Little does Aunt Dagmar, who even clipped the recipe for Mock Apple Pie (“No Apples Needed”), suspect this scurrilous tale of prefab gastronomy. The word “SEX” is somehow baked onto the surface of Nabisco’s Ritz Crackers—or so the story goes. The SEXes were “discovered” by subliminal advertising guru Wilson Bryan Key and first described in his 1976 book, Media Sexploitation, The SEXes are supposed to be scrawled in the irregular surface mottling of the crackers. Key finds about a dozen SEXes (in all-capital letters) on both the top and bottom surfaces. He suggests taking several crackers, placing them face up, and gazing at them for a few seconds. Provided you are relaxed, the secret SEXes are supposed to be visible. Key thinks the SEXes are created by special molds and that they are there to be perceived subliminally and thus to link subconsciously the eating of Ritz Crackers with sex. A lot of people think Key is nuts.
A few definitions are in order. To the processed-food biz, French dressing is a thin, pourable mayonnaise with a little tomato paste thrown in for color. Add chopped pickle to French dressing, and you have Thousand Island dressing. Add chopped bell pepper instead, and you have a bland incarnation of Russian dressing.
The Big Mac Secret Sauce plainly has a mayonnaise-type base That is to say, it probably contains vegetable oil, water, vinegar, and egg yolk. Most mayonnaise also contains sugar. The Secret Sauce is the color of French dressing, but it contains chopped solids. If you scoop up a glob of the Secret Sauce and wash off the mayonnaise part, what is left? It seems to be chopped pickle, recognizable by the thin green skins adhering to white interiors. McDonald’s may claim the exact composition of the sauce to be a secret, but it appears to be well within the conventional definition of Thousand Island dressing. In fact, the color of the Secret Sauce is a dead ringer for Kraft Thousand Island Dressing. For what it’s worth, Kraft’s list of ingredients reads: “Soybean oil, water, sugar, tomato paste, chopped pickle, vinegar, egg yolk, salt, mustard, flour, propylene glycol alginate, dehydrated onion, spice, calcium disodium EDTA to protect flavor, natural flavor.”
According to McDonald’s employees, corporate policy dictates exactly where the sauce is glopped onto the sandwich. There are thirteen layers in a Big Mac, two of them being dollops of Secret Sauce. The stacking order runs as follows: top bun, onions, meat, pickles, lettuce, Secret Sauce, middle bun, onions, meat, cheese, lettuce, Secret Sauce, bottom bun.
There may be no ice cream in fast-food “shakes,” but there is sugar on the french fries. In an interview, Burger King president Donald Smith said that his chain’s fries are sprayed with a sugar solution shortly before being packaged and shipped to individual outlets. The sugar carmelizes in the cooking fat, producing the golden color customers expect. Without it, the fries would be nearly the same color outside as inside: pasty white. Smith believes that McDonald’s also sugar-coats its fries.
It has been rumored that the secret behind this frothy mall fare is whole eggs—shells and all. Orange Julius is made by mixing orange juice with a mysterious white powder supplied by the company headquarters in Santa Monica, California. Thus the average Orange Julius employee has little idea what is in the drink.
If there are eggshells in the drink, they would have to be a component of that white powder.
The drink has an egglike smell. A recipe for a simulated “Orange Julius” has long been circulating. It calls for eight ounces of orange juice, one tablespoon of sugar syrup (mix sugar with just enough boiling water to dissolve), an egg, and about half a cup of crushed ice. All ingredients are mixed in a blender. Some people use the fluid part of the egg only; others throw the shell in too.
No bits of eggshell are apparent in a real Orange Julius. Big Secrets tried the above recipe, with the eggshells, to see if the shell fragments could be pulverized into invisibility. A whole, unbroken egg was plopped into eight ounces of orange juice, some syrup, and crushed ice in an Osterizer Galaxie blender. The blender was set on “Liquefy,” the highest setting. After five minutes—far longer than the mixture would normally be blended—the liquid was poured out to check for shell fragments. The shell was still visible as a fine powder settled on the bottom of the blending chamber.
A letter asking about the eggshell story was sent to Orange Julius’ headquarters. Orange Julius’ reply: “There are no eggshells in an Orange Julius unless specifically requested by the customer.”
Are dry-roasted peanuts less fattening? Just look at the labels. Vendors have managed to sell the idea of dry-roasted nuts as a diet aid, but they can’t lie outright on the packages. Planter’s Cocktail Peanuts have 170 calories an ounce. Planter’s Dry-Roasted have 160 calories—scarcely enough of a difference to bother with. You do even worse with Planter’s Salt-Free Dry-Roasted Peanuts, which contain not a calorie less per ounce (170) than the regular peanuts.
Lea & Perrins’ secret formula for Worcestershire sauce has been imitated widely. The label lists “water, vinegar, molasses, sugar, anchovies, tamarinds, hydrolyzed soy protein, onions, salt, garlic, eschalots, spices & flavorings” as ingredients—the only mystery being the “spices and flavorings.”
