As a traveler, I find eating in the US as odd as it gets. Take a road trip across America sometime. Obtaining sustenance is a guaranteed way to shock and possibly destroy your palate. Trust me on this.
In rural America, especially in the fertile yet wineless middle part, we the people like to concoct weird mixtures of our chemical crap foods. My friend Beth has in her possession a cookbook from middle America that has a recipe combining Cool Whip and Frozen French Fries. Mmmm. You need more proof then that?
And despite American insistence that a teaspoon of butter will clog an artery and kill the unfortunate victim instantly, in Texas they are evidently fond of tempting this fate, having invented competitions for the best deep fried butter.
We also like to make up things and blame their culinary awfulness on other people, preferably living in other countries where they can’t wring our necks conveniently.
Take “Italian” salad dressing. Please. And keep it. No self respecting Italian (or otherwise sane person) would ever, in a million years, put that snotty mixture of guar gum, powdered vegetables and high fructose corn syrup on a bed of greens. I’ve written about this before: Black Pigs and Italian Salad Dressing
But I’ve been alerted to an even more spectacular use of this freakishly bad idea of what to put on salad.
Why not combine a bottle of the stuff with a stick of butter and a cup and a half of milk and put it on some badly cooked, cheap spaghetti and then top it all with some cannonballs of beef (meatballs are traditionally made in Italy by combining meat with stale bread, which makes them into delightfully soft sauce sponges that use up bread that wouldn’t be eaten anyway.) Despite the fact that the original recipe included these atrocities, the “updated” recipe referenced below does not. In any case If you simply make round hamburgers and pile them on your spaghetti, they’re not “meatballs”.
Anyway, here’s my vote for the Worst Spaghetti Sauce Ever. The ingredients below cover a pound of spaghetti—and I do mean cover. You’d probably spend half a day dredging the goop to get to the actual spaghetti.
Olive oil
1 each white onion, small dice
3 each garlic cloves, peeled, minced
½ cup dry white wine
1 bottle Italian dressing
1 stick butter
1 ½ cups milk
¼ cup Romano cheese, grated
¼ cup Parmesan cheese, grated
To taste: garlic salt, garlic and pepper seasoning, Italian seasoning
More (and better) food
Pignoletto Rosso Polenta, Oh My!
Davide Scabin: Innovative Italian Cuisine
Spaghetti alla Nerano and its Derivatives
Fava Beans: The Time in Italy is Spring