Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (16 page)

We whet our appetites
by remembering a band that oozed out of the musical lava lamp of late sixties
San Francisco. Hot Tuna’s first album hit #30 on the charts in 1970.

I’ve paired the
patchouli-scented Jefferson Airplane side project with the relentlessly bland
stylings of Bread (Thirteen ‘Hot 100’ singles between 1970 and 1977?! How did
we let
that
happen?).

Don’t forget the Hot
Butter, and believe me, if you’ve ever heard their #9 hit from 1972, ‘Popcorn,’
you’ll remember it. And if you do, you’ve probably got it stuck in your head
right now. Sorry.

For this open-faced
appetizer, try sautéing the tuna in some herb butter, and by ‘herb,’ I mean marijuana.
Your house will reek for a few hours, but you’ll be tripping to some
psychedelic blues, so it won’t matter, and why are you trying to harsh my buzz,
anyway, man? Wait, is someone at the door? Are you a narc?

MAIN
COURSE

‘Salt
and Pepa’ Meatloaf

Black-eyed
Peas, Red Hot Chili Peppers

Sure,
he descended into self-parody on
Celebrity Apprentice
, but let’s remember
that Meat Loaf’s 1977 opus,
Bat out of Hell
, went
fourteen
times
platinum, which represents something like fourteen gazillion records sold!

Unfortunately
it also spawned
Paradise by the Dashboard Light,
which has inspired frat
boys and their girlfriends the world over to try to ‘perform’ the song at
karaoke.

Any good meatloaf needs
some seasoning, so we’ll add the best-selling female rap act of all-time, with
Salt and Pepa releasing six platinum singles between ’86 and ’97.

Finally, combine black-eyed
peas (over sixty million records sold since ‘03) with chili peppers (five top-five
albums), and you’ve got a big helping of quasi-funk, right there. It’s like
having a near-funk experience.

For
the meatloaf, you can find many good recipes online, but I rely on a handful of
very old, musty, tattered ACTUAL cookbooks. You know, made out of paper, like
in olden tymes.

Here’s a meatloaf
recipe from a 1914 collection put out by the Boston alumnae chapter of Alpha
Phi.

There doesn’t seem to
be anything particularly ‘Swedish’ about it, and notice that there’s no middle
ground as far as the onion is concerned—two thin slices, or just shove the whole
onion in.

In honor of the singer,
be really loud and dramatic when you cook this meatloaf. Cook the black-eyed
peas until al dente. Just before the beans are done, finely shave a few chili
peppers into a hot skillet.

Add cooked beans
to skillet. Stir frequently. Sprinkle grated parmesan cheese and kosher salt on
top of entire mixture in skillet. Serve hot.

DESSERT

Ambrosia,
Raspberries and Cranberries

Vanilla
Fudge with Cream

“Cake”

Ambrosia can be a
little too sweet for some tastes, but the group had five Top 40 singles between
1975 and 1980. Someone must like it.

I figure we’ll balance
that with a little tartness from the Cranberries (a little yelpy for my tastes,
but four top twenty albums) and the Raspberries, who, from 1970-75, featured Eric
Carmen, before he decided to craft a solo career of mopey self-absorbed
treacle.

Beginning in 1967,
Vanilla Fudge released eight albums and reached #6 on the U.S. charts with a
slow, proto-grunge, ultimately creepy cover of the Supremes’
You Keep Me
Hanging On.

Top that with some
Cream (1966-1970), you get two more top ten hits, and the only million-selling
album in history named after Benjamin Disraeli.