The Favourite British Dish

[SepticTone]

Snails v Pizza. Pizza wins hands down. Correct, you certainly wouldn't want to eat squishy garlic garden pests every day, even though I'm tempted to collect up all the giant bloody snails who regularly snack on my plants outside, give them a good ticking off, smack their gastropod then stick em in the oven , just to teach em a lesson.

Instead of collecting them by torchlight & throwing them over the fence at night into my neighbour's garden, which is what I do currently.

In retrospect, yes, I agree: escargots are crap. Only Frogs would have thought of eating them, rather than just standing on them.

As an interesting (?) addendum, a recent TV article highlighted the vastly increased purchase here in the UK from High Street butchers, of olde-worlde lumps of cheap but nourishing butchered animal bits, like pigs' trotters, oxtail, pigs' cheeks (hogjowls I guess), tongue, cheap cuts of meat like brisket, etc., as Britons react both to the recession and a constant barrage of rustic Italian-style cooking programmes on TV which incorporate stuff like this, & have started increasingly to revisit old trad Brit dishes at home in a subconscious attempt to reconnect with the mythical golden old days, before we got pizza, pasta & foreign fast food.

I like cooking, btw, but we're mostly vegetarian in our family here, hence my growing my own veg.

[davec]

You mean Brits don't have Toad in the Hole four times a week anymore?

White pudding is basically pork and oatmeal, and is really black pudding without the blood. Common in Ireland, Devon, and Cornwall.

[davec]

Erm, I meant for that previous post to somehow refer to American misperceptions of British culture, but I got called away while writing it, and somehow forgot. D'ohh!!

I think I should stop posting when I come home from work beat. Should cut down on the brainfarts, oh, about 10%.

[Kate]

I had white pudding and really liked it. Given the chance I would probably try black pudding.



This is a possum - more specifically, a variety known as the Virginia opossum. I don't think he's dead - more likely playing possum (faking dead). At least, he looks like the one I once found in my trash can (bin) did. How he came to be in the can/bin I do not know, as it was standing upright. You can't really get a sense of scale, but they're slightly smaller than a cat. Not long after my family moved into our house, we left a bag of cat food on the back porch one night, and I came by the door and saw a small one eating the cat food. I could only see the hind end, and I let out a yell because I thought it was the biggest flippin' rat I'd ever seen. They're supposedly fairly intelligent. I've heard of some people having them as pets, but with teeth like that, I wouldn't want to try it. I've only seen live ones a few times, but there are dead ones everywhere on the roads. One of my favorite jokes is, "Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the possums it could be done."

When the group I was with went to England and Ireland, one morning, one of the guys decided to replicate biscuits and gravy as best as he could. He got a bowl of porridge, put some bits of sausage in there (there may have been some black pudding involved as well), and crumbled about three pieces of toast into it. He claimed it didn't taste bad. The waitress obviously thought we were completely insane.

[SepticTone]

Thank you very much for the pic of the dead rat thingy, Kate.

If it's playing possum, It certainly has me fooled: it looks fairly dead, & I wouldn't want to eat its innards, despite what Granny Clampett added to make them taste nice. It doesn't look very intelligent either. I'd always imagined them vaguely like koala bears, having never wiki'd them ( well, you wouldn't , would you?)

TYVM for that. It's a piece of vermin, really, isn't it? An overgrown rat. Thank God the only animals Americans ever introduced over here were grey squirrels.

Which have now nearly made our nice big fluffy native pacifist red squirrels extinct, by being nasty to them & eating all their stuff over the past 50 years.

Dave makes a point about eating squirrels: grey squirrels are now officially vermin here & can be shot. Not red ones: they're officially nice endangered animals.

Except nearly none of us have guns, except criminals and so it's a bit tricky killing them really as they're quite a bit faster on their pins than the average Brit.
They look like they have a quite a bit of meat on them, so I wouldn't mind eating squirrel, as long as it didn't have its face, tail or fluff on it, & preferably, if it was made into cheap mince, so I could make a nice shepherds pie, & nobody would notice.

You must give me a recipe for biscuits & gravy, please.

[davec]

Sorry to hear we exported greys your way. They are four legged vacuum cleaners when it comes to the local food supply. They're displacing reds here too. I grew up in 'red' country, and it's now largely grey country.

If you want to do your bit for the red population, you could get a live trap at Homebase, and bait it with peanut butter mixed with rat poison. Put it up where the chipmunks (ground squirrels), if you have them, won't get to them.

[SepticTone]

Sorry to hear we exported greys your way. They are four legged vacuum cleaners when it comes to the local food supply. They're displacing reds here too. I grew up in 'red' country, and it's now largely grey country.

