Corn

An epic tale of rebirth

Mark: “?? I haven’t had corn in days, have I ???”

Cut back to 24 hours earlier

I have a big mouth that, one day soon, will be the end of me. To wit, I am in a German biergarten in the 1500-year-old city of Speyer. A beautiful city on the Rhine filled with history, architecture and well, German biegartens. I’m enjoying a wonderful pint of home brewed beer, interesting conversation, and it comes time to order some food. I brag that I always like to try a local dish when I am traveling. As always, the Imp of the Perverse hears me and prompts my hosts to say, “oh, well we have a wonderful regional dish that I think you’ll really enjoy. It’s called saumagen, and it’s delicious!”. Now I know that 98.8% of all German food is either sausages or chocolate (although I have yet to run into chocolate sausages…). Germans can make sausages out of anything; pigs, cows, lambs, chickens, ducks, bugs, apples, small churches etc. If Noah had it on the ark, the Germans later found it and ground it up for sausage. Fortunately, I can choke down almost any kind of sausage or sausage-related meat by product and feel pretty confident that I can handle this “saumagen” thing. “Is it a sausage?” I ask. “No,” comes the highly unexpected reply. “It is, how you say, a pan”. A pan??? Did they find some way of actually incorporating cookware into sausage form? My host makes a couple of signs with his hands and asks his companion, “How do you say aufgerfucked?” (He didn’t really say aufgerfucked, he said something else in German I didn’t catch/know. Aufgerfucked is, however, a more accurate term in my opinion”) “Patty”, came the reply. “Yes!, it is a patty”. Oh, okay, I think. I can eat a sausage patty. If Jimmy Dean can make them, I can eat them. When it comes time to order, I confidently tell the waitress, “Saumagen”. She looks incredulously at my hosts, who nod appreciatively and also order it. She looks back at me, clearly impressed. I suddenly realize I am in deep deep shit here. Impressing the waitress is *never* good.

2 beers and 20 minutes later, a steaming plate of saumagen and sauerkraut arrive. The ‘kraut is standard but good. As a youth with a polish grandmother, I have downed more cabbage products than any two Irishmen and more than most VFW fundraisers. Fine. Onto the saumagen. The disk of meat is about the size of my head and deeply pan fried. It looks pretty much like a Frisbee of fried meat-vomit, but not as appetizing. I cut off a piece, smile and pop it in my mouth. Chew, smile nod, chew smile nod as I look a my hosts. Swallow. “Delicious!” I proclaim. Satisfied, my hosts smile proudly and eat. I cut anther piece, pop it in my mouth and swallow it whole. This minimizes the time near anything like a taste bud and put it right into the reject hopper as fast as possible. Said hopper is going to fill fast and I am soon going to have a new, not entirely unexpected problem. This tastes as if I’m eating a vegetable filled Prada handbag, except without the deliciousness of the tanning acids. It is chewy beyond description, like that time I tried to eat a superball. I suspect though, this adventure will not end with as much grace as that one did (The official medical report used the phrase “passed harmlessly”).

“What’s in this?”, I ask with as much innocence as possible. I’m doing pretty well here and half of my head-size portion has disappeared from the plate, although my napkin is suspiciously bulky and stained with saumagen-like juices. Now is not the time to give up the game. “Sau means pig, right?” my host explains. I nod suggesting I had figured that much of it out, which honestly I hadn’t but could have based on my limited German. “And, Magen?” I prompt. My host looks to his friend and says,
“How you say totalishundtaglishaufgerfucked?”
“Stomach,”
Ut-oh.
“Wait,” I say. “Pig Stomach?”
“ja! It’s very high in protein! Actually it’s the second stomach where the vegetables are digested…”
I tune out after this point. ‘No wonder this was so chewy”, I think. ‘Well, I can’t lose the game now. I ate a goodly portion, I might as well finish it’.
“So this is like … haggis?”
“No, no, not so crude. We don’t empty the stomach so much as … truelyundcompletelyaufgerfucked… it”
“I see” I say, trying my level, Yankee best not to see at all…

I did not finish my meal, but did manage to remove more than 50% of it from my plate before claiming I was “stuffed”. The irony of this statement didn’t hit me until the car…

24 hours later, in the hotel men’s room
Mark: I didn’t eat corn or any other real vegetable this week. Just ‘kraut. … weird…. Don’t they feed all the corn and vegetables to … THE PIGS!!!???!!!