Meat Clown

November 19, 2020 11:40 AM

The meat clown isn’t the ghoulish nightmare the internet would have you believe. [MEL]

Meat Clowns. Meat Clowns! MEAT CLOWNS!!! [Gleek]
Restaurant Meat Clown [Simpsonswiki]
What is a Billy Roll? [Irish Times]

posted by chavenet (27 comments total)

Strong candidate for the Metafilter 2020 “Most Ominous Use Of [More Inside]” award here.
posted by mhoye at 11:52 AM on November 19, 2020 [18 favorites]

and even a meat Bernie Sanders

Surely that's not kosher?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:59 AM on November 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

I saw a slice of this madness on a UK TV show and was like... how are these guys always talking shit about American processed food when they're going around eating hamclowns?
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:00 PM on November 19, 2020 [13 favorites]

I'd seen the meat clown before but foolishly assumed it was just a face photoshopped onto bologna. Had I known this was real, I would have picked some up when I was in Ireland, just because.
posted by tommasz at 12:07 PM on November 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

“Once the eyes and mouth were removed and graciously eaten, came the spectacle: Billy Roll is now my face,” Bloss continues. And after putting the meat clown’s gaping eye and mouth holes over her own, she’d eat whatever remained of the buttery deli meat “with utmost pleasure.”

This doesn't seem weird to me because, as a kid, every once in a while I successfully lobbied to have macaroni and cheese loaf for sandwiches. The selling feature for me was being able to poke the cheese bits out of the slice, and enjoy them in sequence: eat the de-cheesed slice, then enjoy the cheese bits on their own terms.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:18 PM on November 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think the lesson here is that children are maniacs. (The six-year-old I know seems to subsist almost entirely on mayonnaise sandwiches.)
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:25 PM on November 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

This doesn't seem weird to me

ok that's enough internet for one day
posted by mhoye at 12:25 PM on November 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Strictly speaking, all clowns are meat clowns.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:35 PM on November 19, 2020 [32 favorites]

macaroni and cheese loaf

*record-needle scratch sound*

....How did I not know that this is a thing that exists?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:39 PM on November 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

“In Germany, we have a food factory and an engineering firm called Feldhues Tech. They design and build the production lines that we use to manufacture the Billy Bear and Roll. Only two of these productions lines have ever been built – one is in Germany and the other is in Clones.”

Sooo...these are not the byproduct of a hookup between Mr. Big Stick and some clown.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:43 PM on November 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

As it turns out, though, he’s definitely very real, as much a part of our meatspace as you or I.

This is the worst use of the term meatspace ever.
posted by sciatrix at 1:11 PM on November 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

This doesn't seem weird to me because, as a kid

Hell, as an American kid I used to bite holes in the bologna slices and make a mask out of it even without pre-printed guidelines. I can't decide if the Irish kids had a way cooler lunchmeat or were just using a crutch.
posted by nickmark at 1:23 PM on November 19, 2020 [13 favorites]

Per Feldhues’ website, “Billy, the smiling sausage” was born in 1986 after a technological breakthrough allowed the company to produce “a clown face in the meat slice,” which was the “world’s first character meat product for children.”

That is a remarkably specific first they're laying claim to right there.
posted by nickmark at 1:24 PM on November 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

Did no one else in America make this? I have a vague but definite memory of seeing humorous face bologna in the deli case of a grocery in the ‘80s.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:14 PM on November 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

I occasionally enjoy olive loaf. I have no shame.
posted by Splunge at 2:34 PM on November 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

🎵 boeuf a un visage
the meat has got a face 🎵
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:58 PM on November 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

Hey kids, what's scarier than a meat clown? The person who enjoys slicing through the clown head every day to make you your lunch!

Keep it freaky mom!
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:42 PM on November 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Now that I consider this, I find it meh. Have you heard of head cheese? When I worked in a deli I hated slicing it. It seriously made me sick.

Head cheese.
posted by Splunge at 5:02 PM on November 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

Have you heard of head cheese? When I worked in a deli I hated slicing it.

The last time I asked for some at a deli, the guy at the counter said, "Are you sure about that?"

I like head cheese with a nice hot mustard, but I can't blame him for double-checking.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:18 PM on November 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

I've only had head cheese once but I loved it. I had it served on crackers with sliced raw onion. You know when you get a rotisserie chicken from the store and put the leftovers in the fridge and this delicious meaty jello forms at the bottom? It's like that but mixed with tasty assorted meat bits.
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:27 PM on November 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

My grandmother, an immigrant from Sweden, would sometimes make her own headcheese out of an entire pig's head she would simmer on the stovetop. This happened way before I was born, when my dad was a kid... so I never got to witness it. My dad liked the final product, but was still weirded out by seeing a pig's head falling apart in a pot on the stove. He grew up very, very poor, and this was an old country thing to do I guess. She came to the US some time in the 1930s.

Just call it country style paté if you don't like the term headcheese. Paté usually has liver; but otherwise it's assorted meats pressed into a loaf, sometimes with gelatin from the bones. Why waste animal parts?
posted by SoberHighland at 5:57 PM on November 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

OK, quick weird meat story: I'm pretty adventurous with food. I was in France's countryside one time and the special of the house at a tiny, old and recommended restaurant was "Andouillette de Troyes" (we were near the town of Troyes). I speak zero French, and the waiter spoke little English. I ordered it, and he politely tried asking me if I really... really? wanted it? He described it in French, but couldn't get the right words in English. I thought "Oh what the heck?" and said "I'll have that, please!"

It's a sausage made from chitterlings. And it had a distinctive, sharp barnyard smell. Like the actual smell of animals in a barn. It arrived hot. I cut into it, and it was a cross section of chitterlings in a casing. It was loose inside, and the offal sort of fell out of the casing like warm, moist rubber bands in a cloudy broth.

I ate some of it, but the smell was intense. It really disturbed a couple of the people I was dining with. I remember eating the bread and butter and the sides that came with it. The waiter kind of laughed when he saw I only ate maybe a third of it. The people I was with liked their food a lot, but the smell of the sausage was pretty intense and kind of ruined lunch overall.

I guess I'm glad I tried it? But I would not eat it again.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:18 PM on November 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

I knew what andouillette is made from before I tried it for the first time, but my mistake was in assuming that chitterlings would be similar to tripe, which is something I'd enjoyed previously.

It took only one bite for me to realize that chitterlings come from a place much further down the GI tract than tripe.
posted by theory at 9:20 PM on November 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

Without wishing to stir a priority dispute with an Irish company, apparently Gesichtswurst was A Thing in the GDR/DDR before The Wall came down. Free slices for kids at the deli. Source: 2m30s. And for a food challenge, I remember my mother-in-law going [gnnnnarrrrr] at crubeens [pig's feet] while "she still had her teeth".
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:19 AM on November 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm reminded of Front-de-Boeuf, a character in Ivanhoe.
posted by doctornemo at 7:41 AM on November 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Strictly speaking, all clowns are meat clowns.

You hope.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:14 PM on November 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Coming to this party very very late, but: has anyone considered what the ends of the 'clown loaf' look/ed like? I mean the regular slices are already disturbing enough (to me, at least) and it would appear that the manufacturer's already trimmed the ends off. Perhaps with good reason? Shudder.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:11 PM on November 21, 2020