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There's a common axiom that says "you are what you eat." Well, if that is true, then I'm more than just "snips and snails and puppy dog tails." In fact, puppy dog tails are about the only thing along the way that I've missed. If I'm what I ate, then I'm a Ringling Brothers circus of junk that could yet erupt into some weird appendage.

If you happened to grow up with the blessing, and the burden, of an Italian heritage, with aunts and uncles, around every corner digging, cooking, and baking, then you probably ate something very strange along the way to adulthood. My mother was a magician who could virtually turn withered throwaway-quality lettuce into a delectable eco-friendly treat. With a little tomato sauce, she could transform an old shoe into a delicious entree. Nothing was more divine than her warm fresh baked bread, spaghetti sauce, and meatballs. Foie gras is mere vomit compared to that Thursday lunch special.

But there were times when it was a bizzaro world of food around our home. Miraculously, I actually made it into adulthood without a burdock thistle growing from my ear.

We just passed the season when my parents, relatives, and even neighbors would take on the nature of a Pavlovian dog. They would begin to salivate and search for their digging tools at the first whiff of a new spring weed. There were a few special ones that Mother Nature offered up from the once snow- covered fields. The singular treasure that adorned the new green fields was the exquisite cardune. That's right, to the civilized world it's known as the burdock; sort of Mother Nature's original Velcro. But, to my family of Sicilian heritage, it was the rich nectar of the Gods.

By the way, we didn't eat those annoying burrs thanks to my adventurous distant cousin Vinny Stunat, who would be known in today's world as Vinny the Challenged. If you go back into the official history of the cardune, you'll find that this great adventurer went where no rational man was ever meant to go. Legend has it that on a Sunday in May of 1911 in Bayonne, N.J., the sukku (sauce) lacked meatballs, so Vinny thought, "hey, let's a try a little cardune stick-on-a-you-thing." History was made when cousin Vinny gulpled down the cardune thistle and the intestinal eruption that followed convinced others to never try it again. The legend of Vinny goes on to state that he did recover from the burr choking in time for the course of bracciole. His complexion of purple haze betrayed his bravado and claims of, "hey, I'm a fine and it tasted justa like a chicken," rang a bit hollow.

When I was just a strapping youth of a 75 pounds, of which 70 pounds were nose and ears, armies of Italians would take to the fields in May wielding knives in search of the celery-like delicacy. Of course, the location of these fields would be held with the greatest of secrecy. I remember one sunny spring morning Uncle Angelo (Cuticles) Ravioli was being water boarded in the basement by my mother and Aunt Rose in an attempt to get him to reveal the whereabouts of his field somewhere in south Arkwright. It was suspected that it was in Angelo's secret Garden of Eden where the mother of all cardunes grew year after year. It wasn't a pretty sight to see my mother and aunt work over Uncle Ang but when it came to cardune, anything goes.

"Listen, Angelo, you can make this easy or you can do this the hard way. And if the water doesn't make you talk, we'll go to the pepperoni stick across the ears." I can assure you that Uncle Angelo never broke where Sheik Omar Alitalia would've cried like a little girlie man.

It's a little known fact of the Italian -American scene that cardune field locations were passed down from generation to generation. It was common to hear a lawyer read a last will and testament, " and to my favorite nephew Spatula Cammarrerie, I, Evangelista Maria Cammararie, in sound mind bequeath to Spatula my mustache wax and a map which will reveal the location of the Mother of All Cardunes."

Don't mistake the free range cardune with the domesticated species that you can obtain in the prettified atmosphere of a supermarket. That mutation can be purchased for about $ 5 per pound, which is $5.10 too much. A better way to spend your time and money would be to cut up an old box that your big screen TV came in. Boil the pieces for about four hours. Drain the water and sprinkle the boiled pieces with a dash of kitty litter and believe me, it's flavor is extraordinarily superior to the cultured cardune.

Another delightful taste treat of the spring time bounty was chickodia or dandelion salad. Not the yellow flowers mind you. It was the tasty bitter leaves that Mom would turn into a delightful tart salad. Anybody knows that the yellow flower was held underneath your chin to reveal your fondness for butter. Nobody ever got water boarded over dandelion where cardune could turn little grandmothers with hair buns into Dick Cheneys.

Once the burdock stalks were picked, the arduous process of cleaning them was handed over to my mother when she wasn't up to her elbows in pickling pork hocks. I'm sure that anybody who's a vegan just coughed up a twig at the thought of someone actually eating pickled pigs ankle. The alternative name for these fat bombs had to be something like Cardiac Arrest with a Hard Knuckle Center. Basically, they are saturated fat wrapped in saturated fat. Even God designed the pig so that these fat globs were about as far away as they could be from the pig's heart. And yet, as a kid, I buried my canines into those hocks like a Somalian pirate roaring, " aarrgghhh!!! over flying shards of bones and gristle.

If a pig's ankle wasn't your cup of saturated fat, Mom had one episode of culinary lunacy that was truly special. One day I caught her in the basement cooking up a large kettle of chicken feet. I imagine that when you go through an economic depression, you learn not to waste much of anything, but come on, feet? I can imagine that perhaps the feet of a hummingbird might be tasty, though not very filling. Or the elegant feet of a flamingo or peacock could dazzle your tongue. But, you know what? They probably all taste like chicken.

When feet were in short supply, there was always the old reliable concoction of chicken gizards and livers. Makes your mouth water doesn't it? Actually, one wonders how chicken feathers ever escaped Mom's amazing culinary hocus pocus.

One of my favorite exotic entrees that came from Mom's magic kitchen was tripe. At one time, when there were butcher shops, tripe, which is cow's stomach lining, was in such low demand that butchers gave it away. I imagine that any leftover tripe that didn't find its way to the kettle was stitched into an early version of a radial-belted snow tire.

My new bride tried to prepare it once using Mom's recipe shortly after our world record-breaking honeymoon. Not only was she near to heaving everything up that she had eaten since childhood, so was the entire Lake Shore Drive neighborhood in Dunkirk. The remnant of the gut-wrenching pall still plagues Memorial Park. Today, when a puzzled child playing along the water front asks, "Mommy, what's that awful smell? The answer is, "1963 tripe, dear."

Even more bizarre than tripe was a bizarre product that my grandfather had for a medicinal stew. He used the blood from a snapping turtle. I can still recall a headless turtle hanging from a clothes line with blood dripping into a kettle which would then be mixed with sugar. All I recall is that the mixture would be consumed by some poor victim suffering from emotional trauma. Thank God, I never qualified.( I assume the trauma was produced by some poor soul witnessing a headless turtle being drained of blood hanging from a clothes line.)

Perhaps grandpa's medicine was used to treat the nightmares produced by watching snails crawl out of Mom's boiling kettle. They are known as escargot in more refined settings but when they're scrambling to avoid boiling water in your mom's kitchen, they're just snails, buddy.

How mom ever missed the puppy dog tails I'll never know. Hmmm, on second thought, I never looked in the kettle.

Nin Privitera is a Fredonia resident. Send comments to editoriala@observertoday.com