There has been renewed attention to my now 3 year old post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, it’s the most read post in the last week or so, judging from my Top Posts list. I’m not sure why, so I’ve reopened the comments section, which I closed a while back because they all were beginning to sound about the same.
What’s new?
We got patio tomatoes in early June, which I mentioned in a post on June 2, 2025. We now are getting cherry tomatoes and just recently saw a slicer tomato as well. Sena also has been growing garden oregano and parsley. Sometimes while she’s out there, red-wing blackbirds dive bomb her. It makes me wonder whether there’s a nest under the deck although it’s late in the season for those shenanigans.
The other big surprise is Sena got some Miracle Whip salad dressing for me! OK, the jar is small because she also got two bars of Duke’s Mayo which obviously are the priority around here for a certain somebody.
There’s been this long running joke about Miracle Whip not tasting like it used to years ago. I call it a joke because I think the blog post I wrote about it got more comments than any other (see What Happened to Miracle Whip? Posted 9/3/2022; 16 comments!). I recently closed the comment section on it because they all say the same thing. It was an echo chamber.
They all complain that Miracle Whip is not the same and the company should go back to the original recipe. Conspiracy theorists?
Anyway, Sena made lunch using her home-grown veggies today. It was darn good!
I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!
I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.
Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.
Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.
I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.
There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:
Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.
Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/
The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.
So what do you think about Miracle Whip?
Sena bought a new brand of Braunschweiger and a new mayo and we tried them yesterday. The new mayo was Blue Plate Mayo. Frick’s Braunschweiger was the new lunchmeat.
So far, we’ve tried Field’s, Jones Dairy Farm, and Frick’s Braunschweiger. We’ve sampled Kewpie’s, Duke’s, and Blue Plate mayo.
We both thought Blue Plate Mayo was not better than Miracle Whip and the Frick’s Braunschweiger was OK but a little short of earthshaking. Frick’s is a family business in Missouri, and their website looks similar to Jones Dairy Farm (which also makes Braunschweiger). They’re both solid family businesses.
Blue Plate Mayo (“born in New Orleans”) has been around since 1927 and make a decent mayo. We just like Miracle Whip better.
In fact, of all the mayos we’ve tried, we both like Miracle Whip the best although Sena, most of the time prefers Hellmann’s Mayo. But that’s just her.
We finally had lunch with Miracle Whip and American cheese sandwiches a few days ago. They were delicious! An extraterrestrial even showed up, begging for a bite.
Miracle Whip sometimes attracts ETs. I’m surprised more people don’t try this method of getting photo evidence for the existence of these creatures.
Sena is still planning to make Beignets sometime in the near future. She did make some really tasty funnel cakes though, using that Southern Living cake mix.
Big day of mayo taste testing yesterday. We broke out the Kewpie Mayo, Duke’s Mayo, and Miracle Whip. Actually, we got the two mayonnaise brands out for dishes Sena had planned. We got the Miracle Whip out just to compare the taste of all three.
I thought the Miracle Whip was tangy. Sena actually thought it was pretty good too. Miracle Whip was sweeter than the other two (but not cloying!). Duke’s Mayo was definitely strong on the egg yolk flavor. I also thought it was salty. Kewpie Mayo was very different from the other two but it was difficult to tell just how, exactly.
We tried out the Duke’s Mayo on egg salad sandwiches. Sena’s verdict on Duke’s Mayo is that she doesn’t really like it and prefers Hellmann’s. I’m indifferent to it. I think it makes for a pretty good egg salad sandwich, but I prefer Miracle Whip. And Sena is becoming a little more partial to Miracle Whip.
The other day, Sena suggested we have a soup and sandwich dinner. We both had a Braunschweiger sandwich on toasted bread, with onions—and Miracle Whip! Sena suggested the adding the onions and toasting the bread. She also decided to try the Miracle Whip spread. I chose the soup, which was so spicy we needed a drink of lemonade with every bite.
Usually, she prefers mayonnaise to Miracle Whip, so I was floored. In fact, adding onions on toasted bread with the sandwich was delicious! We both liked it.
Braunschweiger is also very nutritious. According to one web article, a single serving has 14 grams of protein, important for muscle growth, repair, and health overall. It also has heart healthy monosaturated fats (good for you), it’s high in Vitamin A which is great for eye health, and has many essential vitamins and minerals.
And is Miracle Whip good or bad for you? It turns out it has half the calories and fat of mayo, so it’s a healthy choice.
Sena actually liked the Braunschweiger with Miracle Whip sandwich. She made sure I put onions on the sandwiches and she liked the way I diced them. In fact, onions are also good for you. They’re low in calories and nutrient rich.
Try to pair it with a soup that it isn’t nuclear grade spicy and doesn’t require a gallon of lemonade to put out the fire.
Older adults can learn more about healthy eating and exercise at the Move Your Way link. Try it. You might like it.
