This morning, I read about a fascinating (and kind of really disgusting) dish once served in France. The Ortolan is a bird in the bunting family and is native to Europe and some parts of western Asia. It is prepared and eaten as such:

You catch the ortolan with a net spread up in the forest canopy. Take it alive. Take it home. Poke out its eyes and put it in a small cage. Force-feed it oats and millet and figs until it has swollen to four times its normal size. Drown it in brandy. Roast it whole, in an oven at high heat, for six to eight minutes. Bring it to the table. Place a cloth—a napkin will do—over your head to hide your cruelty from the sight of God. Put the whole bird into your mouth, with only the beak protruding from your lips. Bite. Put the beak on your plate and begin chewing, gently. You will taste three things: First, the sweetness of the flesh and fat. This is God. Then, the bitterness of the guts will begin to overwhelm you. This is the suffering of Jesus. Finally, as your teeth break the small, delicate bones and they begin to lacerate your gums, you will taste the salt of your own blood, mingling with the richness of the fat and the bitterness of the organs. This is the Holy Spirit, the mystery of the Trinity—three united as one. It is cruel. And beautiful. According to Claude Souvenir, chewing the ortolan takes approximately 15 minutes.

The napkin and references to the Catholic Trinity might be one interpretation. I’ve also read that the napkin’s purpose over the head is to retain the aromas released from the bird as it is chewed, so that the nose can fully appreciate them.

Since the bird is endangered, eating ortolan is illegal. Supposedly, former French president François Mitterrand was secretly served one in 1996 as part of his dying wish. I’ll pass.

Q:

Dear daveb,

How can I raise $150,000 to buy this two headed albino snake? I think it would taste delicious.

<3 gwennie

A: You’d think it’d be a tough task, right? I mean, that’s a pretty good chunk of change. Why you’d want to spend that amount of money to eat a mutant snake, I’ve no idea. Personally, while I would definitely eat the little fucker, I’d balk at having to pay anything over twenty bucks. Call me cheap, but that’s how I roll.

Anyway, so how are you going to pay for this two-headed genetic wonder? Shit, you gotta feed your seeds, yo. You gotta put that deep-fried two-headed bucket o’ snake on the table or social services gonna come haul your kids away for starving ‘em and shit. This is serious!

Alright, calm down. Daveb’s here with the answer. What I suggest you do is get a second job. Taco Bell, CFO of a bank, whatever you can get, just make that paycheck. Once you got some cash, click the button found on the lower right-hand side of davebgimp.com marked “PayPal: Donate”

It’s your ticket to financial freedom and the ability to eat two-headed snakes! Plus, it cures acne, promotes overall gastric well-being and makes people like you!

Use the link to send mee all your new-found cash. I will use it to become filthy fucking rich and when I die, which could be any day now, I will leave you everything and then you can munch away on two-headed snakes to your withered heart’s content. Do it. Do it now.

[Ask daveb anything! Either use this form or send an email to webmaster [at] davebgimp [dot] com with “Ask daveb” as the subject line. Remember, daveb knows all!]

I’ve had one of those generic lousy mornings, complete with the shitty night’s sleep, the late to work action, the forgotten lunch on the kitchen counter and the misplaced cash. So, exhausted, tired and lost amidst wires, ink, chaos and a vague, general malaise, I broke my usual dietary rules and ate a doughnut. Glazed. Two of them, actually. Shh, don’t tell.

I gave up about 90% of the sugar from my diet about five months ago. I stopped putting it in my coffee in the morning. No more candy, except for the occasional piece of dark chocolate. No ice cream, cookies, nothing. Over time, I’ve allowed the occasional exceptions, but for the most part, I’ve been really good about abstaining. It helps that since I’ve cut so much sugar out, my tolerance has dramatically dropped. A few bites of chocolate has me OD’d, sweating, dizzy and feeling I like just did time in a wind tunnel filled with airplane glue. Those days as a child, when I would devour ten to twelve candy bars for a post Halloween breakfast seem like a distant and hazy mirage. I am now a sugar wimp. Call me Mr. Goodbar’s bitch.

