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thunder magazine issue ii |
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Pleased to Meat
YouIf
"British cuisine" is the two-word punch
line to a joke the rest of the world is telling,
the British themselves are deep in denial, as if
a sudden obsession with fresh herbs will erase
several millennia of culinary history. Nicholas
Noyes takes you for a delicious
taste-test.
Britain today is in
a frenzy of foodiness. Bookstores are packed with
tomes on the most obscure and esoteric of the
world’s cuisine, magazine articles debate
the best places for mushrooming, and Foie Gras
and Partridge (ready-stuffed for easy roasting)
line the refrigerated shelves of what were once
quite ordinary supermarkets. Every evening,
dozens of television programs focus on one or
another aspect of the culinary world, from the
shenanigans of bad-boy celebrity chefs to
cook-off contests between junior gourmets who
opine in piping voices on the merits of grilled
duck breasts in a mango-cranberry reduction.
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Mm-mmm
good.
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Is this the country that so
recently protested in tones of high indignation
about the base attempts by European bureaucrats
to introduce legislation that would require that
sausages to contain at least 40 percent meat
product? Perhaps
it’s the trauma of being the home of Mad Cow
disease that has sent the entire country running
for the arugula.
A nation of born-again
gourmets, Britain’s shame at their previous
culinary barbarism is such that proponents of
traditional cuisine face criminal prosecution for
their beliefs. A couple was recently charged with
child cruelty for feeding their son a diet of
"chip-shop food."
"Occasionally I
ate pasty and chips or jumbo sausage with chips
— but mainly it was just chips," said
the lad, describing his plight, and,
incidentally, the diet of the British working
classes over the past 100 years, give or take a
pint or two of ale and a few gallons of tea.
Prosecuted! For providing the diet that got
Britain through two world wars, Beatlemania, and
a decade or so of grating harangue by
food-scientist-turned-politician Margaret
Thatcher. Although the forces of reason prevailed
and the couple was acquitted, these are tough
times for traditional British cooking.
Fortunately, it has its
defenders, and examples of good old-fashioned
British fare can be found in restaurants and
supermarkets, in the cafeterias of provincial
railway stations, and, of course, in the
chip-shop.
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| Chef Fergus Henderson has become
very successful in the UK for creating a sense of
nostalgia for the golden age of offal [editor’s
note: this means "bad stuff"] among
a generation raised on fast food and frozen
dinners. He has revived, at his restaurant St.
John near the famed Smithfield meat market, such
culinary delights as Duck Hearts on Toast, Rolled
Pigs Spleen, Pea and Pig’s Ear Soup, and the
innocent sounding Bath Chaps. And while Fergus
Henderson’s use of innards and odd body
parts is seen as esoteric, even in the UK, there
remains a large number of foodstuffs enjoyed in
Great Britain of which the edibility would be
questioned, certainly by effete North Americans,
but probably by most of the rest of the world. |
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| Take
the Haggis. Its most famous booster, the
poet Robert Burns, celebrated this
national dish of Scotland as "Chief
o' all the Pudding-race." Which
means that, metaphorically at least,
Chocolate Pudding, for instance, has to
bow in tribute to the Haggis. And well it
should. Haggis demands respect, and
preparing it is not for the faint of
heart. The recipe begins with the boiling
of a sheep’s lungs, heart, and
windpipe (also known as sheep’s
pluck, presumably because when you drive
your hand into the chest of a living,
breathing, bleating and by now rather
concerned sheep, the heart and lungs is
what you are able to pluck out). Haggis
recipes emphasize the importance at this
stage of draping the windpipe carefully
over the side of the cooking pot so as to
drain off any post-mortem phlegm that the
beast may cough up. While the pluck is
gently expectorating on the stove a
sheep’s stomach is thoroughly
cleaned. The pluck is then chopped to
fine mince, mixed with oats, some onion,
and a generous amount of animal fat, and
is sown up in the stomach and boiled for
hours. It is then served, sometimes with
some mashed neeps (the dread rutabaga in
one of its many aliases) and mashed
potatoes, but always with a great deal of
whisky. Haggis
doesn’t have a lot of fans south of
the Scottish border, but in this era of
post-Braveheart nationalism it appears
increasingly on menus in the North. In
Glasgow Airport they serve what are
referred to as Haggis-Bites (not a
review, as one might suppose, but a
description), which are little nuggets of
Haggis, battered, and deep-fried to
crunchy-yummy perfection. As might be
suggested by this daring use of the
national dish, a lot of the innovation,
in Scottish cooking at least, has taken
place in the deep fat fryer. The
deep-fried Mars Bars is justly celebrated
(the Cable Food Network in the U.S.
recently hosted a taste test to see if
the chocolate tasted better fried in oil
which had also been used to fry fish, or
in fresh oil), but the deep-fried frozen
pizza is equally innovative.
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Other members of the
"Pudding-races" include
Hog’s Pudding, White Pudding, and
Red Pudding, which is known as a Saveloy
in England and very closely resembles a
Hot Dog. Best of all is Black Pudding.
This delicious blood sausage is a
favorite breakfast treat, a tasty
accompaniment to the eggs, bacon,
sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and baked
beans that make up the great British
breakfast. And while one might suppose
that Black Pudding appeals only to those
who have fond memories of picking and
eating their scabs, it actually has a
huge international following, appearing
on French menus as Boudin Noir. On the other hand,
there’s plenty in a British
supermarket that will never make it to
France. The Lager-and-Lime Ice-Lolly for
instance. The quiescent frozen form of
the pub drink popular with underage
drinkers has the advantage of
acclimatizing British children to frozen
beer, which helps in later life when some
idiot leaves a six pack in the freezer
for too long. Other alcohol-flavored
products for sale in the UK include
Lager-and-Lime and Whisky flavored
condoms – presumably intended for
people who happen to be having sex, but
would prefer to be drinking.
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frozen food section includes strange
sounding but benign products such as Toad
in the Hole (sausages in a popover-like
batter) and Pork Faggots (a flattened
meatball), but here there also lurks some
real nastiness. Heinz, an American
company, produces for the British market
the frozen Baked Beans and Cheese Pizza.
Unpleasant as it is on its own, the real
problem with a baked bean pizza is the
suspicion that somewhere in Britain
someone is deep-frying it. Finally, there’s
the Buffet Bar. While Steak and Kidney
Pies, Pork Pies, Scotch Eggs (a
hard-boiled egg encased in sausage,
rolled in orange breadcrumbs, and
deep-fried), and other standbys of the
Pub Lunch seem bizarre to the rest of the
world, the Buffet Bar is inexcusable.
It’s a candy bar sized tube of
deep-fried pork sausage meat into which
has been injected a creamy mixture of
coleslaw and cheese. Probably not
designed to be eaten, but rather for the
simple pleasure it would give marauding
football hooligans when they looted
Buffet Bars and then stamped on them, it
none-the-less seems popular with hungry
motorists and is for sale in highway
service stations throughout the UK.
At least, it
was until very recently. Reports are that
the Buffet Bar is becoming rare, a victim
of a more sophisticated national palate.
Perhaps it is being replaced by some new
triumph of British food
manufactory—a Truffle and Liver
Cibatta, for instance, or Bath-Chaps
Wraps. Whatever the fate of the Buffet
Bar, it seems unlikely that British
cuisine will lose its power to astonish. <
Nicholas Noyes's first exposure to
British cuisine was in the form of
so-called School Dinners. All subsequent
encounters, including the Buffet Bar,
have been an improvement. He is a
contributor to The Amok Fifth
Dispatch, and is a member of
team Gonzaga. Contact e-mail NickNoyes@aol.com
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