I may be wrong, but I think the above was mentioned in Revelation as a sign of the impending apocalypse.
UPDATE: BREAKING: Foodie riots in Paris, Rome, Lyon over Honey Boo Boo “sketti” episode re: pasta sauce of ketchup & margarine.
Sketti, Or, The Opposite Of France
39 Responses to Sketti, Or, The Opposite Of France
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Peterk says:
Escoffier and Julia are spinnin’ at high rpms
and puhleeeze that is not butter that is margarine
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jaybird says:
I have had and enjoyed road-kill venison on a number of occasions.
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Patrick Harris says:
Oh, Law. As an avid consumer of “sketti” in my younger days, I thank the Almighty I was never introduced to that so-called sauce mix, or I might have developed a Honey Boo Boo physique by now.
Bleuch.
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Saint Andeol says:
9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come ketchup butter sauce melted in the microwave and the sketti is ready: for the sketti sticks to the wall when thou throweth it, sketti which will be eaten before our God day and night.
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philosopher says:
“How is this the opposite of France?” If you gotta ask…
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Rod Dreher says:
Like it or not, your definition of “France” seems like something of a relic. Perhaps it’s a very nice relic. I have made this observation before… but at the end of the day, it seems like the grand boulevards of Paris are more akin to Colonial Williamsburg than anything approaching France as it actually exists.
Have you been to France? I guarantee you that you will not find anyone feeding themselves or their children pasta with a sauce made from melted margarine mixed with ketchup. Hell, I have never heard of that anywhere, ever, until Honey Boo Boo. It’s completely disgusting.
Besides which, did you see my post the other day about the book re: French children’s eating habits?
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Anglican says:
Vension, even road kill is not a problem in my book, more power to them. But the sauce, is just viscerally disgusting, and she uses margarine to boot,instead of real butter. And to think more Americans watched this stuff than either convention. We need a better culture in even the most basic levels of food. If you watch this show you’ll find other examples of greatness such as dipping the baby’s pacifier in Mountain Dew.
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Oengus says:
Rod: “…pasta with a sauce made from melted margarine mixed with ketchup.”
I retch.
This is way beyond even Paula Deen’s deep fried macaroni and cheese. This is beyond beyond.
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M_Young says:
One of my childhood favorites was sketti with melted butter (real butter though) and the ‘Parmesan’ that comes from the green can. Not to be missed.
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Susan D. says:
This is the only time I’ve ever wished I could put one of those green feel-like-retching smiley emoticons in a combox. Really, I felt my gorge rising and couldn’t finish the video.
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David J. White says:
The fact that the producers felt that this needed to be subtitled, as if the people depicted were aborigines in some foreign culture, is somehow the perfect finishing touch.
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The fact that the producers felt that this needed to be subtitled, as if the people depicted were aborigines in some foreign culture, is somehow the perfect finishing touch.Actually, I’m glad they did this. I’ve never watched an entire Honey Boo Boo episode, but in the fragments I have seen, I’ve had trouble understanding their pronunciation. They live in small-town Georgia. I remember stopping at a Waffle House in a small Georgia town once in the 1980s, on a road trip, and not being able to clearly understand the waitress. This happened to me again stopping at a small-town Burger King in Arkansas. It was unnerving to me, because I was talking with fellow Southerners, yet their pronunciation was so thick as to be largely unintelligible, at least to my ears.
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Sam M says:
Yes. I read the post. And I called rubbish on it then, too. Upper class Rhodes Scholar goes to France, hangs out with like minded peopl and concludes, quite literally, that “everything in France is so beautifully done.”
Everything? Gadzooks. I mean… everything?
I see something similar going on in your post here. I have nothing against France, but:
“I guarantee you that you will not find anyone feeding themselves or their children pasta with a sauce made from melted margarine mixed with ketchup.”
You GUARANTEE it? Seriously? Not a single person in France eats crap? It’s astonishing that you would paint with that broad of a brush. America has rednecks and hillbillies and white trash. England has the yobs. I am sure Germany has something similar, as does Australia and Belgium. But France? Nope. It’s Lake Wobegone with brie cheese.
I wonder, then, why they had to ban ketchup in the schools. With such sophisticated kids, you’d think they could pile it in there and none of them would touch it, raised as well as they are.
But no. They cram it in like little le piggies, it seems.
And one wonders why ketchup would even be for sale there. Who would buy it?
Yobby tourists, one presumes.
Nobody. Not a single one?
I have never been to France. But I suspect that there is one you have never been to, either.
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You GUARANTEE it? Seriously?
