Quote from: tekla on December 02, 2008, 08:00:27 PM
Almost every culture has some food that is best not to talk about in public in the rest of the world.
And that's really the point, they usually sound much worse than they taste. Take haggis, for example: some minced sheep innards and grain cooked in a stomach? Sounds yucky. But on the other hand, once you start to think about it, it isn't very different from minced sheep innards and meat cooked in intestine, commonly known as sausage. And the result is quite tasty.
Likewise, lutfisk is essentially salted and dried fish that is later rehydrated and cooked, only with a slightly different chemical mix than plain salt or the various modern food preservatives. It's a bit tasteless by itself, but with the right kind of sauce it too is perfectly edible. People used to eat it, or some variants of it, during lent all over Europe; nowadays it's more a traditional Scandinavian Christmas dish (as a leftover from the pre-reformation custom of fasting before Christmas). Now if you really want a scary Scandinavian dish, try the Swedish surströmming, or fermented herring, sold in bulging tin cans. The taste isn't too bad, but once you open the can everything within a ten-metre radius will smell at least for the next week or so.
Back to the original topic, haggis is good. The one example of canned haggis I've tasted was all right too, although a little bland compared to the real thing. Just like canned foods in general (except some soups) aren't quite as good as the fresh version.
Nfr