So now I’m sitting in my Cubicle of Doom, desperately fighting the effects of two oversized glazed doughnuts, wondering what the hell I could have been thinking to do this to myself. I’m standing square at the crossroads between blowing chunks all over my monitor and passing out, face-down on the keyboard. My brain is contemplating hanging itself from my spinal cord with a suicide note taped to the medulla oblongata. My eyes are fighting a cage match against each other to see who can hold the monitor in focus the longest. For every word my left hand picks out on the keyboard, my right hand’s on the backspace acting like Godzilla in the streets of Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to whole sentences of gibberish and half-formed, semi-drooling thoughts. It’s kind of sad to see.

However pathetic my current situation may be, it can’t hold a candle to last night’s experiment with Kava Kava.

Some time ago, when quitting cigarettes and hitting that frenzied state of withdrawal where you want to rip your skin off, staple your eyeballs backwards and dance the tarantella till you die or someone says it’s okay for you to smoke, I’d tried using Kava Kava to quell or at least lessen the suffering. I picked up a bottle at a health food store and popped something like four or five of the capsules. It helped, I think. Or if it didn’t, I was at the very least too fucking high to notice the difference.

Last night, on a whim, I popped three capsules and sat down to yet another Zatoichi film (someday, somehow, I will have watched them all, dammit) to see if anything would happen.

Very shortly after, I found myself high as fucking hell, head cocked at three o’ clock, with the beginnings of a decent drool as little leprechauns goose-stepped back and forth in my stomach. I had the schizoid desire to jump up and do massive manic jumping-jacks while simultaneously taking a nap. While it was not entirely unpleasant, it was more than a little unnerving and in my advanced age and much more pasteurized lifestyle, I’ll probably refrain from taking it again.

Over the past 4 years, daveb as slowly been weaning various bad habits out of his life. Some happened on their own, like quitting weed and drinking to excess. Others, like quitting cigarettes took herculean efforts. For the past three days, daveb has been struggling with his latest project, quitting sugar and starch.

Now before you label daveb as one of those miserable, monastic bastards with no joy in his life, understand that he wants to be able to do everything for a long time to come. However, he has a bit of a nervous and addictive personality, one that attracts habits that will likely put him six feet under sooner than he’d like. His thinking is, kill all of these “habits”, like drinking, sugar, smoking weed, etc. so that once you have them removed from your life, you can reintroduce them in sane and measured amounts. Moderation, people, it’s the new black for daveb. He envisions going back to Vermont for vacations, getting off the plane and immediately cracking a beer, a candy bar, a bag of Fritos and a huge-ass blunt with a cigar for later. Other drugs and snack foods would be highly welcome. After two or three days of wretched, blurry debauchery, daveb would wipe the greasy crumbs from his eyebrows, hop the plane back to NYC and back to the normal lifestyle.
(more…)

Browsing the aisles of his local ghetto supermarket, daveb noticed an unfamiliar product in the refrigerator aisle. Arnold’s Beef Scrapple, a blocklike slab of reputedly meat ingredients that looked like something along the lines of dirty tofu. What the flying fuck is Scrapple? It looks like ass and is dangerously reminiscent of the foods old people and scary peasants eat, What could it be? Reluctantly, daveb replaced the mystery meat product and continued on with his browsing.

As the day wore on into the evening, daveb’s thoughts could not help returning, over and over to that strange package of processed meat. Who would name food “scrapple”. Is it scraps of apples and crap? Is it fed to children as punishment? Something along the lines of “You best do your chores sonny, or it’s a spoonful of scrapple for you, m’boy!”? If you smear scrapple on your nipples whilst reciting the Lord’s prayer backwards, are you cured of shingles? Does the pope eat scrapple and if so, is that why he’s so fucked up lately? WTF?

The questions stayed with daveb till finally, he had no choice but to embark on a full fledged googling. Interestingly enough, there are many websites that appropriate the name scrapple, but are not actually concerning the scary-ass shit he saw in the supermarket. Checking Wikipedia actually turned up and entry.

Scrapple is one of those farm foods invented to use those parts of slaughtered food animals which were not suitable to be served on their own, in the same manner as sausages, or Jewish kishkes. Scrapple typically contains the meaty parts of hog heads, hearts, some liver, and other scraps. The proportion and spicing is very much a matter of the region, family, and the cook’s taste.

Commercial scrapple will often contain these traditional ingredients, with a distinctive flavor to each brand, though homemade recipes often specify more genteel ingredients, and consequently a blander taste.

Of course you realize that now daveb has no choice but to consume scrapple till it comes out his ears and he feels like crapple. More to come…