No, of course there must be some French version of crap food. I don’t know what it is, but I bet I’m about to find out. Still, I’ve been to France several times, and know a bit about French culture, and the general culinary ethos there is alien to “sketti.” To be clear, I have never heard of Americans eating something as horrible as this “sketti,” aside from the Texas State Fair’s stunt cooking (e.g., fried Coke). I used the phrase “the opposite of France” to make a comic point about the different ways of seeing food. France is commonly associated with the pinnacle of sophisticated cooking; Mama June’s wretched sketti is the complete opposite. I don’t know why you read me so literally here. Do you really want to defend Mama June’s cooking?
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I have never been to France. But I suspect that there is one you have never been to, either.
It’s funny, but France is the one foreign country I’ve visited where I didn’t particularly care for the food. And I was mostly eating at home with ordinary people — the friend I was visiting, and his girlfriend, her family, and their friends. Granted, I have remarked before on my general inability to taste things, so I’m willing to accept a good part of the responsibility for my reaction to food, but still.
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Roger McCarthy says:
While I don’t think I’ve ever seem anyone do it in the microwave as if it were an actual sauce it’s perfectly normal in the UK to toss pasta in a big knob of ‘butter’ (which here too is rarely proper butter) rather than a glug of olive oil and then to squirt tomato ketchup straight on it (children in particular with put ketchup on everything) – so the effect is roughly the same.
And poor people DO eat shit like this even in France and Italy where there is enough concern about the loss of basic culinary skills and the spread of fast food for there to be a ‘slow food’ campaign.
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Beyng says:
There’s no white trash like European white trash, in my experience. Is France some kind of island where the “all the women are strong, and all the food is above average”? I’m skeptical.
Moreover, Honey Boo Boo–whose accent, as an Appalachian, I find entirely intelligible!–is about as representative of mainstream, everyday American culture as is Lady Gaga. That is to say, not at all. Heck, she’s not even representative of white trash culture. Not even in the trailer park where I grew up were ketchup and margarine an acceptable base for sketti sauce (yes, it was called sketti, to be fair).
On the other hand, in his bachelor days, my father apparently used Campbell’s tomato soup as pasta sauce. Ick?
Anyway, this notion that the cafes of Parisian boulevards are indicative of a universal French culture seems a bit, well, simplistic to me. I try to imagine the counterpart to my family in France: lower middle/working class, average in every way. What would they be eating? Am I to believe that they aren’t opening cans, heating up frozen prepared food, etc.? It’s unfair to take Honey Boo Boo as even an extreme case of American food culture; conversely, it’s unfair to use the dining habits of the leisured French classes as a mirror image of American inferiority.
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Joanna says:
Should be the opening montage for”God Bless America 2″.
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Fran Macadam says:
Yeah, and they don’t have “Freedom Fries” either!
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Tom S says:
It’s just like the pasta con burro e pomodoro that I used to eat in Italian university dining halls 30+ years ago. Of course they used actual tomato sauce and real butter….
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That which is seen cannot be unseen!
Sorry, I couldn’t get past the woman putting ketchup in the tub of butter. Really, what the hell was that? And I come from a poor family from Mexico. While some of our food may have been a little tasteless, a little greasy, and could have used a little bit more imagination, we would never resort to stuff like that. Just because you are poor, that doesn’t mean you have to eat crap. Indeed, here in Louisiana, I don’t think even working class people eat crap here. Mysterium iniquitatis is what I say. There is no other explanation.
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Nancy Wang says:
That is just so gross. I’ve never heard of that!
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@Ed,
Hey now! Chicken feet are tasty when prepared well.
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Rod, we clearly have plenty of disagreements politically & philosophically, but I have always found us to be completely on the same wavelength culinarily (and as fellow Southerners in particular). And my initial response was in complete agreement with you here. But having thought it over a bit, and done some research (see below)… I think we may have been wrong.
First, and not really on the food issue, but… well, let me start by asking, as a serious question, is it an established part of the show that Mama June is actually illiterate? Not “not especially well read”, but actually unlettered? Because if that is not so, then what’s up with the “sketti” spelling? The comments about the subtitles is what got me thinking about this. I expect that it says “spaghetti” right on the very box that the woman is using. The minimally charitable thing to do, then, would be to subtitle her utterance as “spaghetti”. If you were recording my speech, and heard me say the word “library” in an unguarded moment, it would come out like “libary”. That’s just how they say it where I grew up. But it would be obnoxious to render a subtitle of me with that spelling, and not the correct one. So, the woman says “spaghetti” in her own way, or which is for all I know, a totally standard pronunciation where she’s from. If you’re going to subtitle her, there’s just no legitimate reason to do so with cutesy-folksy misspellings.
