I Finally Learned How to Make a Screen Shot

Much like last year in the week before Thanksgiving, I responded to the "please help" email sent out by this year's host pretty late in the game. So, once again, I am doing cranberry sauce. Cranberry sauce is the thing that everyone forgets about. Cranberry sauce is the other dad from My Two Dads. Determined to make this year's relish an unbelievable standout, I started doing some image search based recipe hunting and came across a bunch of pictures of aspics. I started to think that maybe Thanksgiving is a time that we can be glad for foods that have gone out of fashion. Like aspics:

If you can't quite make out the text at the bottom of the recipe card there, it says "ring around the tuna" so I can only assume that aside from green olives and congealed gelatin, this particular aspic also includes fish. Aces.

I have long held the belief that, no matter how Alaskan or Lutheran or whatever you claim to be, foods made with poison or whipped blubber and dried berries just shouldn't be consumed in modern times. While I understand and appreciate that food is a part of our shared history and is one of the ways we maintain our traditions, I also understand that recipes from the days of yore were super disgusting. For most regular folks (and many of the rich ones too), fresh food just wasn't available and thus the food that was on hand had to be preserved by some extra foul methods. As a result, some really gnarly crap went down many a gullet.

You've all read books that take place on the high seas and talk about everyone's gout and scurvy from poor diet. Or you've at least seen parts of the awesome PBS series "1900s House" or "Manor House", both of which discuss the cuisine of the times in depth, so I won't cite any of the tired old examples here. Anyway, it's obviously no longer the case that you can't just go and get any variety of fresh produce year-round so just give it up.

That said I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving which is pretty much a feast of historical foods and the traditions we keep alive by serving them over and over each year. Including cranberry sauce, which incidentally, I will now secretly call Greg Evigan sauce.

On a side note, I did some very quick research to see if I could come up with the names of some of these popular foods from the way back to give this post some validity, but then I found this and was laughing so hard that I just gave up.

Oh, you will have to click to enlarge. Or embiggen.