Adventurous Dallas Diners Draw the Line at Cow's Tongue
The Watauga cafe this month started offering an "Acquired Tastes" menu, featuring an array of items most of its customers didn't like or hadn't tried. Liver and onions, oxtail and cow's feet are still available, but the restaurant gave up on a tongue sautéed with onions and bell peppers.
"We got really weird reactions to that one," Merrell reports. "It's hard getting over thinking about what it is."
Merrell says the tongue tasted "just like regular food," but guests were far too many orders shy of acquiring a fondness for it.
The promotion's been most successful in connecting diners with favorite dishes pigeonholed as unpopular. On a recent Thursday night, the kitchen ran out of liver and onions by 7:30 p.m.
"The liver and onions have been a huge hit," Merrell says. "I didn't realize so many people liked liver and onions."
It's unclear whether those enthusiastic eaters were born liver and onion fans, or if they learned to like the stuff at their parents' insistence. Merrell firmly believes tastes can be acquired, and science seems to back her up.
While people's tastes are shaped by a variety of factors, including their upbringings and the number of fungiform papilla on their tongues, researchers suggest the brain is susceptible to self-deception. As Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner recently pointed out in his blog for the New York Times, cilantro detractors - he included --who make a point of eating cilantro-spiked Indian chutneys and Mexican salsas can become accustomed to the bright green leaves, which don't seem so strange or soapy after dozens of decent meals.
Dubner didn't say whether he'd experimented with cow tongue.
How is tongue so foreign in Dallas? Cow tongue (lengua) is an extremely popular taco filling, and one that is freakin' delicious.
Posted On: Thursday, Sep. 16 2010 @ 4:51PMi always grew up with tongue as a jewish deli food...paired with dr. browns cream soda.
and its freaking delicious.
Posted On: Thursday, Sep. 16 2010 @ 5:10PMI also grew up eating tongue. It was a staple item along with pastrami and corned beef in all Jewish deli's in NYC.
It's delicious sliced very thin and served slightly warm on rye bread and mustard.
I say slightly warm because if it's cold, it's greasy tasting.
I also like lengua tacos as served in the authentic Mexican taquerias we have scattered all around Dallas.
Hanna- in the case of lengua, it has nothing to do with fungiform papilla, but as you say, the cerebrum. People think tongue is weird. Why it loses out in popularity to feet boggles the mind, but there's something to be said for desensitization, and lots of people are accustomed to seeing pickled feet in a jar, so maybe that has something to do with it.
But perhaps it is because the one thing people visualize when they think of a tongue is the thousands of tiny taste buds and weird rough edges that exist on tongues. And that's exactly what they think they will be eating, never thinking that a tongue is a very large and muscular organ.
Maybe also because it has to do with the face. A lot of people are turned off by animals looking at them from a plate. The tongue is too close to reminding us that we are eating something that once also ate.
Also, maybe calling it something other than tongue would help. What are "sweetbreads"?
Me, I'll just stick to my local taqueria and enjoy the hell out of some wonderful tongue tacos.
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/cityofate/2010/09/adventurous_dallas_diners_draw.php
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