Ok, now for the food issue. Two things occurred to me, while pondering this thread. First, I remembered that the standard recipe for hot wings sauce is basically margarine and hot sauce. And I do know that, for all that I loathe margarine, I do like me some good hot wings. Did a little googling, and the good people at Tabasco recommend a sauce of… margarine, ketchup, and (of course) Tabasco.
http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco-recipes/recipe/357/hot-n-spicy-chicken-wings/
Second, it occurred to me that this really is an easily examined empirical question: just how icky is “sketti szasz”? I took about a half-Tbsp of butter (don’t have margarine on hand in my house) and an equal amount by volume of ketchup, microwaved for a few seconds, dipped a nearby 7-grain chip in the sizzling mix, brought it up towards my mouth……well, first, I have to admit that Honey-Boo-Boo was right — it did smell pretty good! But then putting it in my mouth, actually tasting it…
…well, it tasted fine. Not wonderful, and certainly not what I’d want for my own “gravy”, as my Italian-American friends say, but solidly on the right side of the edibility line. Not gross at all, but having a hybridized yumminess that was something more than either butter or ketchup has on its own. Good enough that I ate a couple more crackers’ worth, anyway! And, I think, more than good enough as a profoundly cheap workaround substitute for a proper marinara, when you are, as she says, feeding a family on $80/week.
I recommend that you (and everyone else on this thread!) do a little quick kitchen research of your own here. Speaking only for myself, I think I owe Mama June an apology.
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EngineerScotty says:
Chicken feet are awesome; they are the first dish I order when having dim sum.
One important attribute about ketchup in regards to the poor–it can often be gotten for free, from the self-serve condiments at any fast food joint. I have encountered people for whom ketchup packets taken from McDonalds is an entire meal, I’m sad to report.
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I expect that it says “spaghetti” right on the very box that the woman is using. The minimally charitable thing to do, then, would be to subtitle her utterance as “spaghetti”.
But my impression is that part of the point of this whole program is to make fun of these people. And by laughing along and mocking them, we — and I certainly include myself in that “we” — are being just as snobbish and self-righteous as the self-important “elites” many of us so often criticize.
PS to philosopher’s comments: I can recall a number of examples of “baby talk” that we continued to use in my family that had become a kind of family in-joke or part of the family’s culture. For example, when my sister was little, she couldn’t quite say “thread”; it came out “fred”. My parents thought it was cute, so it survived as a kind of family in-joke. To this day, if I see a loose thread hanging from my mother’s blouse, I might say, “Let me get the scissors; you have loose fred hanging from your blouse.” I wonder if “sketti” has a similar origin, if it started out in that family as a child’s mispronunciation that was regarded as cute, and therefore just stuck and survives as a bit of the family’s culture.
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Uncle Vanya says:
If you think they’re hard to understand, try traveling in rural Yorkshire. Close your eyes and for at least a moment you’ll believe you’ve stepped into a novel by one of the Bronte sisters.
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It’s just like the pasta con burro e pomodoro that I used to eat in Italian university dining halls 30+ years ago. Of course they used actual tomato sauce and real butter….
I was going to say, I wonder if “crunchy con” version of this “sketti” would be more palatable to Rod… say, hand-churned butter instead of margarine, and one of those fancy ketchups in a glass bottle made from heirloom tomatoes that Malcolm Gladwell writes about… Maybe add a few chopped sprigs of thyme and rosemary from the window herb-garden for flavor, all on some hearty whole-wheat spaghetti noodles from the local artisan pasta-maker…. Anyone want to try it?
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PS to philosopher’s comments: I can recall a number of examples of “baby talk” that we continued to use in my family that had become a kind of family in-joke or part of the family’s culture.
True. We still sometimes say “waggik” for “water” in our house, because our No. 2 son said that years ago when he was learning how to talk. We all found it charming, and held on to it.
I know people who call spaghetti “sketti” or “buzgetti” for the same reason: that’s what their children called it, or call it. It’s a family in-joke. I assume that’s what Mama June does. Anyway, remember, “sketti” is how they pronounce it; the TV show used that spelling in the chyrons.
I was going to say, I wonder if “crunchy con” version of this “sketti” would be more palatable to Rod… say, hand-churned butter instead of margarine, and one of those fancy ketchups in a glass bottle made from heirloom tomatoes that Malcolm Gladwell writes about… Maybe add a few chopped sprigs of thyme and rosemary from the window herb-garden for flavor, all on some hearty whole-wheat spaghetti noodles from the local artisan pasta-maker…. Anyone want to try it?
Butter and good tomato sauce on pasta is not something I’d be game for (olive oil and good tomato sauce would be). But it doesn’t sound as vile as Shedd’s Spread and ketchup. Do you really not perceive a huge difference between the way margarine tastes, and butter tastes? Between the way ketchup tastes, and tomato sauce tastes? Frankly, I don’t want to eat tomato sauce on my fries, either. I want ketchup, which is sweet and cheap-tasting and delicious on fries.
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I was in Northern Italy (Bologna), where dairy was more prevalent than vegetable oils.
