April 11, 2001

8:07 AM

"I buy as many as I can. I freeze them and we eat them all year round,'' she said. Gross. More news on America's... no... the WORLD'S... favorite (cough, cough) treat.
posted by fusinski (17 comments total)

I didn't like them much as a kid (though I thought they looked great in an Easter basket--de rigeur!) But I don't remember the wings! Anyway, I'm pretty partial to the new colors--delightfully fake to complement the delightfully fake taste of the Peeps. And I now love to eat them, too, though I don't quite understand the rabid Peep-o-philia.
posted by petra at 8:19 AM on April 11, 2001

This is old news. And peeps are still evil.
posted by anapestic at 8:20 AM on April 11, 2001

More news on America's... no... the WORLD'S... favorite (cough, cough) treat.

Ahem. The world disagrees. Especially at Easter.
posted by holgate at 8:21 AM on April 11, 2001

Peeps are not evil. A somewhat amusing socio-gustatory phenomenon, yes. But evil, no. And the purple ones taste the best
posted by petra at 8:25 AM on April 11, 2001

Gross.

Republican!
posted by jpoulos at 8:44 AM on April 11, 2001

I wonder, in general, why it is that the food associated with Easter is considerably less appealing than the food associated with Christmas?

At Christmas, I have multiple kinds of truly yummy cookies (you should all taste my lebkuchen), and the candy that's in my stocking is all good. At Easter, it's all too sweet and cloying: marshmallow peeps, jelly beans, giant eggs made with inferior chocolate and stuffed with godonlyknowswhatall. Sure, you can get the almond m&m's, but you can get those at Christmas, too, and you don't have to have them in pastels.

Is it just a matter of the weather? Are you not allowed good food as it gets warmer and more humid?

Easter is the single most important holiday of the Christian year. Let's get it some worthy sweets. Does anyone really think that Christ would have arisen on the third day if he'd had to face a basket with green plastic grass and a bunch of Peeps?
posted by anapestic at 10:17 AM on April 11, 2001

Well, He did the water-to-wine bit. I don't think peeps-and-eastergrass into kosher corned beef and creamed herring would have been beyond Him.
posted by jfuller at 10:51 AM on April 11, 2001

I imagine after three days hanging on a cross all Christ would want would be a cup of coffee and a good half hour with a newspaper on the john.
posted by bondcliff at 10:56 AM on April 11, 2001

"the world disagrees..."

OK, maybe someone could conceivably eat 50 eggs, but there is no way on god's green earth that anyone could eat 50 Creme Eggs. I am always possessed to pop one in my mouth and devour the thing whole, which is a fantastic idea until my teeth begin to sing tormented cavity dirges of unmitigated torture. I always wondered about a foray into the world of Creme Egg Omelets, or even potentially a Creme Egg Quiche...

I just want to give thanks that the central character in an era defining master narrative may or may not have given his alleged life on a tree of woe so that children everywhere could enjoy such savory treats.

Hallelujah!

Also, Easter heralds the coming of what is probably the world's worst chocolate: that contained in Palmer Chocolate Bunnies. Tastes a bit like the Burnt Umber Crayola from the 64 assortment with the built-in sharpener. Maybe Raw Sienna. Right up there with the Whitman Sampler for waxy non-goodness.
posted by Kafkaesque at 10:57 AM on April 11, 2001

Ugh! Because they last so long with no noticible change in quality, the only use for Whitman's Samplers are for occasional diabetic emergencies (those things have half-lives, not expiration dates). And as for Cadbury, while they
make some lovely treats, there is certainly a place in hell for the creator of those nasty "Crunchie" bars.

As for me, I'll stand by Godiva, thank you very much, but only because I cannot get a hold of these anywhere near me.
posted by Avogadro at 11:32 AM on April 11, 2001

I don't find Godiva chocolates superior to other premium brands. I think you pay a lot for the image. For what you pay for an 11.2 oz Spring Cheer basket of Godiva, I can mail order a 5kg bar of Belgian Callebaut. Bittersweet or milk. It's exquisite chocolate, and it lasts long enough for me to pretend that the entire Peep season isn't even happening. That much Callebaut probably makes chocolate-induced psychosis inevitable, but it's a small price to pay.
posted by anapestic at 11:50 AM on April 11, 2001

mmmmmm.....5kg bar of Belgian Callebaut.....ggaaghaghaghahhhh
posted by jpoulos at 12:03 PM on April 11, 2001

European candy is so much better than the American stuff. I agree with anapestic: Godiva is just the tip of an amazing iceberg. Even relatively cheap items like Ritter Sport bars put our candy to shame.
posted by gimli at 12:16 PM on April 11, 2001

In Britain, we have the spectre of an entire aisle of the supermarket given over to variations on the "Easter Egg" theme: hollow chocolate egg, with a plastic bag of choccies in the middle. I'm still horrified by the memory of getting six or seven of those things for Easter. I'm sure most Brit kids have memories of the one time they pigged out to the point of physical sickness.

Now, I'll content myself with a little bag of Mini Eggs, which are penance for such horrors as the Crunchie.
posted by holgate at 2:16 PM on April 11, 2001

I grew up getting Fannie Farmer solid chocolate bunnies, Fannie Farmer foil wrapper chocolate eggs, and Fannie Farmer jelly beans - when mom (er, I mean, the Easter Bunny) got candy, she did it right. And no peeps. I think that if you don't grow up eating them, they're a harder taste to acquire later in life. *grin* The waxy hollow (usually broken) bunnies always seemed like they weren't REAL chocolate to me. Ahhh, sweet memories of childhood. Oh, wait, that was yesterday I was thinking that - never mind. :-)
posted by thunder at 2:43 PM on April 11, 2001

Returning for the moment to fusinski's original posting, I wonder what the point of freezing peeps is? They're surely pumped full of chemical preservatives, and in any case, what's in there that could go bad in the first place? I'd suggest that freezing might cause a degradation of texture, but I'd die laughing.

It's always been my impression that peeps that didn't get sold in year one were tossed in a box somewhere and put back out in year two, and so on. Assuming that the drug store personnel don't carefully label and rotate their peeps (at the very least a plausible assumption), there's a slight chance that the peeps you by now are originally from 1987. And of course, you'd never notice.
posted by anapestic at 3:16 PM on April 11, 2001

A co-worker of mine once had some rather old, dry, and quite stiff peeps lying around his office. On a whim one day, he decided to embark on a rehydration experiment, and wrapped a desiccated peep in a damp paper towel. Sure enough, the peep soon returned to its lovable squishy natural state. I haven't eaten once since.
posted by Aaaugh! at 8:28 PM on April 11, 2001