A lot of traditional comestibles can be a little bizarre and even repulsive.
For example, at one time Australian Aborigines included witchitty grubs, large white wood-eating larvae, in their diets. However, I have yet to find a single Aussie, including "fair dinkum" (i.e., authentic) "Abos", that will admit to ever having eaten one. Australians do like to snack on musk sticks, which are pink candies that smell and taste like musk perfume (i.e., the secretions of the anal glands of some animal). Few nonAustralians seem to like these sorts of confections, however.The durian is a particularly stinky fruit grown in Indonesia and surrounding areas. Durians reek so much that it is illegal in some jurisdictions to ingest them in many public areas, like parks and subways and hotel rooms. However, durians have a nice fresh flavor, in spite of their odor.
In Norway one can find smalahove, a barbecued sheep's head customarily consumed at Christmas and accompanied with mashed rutabaga. [1] Scandinavia is also the home of lutefisk, which is a sort of jellied whitefish that is partly rotten and prepared with lye. Rakfisk is an even more rancid Norwegian dish. Another variation on this theme is surströmming from Sweden, which is decaying herring packed in salt water. After the fish ferments for a few months, it is packed in tins where it continues to decompose and this causes the tins to bulge. Surströmming is very fragrant, which is why it is commonly eaten outdoors. However, I have not encountered any Scandinavians who will confess to consuming (let alone enjoying) smalahove, lutefisk, rakfisk or surströmming.
Germany has a wide variety of sausages and meat pastes and weird spreadable meatlike substances. A Skypeland regular recently returned from a medical trip to Germany with ugly reports of the atrocious meat products and limp anemic vegetables there. Although she liked the Teutonic coffee and desserts, she lost quite a few pounds in Germany. Some think this weight loss was because of her surgery; I suspect that it might have been caused by German cooking.
The US also has a number of disgusting foods, like jello/gelatin (made from boiled pulverized cow hooves), hot dogs (packaged ground-up anonymous meat "parts", which have an ersatz but "obviously healthy" reddish chromatic enhancement) and marshmallows (basically the same stuff as jello). However, American alimentary scientists are world leaders in creating novel synthetic but good tasting "frankenfoods" using radiation, genetic engineering, chemical processing, and a wide assortment of additives, many of which are not found in the natural world. For example, in ongoing attempts to avoid the Value Added Tax in the UK, the US manufacturer of Pringles brand potato snacks recently revealed that Pringles are composed of only 42 percent potato. Americans know much of their esculent intake is not as organic as it could be, but US nutrition engineers add carefully designed fake flavors, stabilizers, emulsifiers, propellants, humectants, precipitants, solvents, catalysts, hydrates, lixiviates, sequestrants, seasonings, fixatives, preservatives, thickeners, colorants and manufactured sugar substitutes to Yankee vittles. This makes US fare so attractive, tempting, mouthwatering and downright delectable that immigrants to the 50 states from all over the world soon find they are struggling with their weight, similar to many native-born Americans.
One region that is reputed to have some of the worst tucker in the world is the UK. [2] However, instead of acknowledging that their food is either bland and tasteless, or vile and repulsive, many Brits in Skypeland seem to champion the British table with a fierce pride, almost approaching indignant defensiveness and even fury (this is very different from what is seen in surveys; only 5 percent of Britons want to learn how to prepare their national dishes, which are the least popular in Europe, garnering only a 3% popularity rating, compared to Italian food at 60%).
Most foreigners who visit the British Isles return with stories about how horrendous the chow is there. One notable example that serves to illustrate the situation is the case of beef in the UK. Although the limeys often boast about the quality of British cow cuts (and some even brag about being "beef eaters"), visitors are almost always disappointed to discover that British bovine briskets and sirloin are dry and stringy and tough. In my experience, British beef has essentially the same texture and taste as shoe leather.
To add injury to these insults, the UK cattle industry was devastated by Mad Cow Disease a few years ago. It is estimated that over 500,000 British domesticated bos primigenius taurus were infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and about 80% of these sickly critters were consumed in the UK. This can be compared to one or two cows diagnosed with BSE in other countries. There are many fewer reported instances of BSE-contaminated meat being eaten anywhere outside the UK. Is this because the British monitor their food more carefully, so they were able to document the problem better than other countries, or because the Pommys eat more disgusting cuts of meat, from sicker cows, without a second thought? The American Red Cross will not even accept blood donations from people who spent significant amounts of time in the UK when BSE was rampant in the British cattle population. [3]
In addition, the names of British foods might generate confusion or create negative impressions. Food names can be important and even contribute to the popularity of a dish. For example, some foreign companies can run into trouble trying to make sales in English-speaking areas if they choose poor brand names.[4]
Just imagine the difficulties that one might encounter trying to market products like Pee Cola, Jussipussi bread or Shitto peppers in the US or the UK.However, the British do not have the excuse of being nonnative speakers of English (although it might seem like it sometimes, particularly if one listens to someone from Yorkshire). In spite of this, Brits often have very unusual and even unappealing names for their foods. These linguistic difficulties, together with a collection of some of the least palatable vittles on the planet, easily explain why British cuisine has such a poor image worldwide.
