly, the map was made by a Russian.:startled:
I don't understand the difference between "literally" tasteless and "aesthetically" tasteless. :confused:
 
LOL at Nestlé for Switzerland.

Other than Nestlé, I think the only one I've tried is head cheese. It was OK, nothing special, the gelatin was the more notable thing about it than the meat. Around here it's marketed as Bavarian rather than Dutch, though, so maybe I'm not getting the right variety.

Also, there have got to be more disgusting dishes for Scotland of all places than fried pizza.
 
LOL at Nestlé for Switzerland.

Other than Nestlé, I think the only one I've tried is head cheese. It was OK, nothing special, the gelatin was the more notable thing about it than the meat. Around here it's marketed as Bavarian rather than Dutch, though, so maybe I'm not getting the right variety.

Also, there have got to be more disgusting dishes for Scotland of all places than fried pizza.

We eat a lot of tripe, but in stew, not soup; it's good with the right sauce, but I never was able to get my children to eat it. In Firenze it's street food; vendors sell it from little carts. :) Salted pig fat is just lard, isn't it? American pie crusts always used to be made with lard, before the invention of Crisco, that is. There's a bakery near me that still does it. They can't keep the pies in stock. We use it or used to use it in less health conscious times instead of olive oil or in addition to it to make the soffrito base for many dishes. It adds great flavor to food. The Lardo of Colonnata is a great delicacy. It's delicious on a nice piece of Italian bread.
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I would have thought they would have put haggis for Scotland. I don't think it sounds at all bad, frankly. Also, what's wrong with fried pizza? That's what this is, fried pizza dough, and it's delicious.

They're called zepolle, a Sicilian "pastry". They're divine, but one is enough unless you have a cast iron stomach.
Steves-zeppole-500x333.jpg



This is deep fried pasta dough. We call them farfalle or butterflies, but Americans call them bowties.
bowties.jpg
 
I had Iranian bosses and sometimes we go out quite frequently to Vietnamese restaurants. They like Vietnamese food and soup with ripe as well, who knew?
 
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Yammy :LOL:

and others

As the local taste (in Kilikia),


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What if foreigners eat it,
 
We eat a lot of tripe, but in stew, not soup; it's good with the right sauce, but I never was able to get my children to eat it.
Same in my house. I love it but kids can't look at it. I blame myself not feeding my kids more exotic dishes before they were big enough to hear about ingredients, lol.

Salted pig fat is just lard, isn't it? American pie crusts always used to be made with lard, before the invention of Crisco, that is. There's a bakery near me that still does it. They can't keep the pies in stock. We use it or used to use it in less health conscious times instead of olive oil or in addition to it to make the soffrito base for many dishes. It adds great flavor to food. The Lardo of Colonnata is a great delicacy. It's delicious on a nice piece of Italian bread.
Like it too when is well marinated to eat and with bread with butter. In my case with sourdough rye fresh and crispy.


This is deep fried pasta dough. We call them farfalle or butterflies, but Americans call them bowties.
bowties.jpg
Are known in Poland too.


The only food that I couldn't eat so far was boiled cow's tongue in horseradish souse. Actually it was delicious but my throat seized up in half the way. At least if they cut up it in small pieces, but no, it was served as God created.
I like creative french cousin with frog legs and fried liver, though I'm not fun of escargot.
 
I needed a giggle, so...

http://brilliantmaps.com/culinary-horrors-europe/

Actually, some countries eat more than one of those things. My father so loved the maggoty cheese of Sardinia that he used to go to the harbor in La Spezia to meet the boats so he'd be sure to get some. YUCK! :petrified: My mother made him eat it outside. :grin:

I am not squeamish when it comes to blood or unusual foods, so the map doesn't really disturbs me. The only exception if the maggot cheese, which I really couldn't bring myself to eat (and I have eaten ants and grasshoppers). I like the touch of humour with Nestlé in Switzerland.

