Recently I was at a wedding reception with several of my siblings and their spouses. When I was finished eating, I looked up, and all my siblings were done eating while their spouses were still chowing down. My wife has always accused me of eating too fast—I’m usually done with the meal before she’s finished her salad. I’ve always told her it is because I was brought up in a large family. The wedding meal proved my point. When there are eight kids, rarely is there enough for everyone to get seconds. Leftovers were a mythical creature. If you wanted more to eat, you ate faster than everyone else so you had first chance at anything that still remained. It was like a competition. Ties were decided in The Octagon.

There are advantages to eating fast, despite what those know-it-all medical personnel tell you. If you eat fast enough, you don’t have to like what you’re eating, because it goes down so fast you don’t have time to taste it. The food doesn’t have to be good, just filling. Mom could feed us shredded cardboard and Spam casserole, and we would gobble it down. Put a little catsup on it and I’d ask for seconds. I’m joking of course. I’m still not sure it was Spam.

My mother was born on October 29, 1933 exactly four years to the day from Black Tuesday when the stock market crashed and started The Great Depression. When she was five, her father died, and her mother raised a large family on her own while still in tough economic times. One day when I was young, Mom was telling us about the unusual foods she had eaten. One of her earliest memories was of her mother, my grandmother, taking a bucket down to a neighbor who was going to butcher a hog. When they stuck the pig to bleed it out, my grandmother put the bucket under the stream of Blood and filled it. She took the bucket home and ran the now partially coagulated blood through a sieve to strain out any hair, sticks, flies and the other things that had fallen or crawled into the bucket on the way home. After mixing in salt, pepper and enough flour to make a thick batter, Grandma fried it, and they had Blood Pancakes for supper.

After my sister, the skinny slow-eater, had finished shuddering and gagging she said, “I could never eat something like that!”

“Yes, you could,” my mother said in a calm but serious voice. “If you were hungry enough, and there was nothing else to eat, yes you could.”

I understood then what it meant to be really poor.

I know you’re going to tell me that in some strange, weird country that nobody’s ever heard of, like Finland, blood Pancakes are a delicacy. When the restaurants there have all-you-can-eat blood pancakes and chislics night, the people are lined up around the block waiting to get in, and nobody’s there for the chislics. Or maybe you’ll say that your Swedish grandmother, Helga Swenson, made blood pancakes all the time and you loved them.

You: Can we have blood pancakes for dinner tonight, Grammy?

Your Swedish grandmother: Yumpin Yiminy, you do love ta blood pancakes, but ve already had tem tree times tis veek.

You: But they’re so so good, Grammy. Please. Please. Please.

Your Swedish grandmother: Okie dokie. I never could say no to you, my little meatball … or to ta blood pancakes.

You: Yippy! I call dibs on the leftovers.

Your Swedish grandmother, laughing: Oh ya big silly. Ven are tere ever leftovers vit ta blood pancakes? Now, you catch ta pig, und I’ll grab ta knife und ta bucket.

(My humble apologies to your Swedish grandmother, anyone with Swedish ancestry, the country of Sweden as a whole and every person who has ever made or eaten Swedish meatballs for my attempt at writing a Swedish accent.)

My mother made it clear she was not eating the pancakes because they were a delicacy. She ate them because there was not a second choice, and tomorrow there might not be a first choice.

I think about the blood pancakes often when I run into someone who refuses to try something new. I’ve always wondered how taking a bite of a new food could end their world. Even worse are the people who will take a bite and spit it out, as if swallowing even the one bite would desecrate the holy temple that is their body. I once knew a woman who would not try sour cream.

“Why would I eat something that’s soured?” she’d ask.

By the way, she loved chip dip. Obviously she’s never read the ingredients on the label. I get the same thing with sauerkraut.

“I’m not eating something that’s sour.”

Actually the word is sauer a German word meaning fermented, and kraut meaning cabbage: sauerkraut = fermented cabbage.

“So who would want to eat something that’s fermented?” you ask in that whiny nasal voice that irritates me to no end. “Fermented? Rotted? It’s the same thing, right?”

Well, wine is fermented grapes (sauergrapes?) and beer is fermented barley (sauerbarley?). I’ve noticed you don’t have trouble sucking them into that fat temple of yours.

Euell Gibbons—boy, am I dating myself—once said, “Nobody becomes a gourmet by not trying new things.” I think I would try anything once, even blood pancakes, but understand, I would eat them very fast, and there would be a lot of maple syrup.

Remember the date: February 7, 2020. It’s when my new novel A Death in a Snowstorm is due to be released. More about that later. Until then, try something different … maybe chislics?

Joel Jurrens’ Amazon Author page