Pumpkin Spice Spam hitting stores in September

This is basically pork sausage with quatre épices, which sounds very fancy indeed and conveniently gets around prejudices against a spice mix that are more cultural than culinary.

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All of these spices are commonly used with ham already. It will be fine. Probably wouldn’t make spam musubi out of it but with a waffle? I’d eat it.
That’s some strong “I hate cinnamon and nutmeg because middle class white girls put it in their coffee” social conditioning, though.

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I visited the Spam Museum a few years ago, and it most definitely gave me a lot of respect for their contributions to war efforts.

I very much enjoy fried Spam when cooked well, and what the heck, I’ll give this gimmick flavor a try. When it comes down to it, it’ll just be Spam with some nutmeg and cinnamon flavors. I can see it being potentially good with breakfast.

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It will NEVER get a pass from me. Austin for years had the world famous Spam-O-Rama, a marvelously silly excuse for people and even chef’s to go nuts with spam. I worked at an Itallian restaraunt that entered spam tortellini an a Marsala sauce. Tasty! But Hormel at some point decided that free advertising wasn’t good for business and shut the whole thing down. Fuck Hormel and fuck spam. It is weirdly expensive anyways.

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I have to admit- some restaurants in Austin being denied the opportunity to run a promotion is really much more important than allowing the Russians to feed their Nazi fighting army.

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Your sarcasm is accepted. It just pisses me off tho. And really, have you priced Spam these days?

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There never was. Pumpkin is just a descriptor of the mood (aka autumn) not actual product. It always has been just a spice mix.

( A few years ago some soccer moms got together and were SHOCKED to find out their favourite Starbucks beverage did not have any actual pumpkin. Now some things have token bits of it, but it started as, and really only ever will be a spice mix)

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True! Pumpkin pie, for example, almost NEVER has actual pumpkin in it. It is some form of spiced squash. Pumpkin is actaully very hard to work with. They suborned the poweres that be to let them call the squash ‘pumpkin’ even tho it is not.

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Wait, do you mean Austin, Texas, where (I believe) you are, or Austin, Minnesota, where Hormel’s headquarters and the SPAM Museum are? Not that it really matters, but if you meant Texas, was there any purposeful connection to SPAM being from Austin, Minnesota? Just curious.

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Yep. Texas. We do our best to be weird here. The whole festival was just a goof. I am sure someone actually realized that Austin, Minn. was a real thing at some point. Being the tiny blue dot in the big red state, we tended to be a tad insular. At least before the population exploded.

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OFFS. It’s August. Too hot to be posting these sorts of articles. But here you go.

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Sam German.
But it seems he was the English guy who invented the sweetened Baker’s chocolate used in the recipe.

Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate, named after two men who were neither bakers nor German.

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Are you telling me there are no Germans in the cake?

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Many years ago when in college, I was in a photography course and thought it’d be funny to build a camera out of a Spam can. I wrote to Hormel and asked them what the biggest can of Spam was that I could get my hands on to make a camera out of.

Less than a week later, I got a big padded envelope with an (empty) family-size Spam can, exactly the right size for large-format pinhole work, along with a letter talking about how they love it when people get creative with Spam and do fun stuff. They are super supportive of anything that promotes Spam and their products. If they had an issue with a Spam festival I’m guessing there was a very specific reason for it, especially if it’d gone on for years already, such as someone raising a stink or asking for money.

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IIRC the Hormel lawsuit was over the name of the product being part of the name of the festival. Also at some point they worked out some kind of contract or at least Hormel decided not to sue that particular guy, but not to go easy on anyone else with the same idea. The reason it ended ultimately was because the guy who ran it (and had the contract with Hormel) moved out of Austin. Honestly, I only vaguely remember hearing about it. There were a lot of festivals I remember from back when I was a kid, but it’s been a long time since I paid any attention because festival crap is big business in Austin and it’s a lot easier and cheaper to avoid the mess than participate. Details are just from a wiki.

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Ah, that makes some sense. Companies generally like to be given a heads-up when their brand name is used like that so it doesn’t look like they’re sponsoring an event they aren’t a part of. Our local unofficial Marshmallow Fluff festival is called “What the Fluff?” to skirt around that issue, for example.

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The Spam Musabi is one of the better uses of the product.

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Love Spam musubi! It’s really wonderful and the rice balances out the fatty meat really well.

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There is an omusubi (Japanese rice ball) place close to my office. It is my “I’m in a hurry” breakfast

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Can we hire this man whenever Storm Front or others like them appear? I’d support him opening a can of whupass on that entire spectrum.

eta: Spam also appears in fried rice; one of our local grocery stores makes a wonderful fried rice that is more or less kitchen sink, containing bits of whatever they had left from the previous day’s steam table plus mushrooms and other veggies.

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