A recipe from the Department of Monstrous Foods
"…heinous, wrong, gross, disgusting, I do not recommend…"
— Emmy
Imagine please, a pineapple ring on a plate. For full effect, the base has a fluffy mass of lettuce leaves. Into the pineapple's hole you place half a banana, pointy side up. Using cream (or mayonnaise) you stick a maraschino cherry to the very tip. Then you drool some of the sticky stuff down the sides of the banana. Now stand back and look at what you've created. Perhaps you chuckle at its suggestiveness before you throw it away and cleanse your mind.
What you just made in your head is not some twisted Rule 34 phallic symbol, it is in fact a salad dish designed to be easy for children to make in 1920s USA. Cherry flame, mayo candle wax dripping. I can close my eyes and see a 1960s cookbook that suggested this dire dessert, can see the dripping wang on the page in full, dreadful colour, splooging mayo onto lettuce pubes.
According to my sources, it was a popular thing up to the 1960s, and according to one, it was "…an easy way to get children to eat fruit because of its unusual appearance". I can only imagine the current generation of children giggling as they are asked to make this lamentable lingam tidbit. "Unusual appearance" indeed. In my dirty mind it resembles no more than the 3D culinary equivalent of a badly drawn cock.
Perhaps it's only my mind that is perverting this delight. It's also coming up to Christmas, and so I need to be charitable. Maybe in the world of 1920 America, minds were much less defiled than mine; after all, to the pure, all things are pure. Nonetheless, the thought of this as a thing people would make and eat is right up there with Jello salad, a mockery of real food, a punishment for those Puritans who desired to please their flesh. Of course, my left brain¹ tells me that many people lived in a food desert at that time, without access to fresh foods all year round. In this dessert desert they were forced to improvise using what they had available and become food Frankensteins, creating monsters stitched together with mad creativity and hope.
¹ Of course, this is a joke. The left/right brain theory is largely dismissed in these enlightened days.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
399