^Well, never hurts to try. Okay, never hurts
much to try. And that same impulse is the way I once had a freshly poured dark chocolate salt and cracked pepper bar, which remains one of the best decisions of my entire life.
Second the Howard's Violets, lulu. They're violent, not violet. Taste like hand lotion.
There's a review of Ikea's salty licorice fish over in
Reviews of New Food on McSweeney's Internet Tendency, hope you enjoy it, Auntie:
"Ikea Salty Black-Licorice Fish
Submitted by Sam Kean
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl, I re-enacted the meltdown at Reactor 4 inside my mouth. Two days after eating a single (1) salty jellied licorice fish, I still had trouble tasting food. Surprisingly, it wasn't the licorice flavoring that undid me. More anise would have been a relief. (Jägermeister would have been a relief.) It was the salt saturation. The thing was basically a flexible black salt lick, the candy counterpart to the white rings nailed on trees to be gnawed by deer. It was also worse than that: salt licks aren't gooey. They don't cling to your mouth. By the time I scraped the last gill from between my teeth, my taste buds had been seared shut, the tongue equivalent of being in "the hole" for a month and then being hit with a spotlight.
This took place during the middle of my night class. For the last session, our eccentric librarian teacher had brought "treats" from Ikea (the candy is big in Scandinavia) and dared us with the fish. Because no one else stepped up, I took three—each the length of a pack of gum, with the consistency of a Gummi worm and the black soul of a demon—and finished one. As far as I know, this tied the International Federation of Competitive Eating (I.F.O.C.E.) world record. I spent the rest of the class engraving the smooth, conveyor-belt-riding side of my uneaten treats with scars and dopey eyes.
Two days later, I had dinner with a girl I'd been pursuing partly because she, too, was vegetarian. Perhaps that's why Nicole was nonplussed to have to point out the bacon in my appetizer. In a dead-man's float among my half-eaten white beans and sauce were postage-stamp-sized flaccid squares that, to me, had tasted just like the wine: salty. The date ended without a kiss."
