I was eight or ten when I saw pig’s feet at the local Winn Dixie or Piggly Wiggly (I did grow up in the South after all). There they were, lying shamelessly beside the hams and the other piggled parts, waiting for some dude wearing plaid and sporting a frosted mullet to grab them.
Little Old Midwestern me screamed and ran to the comparative safety of the boxed sugary Hostess cake aisle lest they burst from their plastic packaging and trample me.
If it wasn’t hot dogs or White Castles, I didn’t eat it.
I see the irony of this now. I was willing to eat whatever the bloody miserable scary assed hell was in hotdogs in the 70s and 80s, but eating something natural like pigs feet was terrifying. Eat a foot? What kind of weirdo does that?
No thank you. I’ll be over here devouring chemicals and toxins and random body parts instead. This hot dog shit is way less scary than your disgusting feet, you freak.
Flash forward forty some years and now I’ll eat anything. Much of my diet consists of foods I consume some period of time after saying something like, “What the fuck is that?”
The running holiday wish list I keep has whatever strange finds come to mind and this year, almost as a joke, I added pickled pig’s feet. A joke to myself. A joke for whomever might buy them. Which turned out to be my parents. Before I had a chance to rethink my wish.
Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.
Anthony Bourdain
The box arrived last week. A giant box from some company with “pickled” in its name. I spoke with my parents the next day about something else and mentioned the box. Mom made a point of expertly applying Catholic guilt when she said, “I hope you appreciate it. The shipping was twice the cost of the pig’s feet!”
Oh fuck all, I thought. I’m really going to have to eat these things now.
“Have you guys ever tried them?” I asked.
Mom said, “Oh, I ate them all the time as a kid with daddy.”
“Oh… So I’ll save them for you whenever you come next!”
Hot damn! I’m off the hook! I don’t have to eat these things any time soon.
“No. Oh no. No, no. I don’t want to eat those.” Mom laughs uncomfortably. “No. Don’t save those for me.”
These pig’s feet are the first food in decades that I am truly afraid to eat. When I open the box, I find a jar about 8″ tall filled with some kind of creepy gelatinous goo that reminds me of those things people put shrunken heads in. I used to see them in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not ads in Myrtle Beach.
All week I’ve been thinking about them sitting there in my fridge. Wondering what they’ll do to the normal food when they escape.
Today, I took the plunge. I decided to see what they are. How scary can they be? Ham in vinegar, that’s all they are. And when I look at the jar and see the weird gelatin, I repeat that phrase like a mantra.
First of all, the ingredients list talks of typical scary food things. Color. Sorbitate Will-kill-u-ate.
Opening the jar led to a kind of sensory torture that made me wonder why synthetic drug addicts ingest all that crack and meth. The odor was profoundly chemical. Strong vinegar, maybe some citrus and behind it all was, I’m absolutely sure even though I’ve never been in one, sterilized meth lab.
Think “Breaking Bad” when they wore those yellow Hazmat suits in that stainless steel lab. It smelled like that smelled, I bet. If it were real. And it had pig feet in it.
But then I look and there’s more gel. The whole top of the thing, gel. Mbllglubph.
With great pain, I grab a fork and suck all the gel out with that wet sound you get when you try to move a big of a wet thing from a small wet place. A slurpy, slushy sound nobody ever wants to hear during sex. I threw it in a bowl and scrape off the gel.
Bottoms up! Literally!
Texture: Similar to bologna and hot dogs.
Taste: Ham in vinegar.
Smell: Pig meth lab sterlized in vinegar covered in citrus aerosol air freshener from the dollar store.
Sound: Sex with goat lubricated by JELLO.
Honestly, it doesn’t make me puke. It tastes like bologna or ham in vinegar, just as I expected.
Maybe if someone served it along side crackers and triple cream with a frisky white wine it would have been a different experience. As it is now, all I see is post-coital-cigarette-smoking goats and Hazmat suits.
But then I started thinking about the gel. Maybe it’s all jelly-like because it’s cold. What happens if I heat it up? So I gave it 30 seconds in the microwave, and the gel turned to liquid, as expected.
But now it just looks like a deformed human embryo in watered down tomato soup.
More edible, without all that mucus. Tastes about the same, but without the disgusting bit, even more reminiscent of pickled bologna.
Will I eat it again? No.
< laughs uncomfortably just like mom did >