best food from Orwell's "In Defense of English Cooking"

<3 I've found my thread

mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint
sauce not jelly obv

can't choose between crumpets and roasties

when did Brits start using oil to fry food? I was wondering this the other day. Like, have they always used things like vegetable oil? is olive oil a relatively new thing for the UK? or did they use animal fats and butter for most cooking?

love mint jelly. like LocalGarda with his bread sauce, it was part of my upbringing

until the 60s you'd mostly fry stuff in blocks of lard (which is animal-based cooking fat)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o9LWUU1Etvk/TxkJyaCgKjI/AAAAAAAACO0/GbJGSBw7aR4/s1600/Trex.jpg

my wife loves to talk about her granny frying chips in lard in their designated chip pan.

more i look at this list, i wonder if all my favorites are modern inventions --
pasties? pork pies? steak & kidney pies? sausage rolls?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco

^^^a solid block ("shortening") until the 60s, when they started marketing a bottled version

My People Were Fair and Had Lard in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Use Oil and not Cows

olive oil traded in the med in all of recorded history, but i doubt it was in widespread use in britain before the 70s (also you can't really use to it cook things that need get very hot as it turns bitter)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil#History_and_trade

I know an (Italian owned) old skool chippie in Ayrshire which fries the chips in olive oil, which is quite the achievement because olive oil doesn't get as hot as your trad Brit frying fats.

from memory i associate vegetable oil with shopping in supermarkets in the 70s rather than eg cornershops or grocers, and feel that's it when arrived and began selling in the UK in largeish amounts with e.g. safeway in the mid-60s (bcz they could keep the prices a bit via economies of scale)

lol len deighton in his "action cook book" (1965) says of olive oil "it is expensive and not easy to find (ask the best wine-merchant you know for details)" -- he then mentions all the other oils (sunflower, peanut etc) , so they clearly were available and not quite as pricey, but in his table of burning temperatures he is careful also to list beef suet and lard also

also

my parents remind me at least once a year that in their youth they cld only buy olive oil in tiny bottles from the chemists

all the pastry biz ian mentions was around before the 50s, perhaps excluded by orwell on the basis that it's more snack/lunch type baking than Proper Cooking?

However sausage rolls in the modern sense of meat surrounded by rolled pastry, appear to have been conceived at the beginning of the 19th century in France. From the beginning, use was made of flaky pastry, which in turn originated with the Hungarian croissant of the late 17th century. Early versions of the roll with pork as a filler proved popular in London during the Napoleonic Wars and it became identified as an English foodstuff.

The Times first mentions the food item in 1864 when William Johnstone, "wholesale pork pie manufacturer and sausage roll maker", was fined £15 (2015: £1,300), under the Nuisances Removal Act (Amendment) Act 1863 , for having on his premises a large quantity of meat unsound, unwholesome and unfit for food.[5] In 1894, a theft case provided further insights into the Victorian sausage roll production whereby the accused apprentice was taught to soak brown bread in red ochre, salt, and pepper to give the appearance of beef sausage for the filling.[6]

english foodstuff = developed by the hungarians and the french, we switched out the meat and swapped in red-dyed brown bread, brexit naow

i don't think i've ever seen one in real life. the pictures are so frightening in a cronenbergian way but i imagine they taste fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmyYxmSPyMI

Haggis is Greek! Good to know. Also, Lamb Lung was always my favorite member of Sonic Youth.

"The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has long objected to one of the key ingredients in haggis – sheep's lung. No food for human consumption, whether made locally in the USA or imported from overseas, can contain sheep's lung"

object away, more for us

1:17 is where the good stuff starts

Haggis is Greek

The Greek poet Homer mentioned a kind of blood sausage in the Odyssey

brb need to activate the stuffing horn

erryone had blood sausages... certainly not unique to the english.

what is the origin of the scotch egg?

They were created by Fortnum & Mason of Piccadilly in 1738.

where on earth could i get a good scotch egg around here? nowhere.

