Cough drop grapes

a grape to cure what ails you

Hi, clowns!

Davida and I are finally settled back in after our fun family trip to Orlando. The whole thing was amazing; we visited both Universal Studios and Walt Disney World, snuck out to Tampa to visit Davida’s best friend, and Davida even got to try Waffle House for the first time. She politely declined to throw any chairs during our meal.

But reality has a fun way of welcoming you back from vacation. We came home to find out someone had crashed into my car while it was parked on the street (JESUS FUCK HOW MANY TIMES DOES THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN, THIS IS THE THIRD FUCKING TIME NOW), and Florida decided to leave us both with a parting gift: A cold.

Miraculously, it’s not COVID (we checked, I promise). It had been a very long time since either of us had a cold, so we sat around feeling sorry for ourselves while sniffling and coughing. I had little patience for being sick, and I had to do something. I decided to play doctor, Food is Stupid style.

Reader @Dinkle (who no longer appears to be a Substack user, miss you), suggested a while back that I make some special grapes for the newsletter, writing, “Hey Dennis, on Instagram I am seeing a lot of people starting local businesses selling just candied grapes made with melted Jolly Ranchers. Think you can do a twist on this?”

Hmm. This was certainly a good start for our recovery process. Grapes are good for you when you’re sick, since they’ve got like, vitamins and shit, right? But we all know that Jolly Ranchers provide no valuable nutrition or medicinal properties.

So what substance could I coat some grapes with that would make Davida and I feel better? Oh yeah. Duh.

Cough drops.

I lamely headed to the store and bought some fancy organic grapes (since that’s all they had for some reason), and a large bag of Luden’s Wild Cherry cough drops.

When I was a kid and children were practically encouraged to go to school while they were sick (which in retrospect, is hilarious), everyone would be jealous of the one turd who was allowed to eat cough drops in class all day.

The coveted brand everyone wanted was always wild cherry-flavored Luden’s. That’s because unlike nasty mentholated Halls cough drops, Luden’s actually taste like candy. And in fact, Luden’s cough drops pretty much are candy. They’re basically made of corn syrup and delicious flavoring, but the interesting part is that the active ingredient to give you cough relief is, of all things, pectin.

Pectin is a soluble fiber found in fruits like apples and grapes, and it’s a natural thickening agent used in things like jams and jelly. When you ingest it in a cough drop like Luden’s, the pectin coats the inside of your throat and helps reduce swelling and irritation. Pectin cough drops are also a fantastic loophole for a kid to be able to eat an entire bag of lozenges that don’t taste like a urinal cake all day.

Now that I think about it a little more closely, I’m sort of in disbelief that our parents encouraged us to go to school when we were hacking up a lung. Every time someone did that, like three to four other kids wouldn’t show up to school the next day because they all got sick too. I guess we had to build our immune systems somehow. Apparently the best way to do this was via the patheogenic gladiator arena of a school classroom.

“Man, if we only knew what was coming,” I said to myself, eyes glazing over wistfully, as I started unwrapping a dozen cough drops.

I’ll get this out of the way right now and say that cooking with medicine is a terrible idea, and is something you should never do.

But pectin is a food-safe ingredient (remember, it’s a fiber), and you can even buy it in powdered and liquid form in order to make jelly. Also, I routinely do things such as eat kitty litter, and I have a feeling you all generally do not even consider doing stuff such as this. I trust you.

As I gently heated the cough drops up on the stove, I began to skewer some grapes on some toothpicks by poking them up their buttholes.

Grapes have buttholes, right? After I tank my food writing career with this newsletter, I’ve decided to become the greatest botanist in all of history. I plan on winning the Nobel Peace Prize for identifying every plant butthole on the face of this planet.

I didn’t want to wreck my wooden or nylon spatulas with the melted cough drops, so I grabbed a metal one from the drawer.

Turns out a metal spatula isn’t the ideal utensil to use to stir melted sugar. Giant gobs of cough drop solidified on it immediately, and I had to pry those off with yet another spatula to get them to drop back into the lava.

I very, very, carefully dipped the grapes into the molten cough drop mixture.

A single misstep could cause me some really serious burns (sugar burns are some of the worst kitchen injuries you can get), so I really had to concentrate. Never mind the fact that I could have, like, used a pair of tongs to awkwardly do this, but that fact just occurred to me now as I was writing this very sentence.

I sprayed a pan lined with foil with some cooking spray and let the cough drop grapes set up, which only took mere moments.

To be safe, I let them sit for a while and played games on my cell phone, like an adult does when he’s sick. These days, I’m really into this one game called “Ballz.” I wish I were kidding, but no, ask Davida, she’ll confirm this. It’s a block-breaking game that involves a bunch of “Ballz.”

I’m obsessed with Ballz. I dream about Ballz. All I ever do is think about Ballz. Every time I close my eyes, I see Ballz in my face.

Finally it was time to soothe my poor throat after all that stupid coughing.

I put a cough drop grape in my mouth, bit down, and my eyes lit up. The texture on this thing was downright incredible. It was like a thin sheet of glass breaking into a million pieces. I imagine this was what it is like to bite into a cell phone screen.

Fortunately, the grapes were very sweet, and the fake wild cherry flavor somehow made them taste really good in an artificially tangy sort of way—I guess all those kids sucking on cough drops in class really knew what was up, because Luden’s was the superior choice.

I brought a cough drop grape over to Davida on the couch, and we had an unexpected reaction from our cat Scorpion, whose brain is coincidentally the size of a grape.

His brain, may in fact, be an actual grape. Listen, I’m allowed to make fun of him on the newsletter. This dumbass chewed through my third fucking laptop charger that was plugged into the wall, and I can’t believe he’s still alive.

Scorpion went from sitting on her lap into turning into a ping pong ball, bouncing around, trying to get a whiff of the cough drop grape. Neither of us have ever seen him get that aggressive over any food, even cat treats, and Davida basically had to wrestle him from actually getting ahold of the thing. But not before he got a couple big sniffs in.

“Hurry up and eat it!” I said to Davida, “Do it before he gets it!”

She popped the cough drop grape in her mouth and started crunching on it as I carefully watched her the whole time.

“So?” I asked, hoping she had enjoyed this delicious grape as much as I did. “Do you feel miraculously cured?”

“Yeah,” she said, looking me dead in the eye. “I do. I’m going to go outside and kiss every person I see on the mouth.”

Looks like we have a real joker on our hands. I narrowed my eyes and watched her carefully to see if she’d run outside and kiss a bunch of strangers, but as you know, our marriage is strong and can withstand things like eating a poky little poké poke cake and drinking white Russians made out of kitten formula. She did not in fact, smooch a bunch of randos on the sidewalk.

I don’t know if it was the grapes, but Davida and I really do feel better today. I’d like to think I’ve discovered the cure for all diseases that ail humankind, but really, we all have the reader suggestion from @Dinkle to thank for that. And it just occurred to me that because I’m a grownup, I really don’t need an excuse to eat cough drops whenever I want.

Maybe I’ll just eat them melted onto some grapes from now on.

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Thank you all for reading Food is Stupid, and may you never get sick.

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I hope you’re all hanging in there. I know it’s been a really awful week for many of you. Just know that as always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes next week.