Foodstuffs you just don't get

[Diable Rouge]

Has any recipe ever be enhanced in terms of taste by the addition of celery? Cucumber has a similar absence of flavour, putting me at one with Samuel Longhorn Clemens.

[San Bernardhinault]

Blue cheese. Oh how I've tried with blue cheese. I should love blue cheese. It's salty. It's umami. Its cheese. It's expensive. I can be thoroughly pretentious about it. I should love the stuff. Yet I still don't like it.

And oysters. Also expensive and pretentious. Yet they're like eating the phlegm from a really bad chest infection sitting in a little bit of sea-water.

[Lang Spoon]

Has any recipe ever be enhanced in terms of taste by the addition of celery? Cucumber has a similar absence of flavour, putting me at one with Samuel Longhorn Clemens.

Celery does add to a ragu, there’s a slight peppery whiff from it. Definitely better than just onions and carrots.

[ad hoc]

Bay leaves. Why?

[Toby Gymshorts]

Meringue can fuck right off.

[Lang Spoon]

Fucking a. Granny dessert.

[Gerontophile]

Bay leaves are another thing that don't really do anything on their own, but bring out flavours of most other things. Now, this may be an urban myth, but they had a slight fragrant... something. However, I have never been devastated by forgetting to add one to anything ever.

[MrLeam]

Fucking a. Granny dessert.

Would rather not...

[Gerontophile]

Celery is part of the mirepoix. No, I don't know why, but it's not just confined to French cooking.

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah, supposedly its place in soffritto, mirepoix etc is in some way the celery onion and carrot combine into a meat substitute. Which is really pushing what exactly the celery adds to the mix. Maybe as a starving terroni you might think it.

[Gerontophile]

it's just a veg base as bulk, really.

[Lang Spoon]

Still can’t eat raw olives. Capers. Dill.

[Patrick Thistle]

Hummus.

I like chickpeas. Hummus is like eating gone off pond slime.

[Gerontophile]

Popcorn can fuck off.

(Re-reading a Pratchett book about cinema, and it's known as 'banged grains'.)

[Benjm]

Still can’t eat raw olives. Capers.

It's a texture issue for me with both of those. I'll happily eat halloumi which has a slight squeakiness not a hundred miles removed from what I dislike about olives, so it's all highly subjective and inconsistent.

Baked beans are disgusting, although that might be stretching 'just don't get'.

[Sean of the Shed]

Anchovies. I love seafood, but they are just fucking wrong.

[Alderman Barnes]

And oysters. Also expensive and pretentious. Yet they're like eating the phlegm from a really bad chest infection sitting in a little bit of sea-water.

Might be to do with where you come from. I only had them once, at Whitstable a few years ago. I used to spend the summer holidays with my grandparents, who lived by a muddy estuary, and the oysters tasted exactly like the best days of my childhood smelt.

[jameswba]

Re celery, are we talking about the stalk or the root? I've never 'got' the stalk either, but the root can be good in sauces, hot-pots etc.

[elguapo4]

Liquorice and cow's liver will be served at my welcoming dinner when I go to hell, both are disgusting

[Toby Gymshorts]

See, I love liquorice, and particularly Salmiakki.

Cauliflower. That can fuck off, an' all.

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah cauliflower, broccoli, vile shite.

[Bored Of Education]

I agree with oysters although I thing that the question there should be "Foods I get" as it is not even a food; it's a symptom.

Bay leaves add a lot to salmon and bolognese.

Parsley is my food I don't get.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Yeah cauliflower, broccoli, vile shite.

Never broccoli. I love broccoli.

[Gerontophile]

I think all of this dislike for broccoli or cauliflower is because it's just been badly cooked. And probably wasn't covered in cheese sauce.

[Lang Spoon]

It’s a textural thing. The tree like snap of broccoli, the horrible dirty softness of cauliflower.