FOOD: Sausage a'la Goddamn

SAUSAGE A'LA GODDAMN
by Joe Evans
based on an original
concoction by
Marc Stewart

NOTE: This is not a proper recipe, as such. More, it's a journalistic account of a unpleasant food combination.

My friend and cohort Joe Evans recently wrote me to chastise me for not having this recipe on my page. Not having heard the story behind it myself, however, Joe felt it necessary to regale me with it.

It seems, some time back, Joe was dining at Ryan's family super buffet restaurant, in Columbus, MS, with several friends, among them one Marc Stewart. Their goal was to eat as much "brown food" as possible.

Now some of you might think that the term "brown food" refers to the fact that most of Ryan's buffet items tend to be colored in fried and earth tones. While this is essentially true, it's incidental to the actual etymology for the term. "Brown Food" was actually coined by my friend Glen Bryant, co-author of the drink recipe for Howie Reynolds, as a reference to the film City Slickers. In that hallowed film, Jack Palance's character, Cookie, tells the faux cowboys that the food he's prepared is "brown, hot, and there's plenty of it." Ryan's being the Mecca of plentiful brownish food, it seemed a fitting moniker for their grub.

That said, back to Marc.

Marc is something of a "brown-food" connoisseur. He's also infamous for his casual ability to be louder than any other human being in any given restaurant, or indeed, city. Marc had finished the main portions of his meal of brown and went back for one last strafing run on the bar, returning with a bowl full of his three favorite foodstuffs in the world: smoked sausage, chocolate syrup and candy corns. Joe reports: "Marc then took a bite or two, and decided that he had had enough. He instantly named it Sausage a'la Goddamn. The name alone makes it worthwhile."