Sena bought two items at the grocery store that brought back memories: Braunschweiger and Miracle Whip.
You may recall the Miracle Whip vs Mayonnaise challenge blog posts last August-September. Miracle Whip took a beating and it’s partly because I suspect the makers changed the recipe for it.
I can’t change that. On the other hand, I used to make sandwiches using slices of plain white bread and Braunschweiger. There are dozens of brands of Braunschweiger. I’ve never heard of Field, but it hardly matters. I think they’re all pretty much the same.
On the other hand, try telling that to the food science experts at Iowa State University. We found a YouTube video of a guy explaining what they look for when judging Braunschweiger. He went on about how it has to be a certain color (reddish is better), it can’t be spreadable, and it has to be flown in from a distant galaxy and so on.
But we also found a couple of videos that show the spread of opinion on what people think of the taste of Braunschweiger. One of them showed a guy in Texas who tried it for the first time. He toasted the bread (something I’ve never done), sliced the meat, placed it between the bread slices without any kind of condiment—took a while to roll it around his mouth and finally praised it highly.
That contrasted with a video of a father and son who made a hilarious and overdone spectacle of themselves gagging their way through a taste test.
There are a lot of recipes out there using Braunschweiger. Many of them look really tasty. Nostalgia is the word for my version. I don’t do anything fancy with it. I slap Miracle Whip on the bread, slap Braunschweiger slices on them and have lunch.
I ate a lot of lunch meat sandwiches when I was growing up. I didn’t know about nitrates and nitrites back then and didn’t worry about carcinogens from them. I still don’t. If you want the lowdown on nitrates and nitrites in your diet and the relationship to diseases like cancer as well as their benefits, you can read a very thorough and recent review of it (Karwowska M, Kononiuk A. Nitrates/Nitrites in Food-Risk for Nitrosative Stress and Benefits. Antioxidants (Basel). 2020 Mar 16;9(3):241. doi: 10.3390/antiox9030241. PMID: 32188080; PMCID: PMC7139399.). There is no slam dunk decision on whether it’s totally evil or not—note the word “benefits” in the title.
I recommend you not watch any overly dramatic YouTubes or read any scary science articles about it. Keep it simple. Just enjoy your Braunschweiger and Miracle Whip sandwich. You can also enjoy it with mayonnaise, if you’re so inclined. Sena and I did a taste test and this time the Miracle Whip tasted just like it did when I was a kid! Sena actually liked Braunschweiger. She ruined it with mayo, but that’s just her.
Okay, so it’s Mayo Wars again at our house evidently. Remember that challenge of Mayonnaise vs Miracle Whip Sena and I had a while ago? Well, now Sena is planning to make a Korean cheddar corn dish. It’s supposed to be made with Japanese mayo, which I gather refers to a product called Kewpie Mayonnaise.
She also ordered a couple of other mayo products: Blue Plate Mayonnaise and Duke’s Mayonnaise. She plans to use them in egg salad and a fish sauce.
All of them use mainly or only egg yolk instead of both the white and the yolk as other mayo makers do. Hmmm. One reviewer says that this avoids the “cloying sweetness” of Miracle Whip.
The nerve!
The other annoying thing is that the Kewpie Mayo took its name from the Kewpie doll. Let’s be clear, the word “Kewpie” is not Japanese. It was coined by an American illustrator, Rose O’Neill. The name comes from “cupid” the name for the rosy-cheeked babies and the Greek god Eros. The Romans called him Cupid. A Japanese businessman shrewdly applied the name to the mayo his company made because kewpieness was getting a lot of attention in America. Kewpie dolls are collectible.
“Cloying sweetness of Miracle Whip” for crying out loud!
Okay, the update on the Mayo vs Miracle Whip thing is not going as planned so far. A couple of days ago, we had tuna fish sandwiches using Miracle Whip.
This was not the Miracle Whip I knew growing up. Neither of us could appreciate much of a taste at all. It’s a crisis.
Even the label on the jar looks strange. Since when does Kraft call it “Creamy Mayo & Tangy Dressing?” Why do they need to use the word “Mayo?” And it didn’t have the tangy flavor I remember.
This is all because of aliens. I’m pretty sure this is a violation of the Intergalactic Federation for Preservation of Tanginess Standards (IFFPOTS). Look it up.
I never made Miracle Whip sandwiches with just Miracle Whip on two slices of bread. I also had a slice of lunch meat on them. In fact, I ate one Miracle Whip nitrate-rich lunch meat sandwich a day for lunch for years. Its’ a good thing scientists discovered that nitrates aren’t bad for you.
But the point is the Miracle Whip tasted tangy back in those days. What happened?
Maybe it’s because my taste buds are older. More likely it’s because aliens kidnapped me and altered my taste buds. Or maybe they altered the Miracle Whip itself.
We’re not done yet. There are other recipes to try.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 