If you want to do your bit for the red population, you could get a live trap at Homebase, and bait it with peanut butter mixed with rat poison. Put it up where the chipmunks (ground squirrels), if you have them, won't get to them.

You didn't export them: it wasn't your fault, honest: some idiot 19th C Brit imported them for a laugh, then released a pair of greys into the wild, again for a laugh, presumably. The rest is history, as they say.

The main reason they supplant the reds here is that they carry a squirrel virus: the squirrel parapox virus, which is fatal to reds: kills em in about 7 days, but the greys are immune. They also eat treebark, which kills young trees. But they look cute. A lesson for History, perhaps. But they're only bloody squirrels, after all, so who cares, really, in the greater scheme of things?

And I would never kill Anything knowingly unless it threatened to kill me, especially with poison, & particularly if it cost me money. Plus. Peanut butter and poison are interchangeable words to me.
We don't have chipmonks here either. We have hardly any wildlife left: we've eaten most of it centuries before, as we used to be very hungry then, & being an island, no more bits of wildlife could creep in. There aren't very many grey squirrels in Europe, as they watched & learnt.

But we drew the line at eating snails, frogs & squirrels. Which sets us apart from the French, at least.

This thread began with curry, & ends with squirrels. Both of which are best taken in small doses.

[Kate]

Sort of like rabbits and Australia...

Interesting how we tend to chase our rabbit trails on topics. From curry to squirrels. Nice.

[SepticTone]

Chips.

I like chips. But I also like french fries, now & again. I don't eat either very often because of the fat content, except my own home-made fat chunky parboiled then oven baked ones, but it was only this thread which made me think (briefly, as life's too short really, isn't it?) about the difference.

Most restaurants I think, both here & in the US, use frozen oven chips, as to cook chips properly either at home or in a restaurant, with the fat/oil at a very precise temperature, you need a deep-fat frier, which whatever you do, still stinks the place out.

You can't get proper chips here anywhere other than from a fish and chip shop.

For Americans unused to the concept of a fish n chip shop: They have huge elaborate fat frying 'ranges', with gallons of oil heated to a precise temperature, the chips are cooked once, then rested outside the fat, then cooked again, to create the perfect soft-yet-slightly crisp texture. But mainly soft, actually.

They have big extraction fans in the ceiling to take the smell of fried fish n chips away & blow it outside into your nostrils as you walk past, so you're lured in there despite yourself. Very cunning. And they're always best consumed outside immediately, with the fingers, as, by the time you've taken them home to eat on a plate, it's all gone soggy & steamed in the packaging.

The perfect traditional fish is a cod fillet, sadly a bit scarce nowadays, as the Icelanders have overfished them in the waters we traditionally used to get them from. But haddock will do, even pollack, whatever that is. The fish are briefly dipped in a light batter then plunged into extremely hot fat for a minute or so, so the batter crisps & the fish is steamed inside the batter. Timing is critical.

People here will drive miles to the best fish n chip shop, passing dozens of others on the way, precisely to obtain their perfect version of the takeaway, as, with all take-away food, there are good ones & crap ones. The Pakistanis & Chinese take-aways here try to make fish n chips, alongside the stuff they really know how to cook, ie: curries or stirfrys, but they're always crap.

I only wrote this as I'm really hungry & waiting for the wife to come home, so we can go & get some & eat em in the car! LOL!

[davec]

The old Free Smell Fan! A favorite American trick too, for places serving fried food, notably soul food and southern cuisine such as fried chicken and barbecued ribs. There's a rib joint a few blocks from my house, and you almost need to spritz the windscreen and turn on the wipers after driving by. Sure smells good, though...

We know how to do the fish and chips here, if you're willing to pay a stiff price for it at good British or Irish pub joints. If so, it's done right--proper chips, not fries, and definitely must be eaten immediately. Seafood restaurants here stick to the traditional American seafood fare such as lobster (a pricey item that, years ago, was considered garbage food).

Yeah, the Orientals know that, when a group of Round-Eyes come to eat at their place, there will always be one in the crowd who just doesn't like Oriental food. Most of us love it, but there are the holdouts. Here, they offer hamburgers and spaghetti, both poorly done, but at least not that awful dirt-and-bugs Oriental stuff. You lot get faux fish and chips, naturally.

As I've groused elsewhere, nobody here serves even the best fish and chips with any accoutrement but malt vinegar, or on rare occasion mediocre tartar sauce. I suppose in that case the tartar sauce is supposed to be for the fish and the malt vinegar for the fries. I'd rather put the tartar sauce on a rash and the malt vinegar in my hair, thanks.