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21 Rotten Foods Found in Your Family Cookbook

How many recipes for rotten food are in your family cookbook?  Or, how many recipes in your family cookbook include ingredients classified as rotten food? I bet you have quite a few!

Consider that some of the most beloved rotten food tastes from the Americas and Europe (especially France) are based on some form of decomposition, decay, or the result of deliberately drying, fermenting, spicing, or injecting foods with “good” bacteria.

It is always amusing to try and fathom why someone would taste, let alone eat, some of the most disgusting rotten food products out there (and pay extra for them). Culture certainly has a lot to do with rotten food being coveted.  Smelly, salty things don’t seem like such attractions, however, go most anywhere in the world and you’re bound to find at least one food that is prized for its putrid qualities.

Still think you don’t have any rotten food recipes in your family cookbook? Try these on for size:

21 Rotten Foods Found in Your Family Cookbook

Aged meat
Beer
Cheese
Creme fraiche
Cassoulet
Confit
Cured meat & hams (Parma, Rosette, Smithfield)
Fish paste
Fish sauce
Kim-Chi
Pate
Rillette
Salt cod
Sour bean curd
Sour cream
Soy sauce
Sun-dried tomatoes
Surstromming herring
Wild game birds
Wine
Yogurt

Most of the rotten foods in the list above are an acquired taste. And, coincidentally, most rotten foods are the result of someone trying to extend the usefulness of a food by extending its due date (aka preservation to prevent spoilage), thus staving off hunger.

Can’t really blame/credit any one person for the “discovery” of cheese, or the process of fermenting soy sauce or beer. It is just interesting to imagine why anyone would try rotten food in the first place.

Well, I wouldn”t recommend adding a section in your family cookbook called “Rotten Foods,” but it is fun to think about and perhaps use for idle conversation during lulls in the Super Bowl competition (when you are working on your family cookbook, recipe cards, family reunion, or fundraiser).

Happy Cookbooking,

Erin