Some conjecture that there must be dissolved anchovy bones in Worcestershire sauce. Whole anchovies go into the sauce; the sauce digests the fish as it ages. People magazine described the process in a 1982 profile of Worcestershire sauce heir Ransom Duncan: “Worcestershire [sauce] in various stages of aging sits in 35 6,000-gallon fir vats (which impart no flavor). That’s been there quite a while,’ notes Duncan, peering into a lumpy brown liquid. ‘You can see onions, and you can see garlic. By this time you won’t find fish; you might find skeletons. The meat begins to fall off and get absorbed.’ ”
The skeletons probably meet the same fate. Chicken bones dissolve in vinegar after a few weeks; Lea & Perrins’ sauce is aged for a total of two years. Most of the water content is not added until shortly before bottling, so the liquid is largely vinegar.
The layer of crud at the bottom of a bottle of Worcestershire sauce has inspired its own speculation. The usual explanation is that it consists of tiny grains of the spices used. According to various standard recipes for Worcestershire sauce, common flavorings are Cayenne and black pepper, allspice, coriander, cloves, mace, crushed pickled walnuts, mushrooms, brandy, and sherry. The salient spice of Worcestershire sauce is something called asafetida or devil’s dung—which may explain why it is never mentioned on the label.
Asafetida has a fetid odor and a bitter garlic/onion taste. It comes from a six-foot-tall carrotlike plant of Asia. When the top of the “carrot” is cut, a gummy resin—the asafetida—oozes out and dries as “tears” an inch across. At first a translucent pale yellow, the tears turn purple-streaked pink as they dry. Fully cured tears are opaque reddish-brown outside, milky-white inside. In the pure state, asafetida is used as a laxative; in Worcestershire sauce, a little goes a long way. According to a 1965 article in the Journal of Food Technology, the asafetida content of condiments runs from 5 to 160 parts per million.
Some Worcestershire sauces contain meat. Boiled pork liver is most frequently cited as an ingredient (some recipes demand it be cooked for eight to ten hours). Some recipes use beef extract.
None of the familiar commercial Worcestershire sauces list pork or beef on their labels. All, however, admit unspecified spices and flavorings. Pork is not a spice, but it could be a flavoring. French’s, Crosse and Blackwell, and Ann Page Worcestershire sauces display the circled-U parve symbol. Parve food may contain fish (the anchovies), but it must not contain the meat of any mammal. Lea & Perrins and Heinz Worcestershire sauces do not have the parve symbol.
Big Secrets wrote the major Worcestershire sauce producers, asking if there is pork in their products. Lea & Perrins and French’s denied any pork. Heinz and Crosse and Blackwell did not respond. But if Crosse and Blackwell is truly parve, it cannot contain pork. That leaves only Heinz as a possible pork-formula sauce.
What keeps the anchovies—and maybe pork—from spoiling without refrigeration? The vinegar and sugar keep them embalmed.
Every pop oenologist has heard of Stag’s Leap, the Napa Valley Wunderkind that beat out several first growths of Bordeaux at a 1976 blind tasting in Paris. But before you shell out for a bottle, watch that apostrophe. Not to be confused with Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars is Stags’ Leap Winery, also of Napa Valley. A vinous knock-off? Not exactly. Each winery disputes the other’s right to the name. Of course, only Stag’s Leap won the Paris tasting. Restaurant wine lists are not above capitalizing on the confusion—and price differential.
Despite a thumbs-down from the Food and Drug Administration, hard-core nouvelle cuisine buffs still pay five to ten dollars an ounce for pink peppercorns. That’s about what garden-variety caviar fetches; about ten times the cost of wild rice. Pink peppercorns are scarlet, about the size of regular peppercorns, and impart a bitter-pungent flavor to meat and fish. And pink peppercorns are slightly poisonous. They are suspected of causing headaches, chest congestion, nausea, intestinal inflammation, and hemorrhoids.
The extravagant price has always been justified by the source—the far-off isle of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Pinkpeppercorns are harvested in Réunion by French firms, shipped to the mother country for processing, and then imported to the United States. They are sold in bulk, freeze-dried, or bottled in brine or vinegar.
Black pepper is the fruit of a vine. White pepper is black pepper with the skins removed. Pink peppercorns, however, are the fruit of an unrelated tree, Schinus terebinthifolius. Schinus is related to poison ivy, which explains its toxic potential.
Schinus is not found in Réunion only. The pink peppercorn tree is native to Brazil. It was introduced to Réunion long ago and has run wild there. S. terebinthifolius was also introduced into the southern half of Florida. There it goes by the names “Brazilian Pepper Tree” and “Florida Holly.” It was brought to Florida as a sort of tropical holly for homesick transplants. During the Christmas season it fruits heavily, the boughs and red berries sometimes being used for Christmas decorations. S. terebinthifolius grows so rapidly in Florida that it has become a weed. Dotting roadsides, the tree and its berries are considered worse than useless. By one estimate, the tree now covers several thousand acres in Florida.
No one seems to have gotten the idea of selling the berries as pink peppercorns. A very similar tree, also with red berries, grows in Southern California (Schinus molle). The same S. terebinthifolius also grows in Hawaii. Anyone who orders salmon with trois-color peppercorns is paying over a hundred dollars a pound for a Fort Lauderdale weed.