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When you are very poor, or otherwise desperate, you get to eat a lot of things you wouldn’t otherwise. I ate a lot of Top Ramen in college; and usually avoid the stuff nowadays–though its flavor is improved when cooked over a campstove.
My general disinterest in Top Ramen nowadays is not because my palate has become more sophisticated; ’tis because I have ready access to a full kitchen (rather than a clandestine hot-pot smuggled into a dormitory room), and a budget which permits the purchase of stuff I like better.There, but for the grace of [insert deity here], go I.
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em says:
I find very interesting the studies of how we taste – actual taste buds, oral sensations, and neurology. I think to many people, there actually isn’t a “huge” difference between the best butter and some cheap margarine.
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Butter and good tomato sauce on pasta is not something I’d be game for (olive oil and good tomato sauce would be).
I’ve been in any number of Italian restaurants that will serve pasta with butter on request, even if it isn’t on the menu. My mother once found that what she ordered disagreed with her terribly (it turned out to be far too spicy for her taste, and really upset her stomach). The restaurant offered to make her some spaghetti with butter as something fairly bland that might sit well on her stomach. They did, and it did. But, having said that, in my experience restaurants serve pasta with butter as an alternative to tomato sauce, not in addition to.
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Do you really not perceive a huge difference between the way margarine tastes, and butter tastes? Between the way ketchup tastes, and tomato sauce tastes? Frankly, I don’t want to eat tomato sauce on my fries, either. I want ketchup, which is sweet and cheap-tasting and delicious on fries.
Between butter and margarine, actually, no, I don’t think they taste all that different. Maybe a mouth-feel/texture difference, but if they were both melted and mixed with ketchup? No, I really don’t think I could reliably tell the difference in a blind taste test. I don’t think you could either, for that matter.
Anyway, I think a lot of redneck cooking like this is just a bastardized version of typical peasant fare – working with whatever ingredients are on hand, and trying to make the best of it. I don’t think “sketti” would ever have occurred to me, but then neither would chili-spaghetti -Hormel meatsauce over spaghetti (anyone want to consider the grade of meat that goes into Hormel chilli? Hint: lips & assholes), but that’s considered a delicacy in Cincinnati.
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Tyro says:
One of my childhood favorites was sketti with melted butter (real butter though) and the ‘Parmesan’ that comes from the green can. Not to be missed.
Parmesan in the green can is one of those things I remember fondly from my youth while at the same time is something I just would never buy, now.
My all time favorite comment on this blog when it came to these disputes over food was when David Dutcher mocked Rod for trying to imitate European mores rather than standing fast to good, American values of rural/frontier eating norms (presumably high starch, high fat foods) which he felt were more authentically American, and then added that the reason Europeans wanted to eat in such a way to stay healthy and thin was because, libertines that they were, they still thought it was worthwhile to have sex, which was apparently unbecoming of good, patriotic middle aged Americans.
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alcogito says:
Anyone else first encounter “spaghetti” in a can by Franco-American?
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Eli says:
As I said on another post, I have warm memories of watching my 90-year-old grandfather relishing a plate of spaghetti with ketchup and margarine (sans roadkill — Hindu vegetarian) at a table in his sealed-concrete living room in New Delhi.
In the United States I think of this as “Irish” spaghetti, cf. this Chowhound thread: http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/269261 and this supper scene from Goodfellas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5VeCVSaEx4 (note which character is using the ketchup).
Advanced eaters will tear up a Kraft single or two to mix with the hot noodles and margarine before adding the ketchup.
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Spaghetti with melted butter and Parmesan cheese (preferably fresh rather than Kraft) is quite good. Change the pasta from spaghetti to fettucine, and you essentially have Fettucine Alfredo.
How is this the opposite of France? I’d argue that it’s MORE French than France.
What is your objection? The roadkill? This strikes me as the quintesence of resourcefulness. Deer are local and eminently usable. For years, where I am from, it was illegal to utilize animals killed on the road. What a waste. Now you can get a permit to take and use the animals. My Italian grandfather would have been first in line for such a permit. He ate anything. Any critter setting foot in his yard was essentially stepping into his stew pot. Starlings. Rabbits. Robins. The pellet gun did not discriminate.
Butter? Enough said.
The microwave? You said yourself that the most popular grocery store in Paris sells frozen food. I assume people thaw these meals in microwaves. At least this lady cooks her own pasta.
Ketchup? It’s so popular in France that they had to take legislative action against it:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/06/world/la-fg-france-ketchup-20111006
Like it or not, your definition of “France” seems like something of a relic. Perhaps it’s a very nice relic. I have made this observation before… but at the end of the day, it seems like the grand boulevards of Paris are more akin to Colonial Williamsburg than anything approaching France as it actually exists.
I’d call her Mademoiselle Honey Boo Boo… except you aren’t allowed to use that word in France anymore:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/europe/france-drops-mademoiselle-from-official-use.html?_r=0