How Italians view the food of Europe:
http://brilliantmaps.com/italian-food/

Interestingly, the map was made by a Russian.:startled:

Funny, but highly inaccurate if it was really based on scores given by Italian tourists abroad. For example it doesn't make sense to give three different shades for France, where the cuisine is not considerably better or worse in any particular region. Preconceived ideas are pretty meaningless. It would be better to do a sort of scientific survey of people's opinion of food quality in various countries and sort the results by rationality to see if some nationalities have higher standards about foods than others, and how tastes vary across cultural groups, linguistic families, and genetic/ethnic groups (e.g. North vs South Italians).

As for the 'toxic' shade of the map, it is ironic since one of the few food items about which potential toxic content I worry when I buy it is mozzarella from Campania, after all the horror stories about the piles of illegal toxic wastes and dioxin spewed in the air by waste incineration in the so-called triangle of death around Naples and inhaled and swallowed by local buffaloes. I love Italian food but it always gives me the chills when I see a package of mozzarella stating that it is real mozzarella from Caserta or Capua, just a few kilometers north of the triangle of death. I try to buy only organic mozzarella and if possible not from Campania for that reason. When it comes to toxicity, I would certainly trust more Swedish food items than Neapolitan ones.
 
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They're called zepolle, a Sicilian "pastry". They're divine, but one is enough unless you have a cast iron stomach.
Steves-zeppole-500x333.jpg

We have these too called Zeppolini called after GuZEPPI as they are a specialty for St Joseph feast round about March I think. They are filled with sweetened ricotta and as you said fried...I can eat more then one mmm :)

I had frog legs last time in France and they were absolutely delicious....no joking. They told me they are imported from Slovakia or Slovenia these days (Im not sure which)
 
What's supposedly "disgusting" about squid ink? And it is actually great. In Spain it is used for the sauce to make squid and rice ("calamares en su tinta"), and in Italy it is used to make the sauce for some rice and pasta dishes ("al nero di seppia")
 
Yankos' maps are just funny, not to accurate but love them anyway. For e.g. in Kosovo, not all the regions eat tripe nor the heads of cow or sheep or other animal, they simply gave it away to poor. Highlanders, and their ancestors now, would never eat a "poor mans food" as they call it, but urban areas do eat tripe in soup known as paqa (pacha) which is made with head meat as well, but one can never find it in restaurants, they usually make it with meat since not everyone likes it. There is however a speciality, strict to few families, pie with tripe, and it is usually a man thing, women would make it but they do not like it, man simply die for it. I do not understand it since I come from the highlanders tribe, lol. In some families there was a version of haggis as well, my female (mothers) line used to have it as a family recipe but not in our family, it was a no no.
 
Yankos' maps are just funny, not to accurate but love them anyway. For e.g. in Kosovo, not all the regions eat tripe nor the heads of cow or sheep or other animal, they simply gave it away to poor. Highlanders, and their ancestors now, would never eat a "poor mans food" as they call it, but urban areas do eat tripe in soup known as paqa (pacha) which is made with head meat as well, but one can never find it in restaurants, they usually make it with meat since not everyone likes it. There is however a speciality, strict to few families, pie with tripe, and it is usually a man thing, women would make it but they do not like it, man simply die for it. I do not understand it since I come from the highlanders tribe, lol. In some families there was a version of haggis as well, my female (mothers) line used to have it as a family recipe but not in our family, it was a no no.

You're absolutely right. They're just fun, not something to take too seriously or to take umbrage at...

Italians are very conservative about food, so a lot of traditional, "peasant" food is still part of the cuisine, although nowadays some of it's made only in certain restaurants or prepared at sagre during the summer instead of in the home kitchen. The fact is that many of these "old time" dishes are delicious as well as being testimony to the fact that nothing was ever wasted, or should be wasted from the animals we consume. People with a good palate and talent who are willing to spend a lot of time on a dish can indeed make "a silk purse out of a sow's ear metaphorically speaking"!They're actually sort of a vogue in urban areas. That's what's happened to a lot of traditional Roman food of the poor, which was based on offal of various sorts.

