Eating Chocolate Covered Cotton
A gluten free diet can be surprisingly tasty, but there’s still the occasional assault on the palate. The texture of rice flour breads is not quite right, and the yeast aroma can be overwhelming. Dry pastries, crunchy bread, tasteless cookies, tooth-chipping crackers - these are all things we had to try before we found the ones that actually taste good.
My mind keeps going back to the profiteering Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, who bought up all this Egyptian cotton and couldn’t figure out how to offload it. Finally, in desperation, he covered it in chocolate and tried serving it in the mess hall. Every time we try one of these new products, I hope and pray it doesn’t taste like chocolate covered cotton.
Then again, you probably consume more cotton than you realize, cottonseed anyway. It’s funny, I found this article in the New York Times archive from 1910, which looks to be bought and paid for by the fledgling cottonseed flour industry, hoping to do what corn has achieved in the hundred years since this was written. Sorry, cottonseed, you lost.
Oh, and if you read the fine print, you’d see that cottonseed bread isn’t very good unless you mix a little wheat flour in it. On the other hand, the South might have actually won the Civil War if they’d known they could eat bread made out of cottonseed.
And to top it all off, “It has another property that should commend it to many. It clears and tones up the complexion of humans, just as it polishes and electrifies the glossy coats of animals to which it is fed. This may serve to make the new flour very popular with the ladies.”