Yorkies/crumpets/roasties = food of the gods.

Agree with people upthread that if you think mint sauce tastes like polos then you've had some seriously fucked up mint sauce (and/or polo mints).

Scotch Eggs are repulsive, the very idea of them makes me shudder, gilded balls of stinking corruption.

thanks scott i guess i could have googled that myself.
next time some new yorker guy is coming to play music in greenfield you should ask for a scotch egg from meyers of keswick.. they good.

http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/mintcustard.htm

^^^i tracked it down

This is the thing - the quality of casual food in France and Italy is just so much better than it is here. You can go to a French inn largely frequented by lorry drivers and the food will be great.

For all that this is not true of England, I've certainly not found that France is much better at this level of expenditure tbh.

Look. Dublin prawns. I won't even.

Scotch eggs are magnificent. The crowning contribution of the scotch.

lamb with mint sauce is the only use for mint sauce that i can think of. in the states. kinda fuddy duddy. or that's how i think of it. like a 70s thing.

lamb w mint sauce is definitely something my grandma would serve.

Yorkies/crumpets/roasties = food of the gods.

Yes, I voted crumpets but this is the trifecta.

Crumpets with Marmite, strong cheddar + fried plantain are just phenomenal.

tbh I dunno if English people use mint sauce for anything but lamb, I haven't anyway.

Scotch eggs suck. I thought maybe that was just a school dinners/crap supermarket thing, but my friend had a 40th birthday party a few weeks ago at a pub and they had "fancy" scotch eggs on the buffet table so I thought I'd give them another go, but no, still gross.

i didn't like tesco scotch eggs but i felt like i ought to try 'em.

mint sauce w/lamb first mentioned in 1743 by the great hannah glasse

https://superchef.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/hannahgasse_475x225.png

hannah^^^ scorns yr anecdotal anachronisms, scott

I always load my Yorkshire Puddings with chopped onions, that is important for me.

Gonna have to make them, which is a fun waste of an afternoon.

challopsed onion more like

anyway from now on i am going to refer to scotch eggs either as "narcissus meatballs" or as "gilded balls of stinking corruption" -- a rose by any other name bcz they are delicious

(I voted Dublin prawns which are langoustines which are the main ingredient in decent scampi from the good chippy, so there).

Mint is poached in cream and then added to cooked peas to make... MUSHY PEAS!

(I voted Dublin prawns which are langoustines which are the main ingredient in decent scampi from the good chippy, so there).

Mint is poached in cream and then added to cooked peas to make... MUSHY PEAS!

never had mushy peas with cream in them

yes pea and mint is totally a thing, tho i associated it more with home-made pea soup than mushy peas (which arrive in a can after a process akin to the haggis machine with its stuffing horn iirc)

mushy peas are probably the apex of english food for me.

i get dried peas and heat them up and serve them with far too much malt vinegar and salt and pepper

you would think there would be more fish on that list. there should be a separate fish list. poached fish! i really want fish and chips now...

although for fishy fish dishes i'd probably rather travel to italy...or spain...or greece...or portugal...or sweden...

I only do cream in the mushy peas if I'm making industrial quantities, otherwise it's a couple of handfuls of heated freezer peas, a big pinch of mint, a knob of salted butter and quite a bit of white pepper, all blitzed.

there should be a poll thread for the best food that looks like baby vomit. mushy peas might win that.

I like that old WW2 story about the Whitehouse valet opening (Animal Farm hero) Molotov's suitcase and being surprised to see a chunk of black Russian bread, some large roll of sausage and a pistol being concealed, by the extremely paranoid guest.

there should be a poll thread for the best food that looks like baby vomit. mushy peas might win that.

― scott seward, Thursday, 31 August 2017 17:57 (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

spinnakers clam chowder is the correct answer to this

its hard to screw up applesauce

Scotch eggs should be a magnificent invention but I've only ever had crap ones that taste of sawdust. Even from Waitrose!