Oxtail Stew:
Oxtail-Stew.jpg


@ Boreas, I have never eaten the head of a sheep or cow, nor seen one prepared, but I have eaten the head of fish, however. :) In fact, I was trained never to eat a fish unless the head was on it. It's one of the ways to know the fish is fresh.

I had to look up your Turkish specialty, and feared the worst.
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I was relieved to find it was just a haggis like stuffed intestine.
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This is how they serve tripe at vendor's stalls in Florence. Not quite so frightening looking.
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Stewed tripe Florentine style:
Trippa_alla_Melrose1.jpg
 
Where is Andrew Zimmerman when you need him :D . I find it interesting that Rotten shark is available in Iceland, looks like the Greenland shark is poisonous to eat when fresh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl
 
Squid ink, horse meat, liver paste, head cheese, deep fried pizza, lard: some of these are not exactly "healthy" but I would hardly qualify them as "disgusting". Some of the blood ones, like blood sausage, also are not really "disgusting", at least not once you taste them and get over the fact that they have pig blood in them. Frog legs are also not that weird to be labelled "disgusting". Entrails, genitalia, raw urchin, rotting/fermenting fish and cheese with maggots one can understand why most people would consider them "disgusting".
 
Squid ink, horse meat, liver paste, head cheese, deep fried pizza, lard: some of these are not exactly "healthy" but I would hardly qualify them as "disgusting". Some of the blood ones, like blood sausage, also are not really "disgusting", at least not once you taste them and get over the fact that they have pig blood in them. Frog legs are also not that weird to be labelled "disgusting". Entrails, genitalia, raw urchin, rotting/fermenting fish and cheese with maggots one can understand why most people would consider them "disgusting".

Why would raw urchins (known as uni or 海胆 in Japanese, for sushi aficionados) be disgusting ? That's just seafood. It's not more disgusting than eating raw scallops or oysters. Then why would you have a problem with fermented fish if you eat other fermented foods like yogurt, cheese or sauerkraut ?

I think that maggots cross a particular psychological line because dead human bodies are eaten by those very maggots, and you surely don't want to accelerate that process or tempt them to eat you alive from the inside !
 
Where is Andrew Zimmerman when you need him :D . I find it interesting that Rotten shark is available in Iceland, looks like the Greenland shark is poisonous to eat when fresh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl

It's never a good idea to eat carnivores on top of the food chain as they contain the most accumulated toxins and heavy metals. Just in case you were stranded in the Arctic and decided to hunt polar bears to survive, be warned that eating their liver is deadly, but for another reason. It contains far too much vitamin A, which would cause immediate acute hypervitaminosis A, which will cause severe headache, hypersensitivity to sunlight, vomiting, hair loss, yellow discoloration of the skin, skin peeling, softening of the skull bone, bone swelling, spontaneous fracture, atrocious pain, and eventually death. Not a fun way to go.

When you consider that, eating insects is not a bad alternative after all.
 
Another visual for you all. Polenta e osei. They're little birds. It's a dish particularly loved in the Veneto, but it's served in my area too. The real aficionados lift them up by their feet and just bite down, head and all. :shocked:

I can't do it myself but I'm used to seeing it. Not so our British part time residents. When my dinner companion assaulted the dish with gusto, an English woman sitting at an adjoining table started to heave and had to leave the table!:grin:

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Eating raw sea creatures is sort of standard in most coastal communities, isn't it? There's a certain shell fish called datari because they're oval and black which used to be very common in the Ligurian Sea. I remember going with my father and he would just slice them open and gulp them down. So many people loved them that I think you can barely find them anymore.

Sea urchins are called ricci di mare in Italy...a lot of people love them. It's not really the eggs that you're eating; it's the gonads that produce them, which is a bit off putting for some people.

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