Tell me your mother never handed you a Vienna sausage dipped in Bisquick batter shoved on the end of a chopstick and tried to pass it off like it was a Maui County Fair pronto pup.

"Really, it is! Try it! I saved it in the freezer from the last County Fair. Tastes just like, almost."

Yeah right, Ma.

Or the homemade flying saucers — way too saucy to eat with your hands, pieces of bread stubbornly refusing to stay together, altogether a different item than what you happily ate from the once-a-year food booth in October.

(If Mom was crafty enough to attempt candy apples, she probably got it right, though. Lucky.)

There are many versions of the "recreating fair food" disasters, a category related to "We can make our own Big Macs at home!" — words of defeat when a kid has a very particular taste in mind. It's never the same. It just never is.

Even though it made your gut ache and threatened to come back up on the Tilt-a-Whirl, you find yourself wanting that lovely battered ball of grease, especially in the long empty months when fair weekend is far away, just a dyspeptic dream for the future.

Of course, every town has its favorites, from Punahou Carnival's malasadas to cheese curds at the Minnesota State Fair.

Maui County Fair food had the inimitable combination of sweaty teenaged cooks forced to work the booth for a school service project, harried parents roped into helping, day-old bread bought at discount for filler, cooking oil that didn't get changed all weekend and a sprinkling of dirt, like fairy dust, that wafted through the air, kicked up by hundreds of shuffling feet waiting anxiously in line for something lava hot and Wesson greasy. So 'ono.

Pronto pups are corn dogs, in case anyone was wondering. They're hot dogs with a golden fried cornmeal batter coating served on a stick.

Flying saucers are little sandwiches filled with a ground beef/tomato sauce/ corn mixture. The artful part involves clamshell metal clamps used to toast the sandwich over a fire. Kind of like a panini, but greasier and without the stripes. When the little meat pockets are done, the two sides of buttered bread are fused together and rounded like Marvin the Martian's space ship.

Mama can follow the recipe from the Wailuku 4-H cookbook to the letter, but without the cosmic convergence of stained metal clamps, horseplaying helpers, grumpy cooks and buzzing bass notes from the blown-out speakers near the arcade, it just doesn't taste the same. "A" for effort, but so much of the flavor is in the ambiance.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.