Here are some specific examples of what makes outsiders wonder about British grub:
*One of the staples on the British national menu is "bangers and mash", a nasty, greasy yet bland meal of mashed potatoes and sausages.
*A variation of "bangers and mash" is "toad in the hole"; soggy cooked vegetables and sausages surrounded by pastry. I hate to say this, but the name of this dish reminds me of "turtling".
*Haggis is a notorious Scottish food, but there are versions of this dish in other places in the British Isles. Haggis consists of a sheep's heart, liver and lungs, boiled in a sheep's stomach for 3 hours. I will pass, thanks.
*Bubble and squeak is not quite as stomach-turning as haggis, but this meal is just warmed up, dried up vegetables left over from a Sunday dinner, typically served with cold meat. Yum.
*Kippers is a traditional British breakfast and a vile herring dish, complete with bones, scales and fish eyes. Perhaps not so good to eat if you are hungover, when you have to deal with food that is looking back at you.
*England is home to Stinking Bishop Cheese. This cheese is supposedly very popular because of its aroma, which is said to be reminiscent of a combination of ripe unwashed socks and wet towels. Stinking Bishop Cheese can have a nice grey rind as well. Don't you want to try it?
*"Spotted dick" is something else that can be found in the UK. No, spotted dick is not some sort of "social disease", or a symptom of a "Moby Dick" infection. A spotted dick is a tube of steamed raw beef or mutton fat ("suet") in which dried fruit is embedded. Mmm, mmm, sounds good. But doesn't it seem like something kids are advised to hang outside from tree branches as feed for birds in the winter?
*A friend who went to the British Isles told me about a delicacy called a "Scottish Wood Cock" (I wonder if after a bad case of "spotted dick", it fell off and had to be replaced with a prosthesis?).
*The British eat a food called "faggots", which are orbs of meat formed of chewed up pig hearts, livers, intestines and other undesirable parts (as an aside I will note that meatballs are sometimes called collops in the UK). However, as horrible as faggots sound, many Brits find nothing strange about eating a food that bears the same name as the UK slang term for a cigarette, or a common informal slur for a male who enjoys "buggery and blow jobs" with a few of the lads. Personally, I think it sounds a bit questionable to announce, "I like to eat faggots", as Mrs. B proudly proclaimed the other day. Such a statement certainly would raise eyebrows in the US.
*The British eat jellied eels and something called "mushy peas". How appetizing.
*As if Spam were not vile enough on its own, the British were so excited at the introduction of Spam to their island that they created a special dish called "Spam fritters", which is deep-fried Spam. Ick. It can still be found in those British temples to deep frying, fish and chip shops.
*Black bun is a Scottish cake with a nice filling made from fruit rinds. Wow, how delicious.
*Sometimes one can get some glimpse of British culinary culture in the international section of a US supermarket. I was surprised to come across a package of something from the UK called "cock flavored soup". I have no idea what that might taste like, but perhaps this is some more evidence of the English fascination with homosexual behavior?
*Stuffing for meat or fish is called "forcemeat" by the Brits. The only way to get most people to eat British meat would be to force it on them, I think.
*The Brits use many other odd names for food. Gammon is a British name for ham, and groundnuts are peanuts to limeys. Meats like liver, liver, tripe, heart and kidneys are called "offal", although "awful" might be a better spelling in my opinion. These meats are also called "pluck" to confuse matters further. Tunny is tuna, aubergine is eggplant, bilberry is blueberry, sack is sherry (maybe for the bag they wrap the bottle in, when they are out on a Winehouse rampage?)
and pips are seeds. This makes me wonder what on earth the proper British expression "pip, pip and all that" means. And the Chinese are supposed to be inscrutable? What about the Brits?
*Another British favorite is the so-called "head cheese". However, head cheese is not cheese at all, but instead is slices of calf or pig head, sometimes including meat from the animal's feet, tongue and heart, served cold and coated with aspic (that is, jellied animal head meat). Nice...
*Not only do the British drink their beer warm, but they eat the foul remnants of the brewing process. Marmite is spread on toast and eaten, in spite of having a taste that can make the average person gag.
*Black pudding is cooked thickened pig's blood. Ugh.
*Laverbread is a Welsh bread made from seaweed.
*Hotchpotch is a Scottish soup made by boiling vegetables together with some bones to leech out some of the bone marrow. Confusing matters further, a marrow in the UK is a kind of squash that looks like a monster-sized zucchini. However, the Pommys call a zucchini a "courgette" (sounds like what you might call a female Corgi dog).
*Pork shoulder is called "hand of pork" in the UK. How on earth can anyone refer to a pig's hands? Maybe someone was drinking too much of that warm beer.
*In the US, beer is consumed chilled, particularly when the weather is hot. So is lemonade, and the Brits mix the two to create to create a "shandygaff" or "shandy". I am not sure I would like to drink a nice warm shandy to quench my thirst.
*A "baby's head", or "babby's yead", is one of the endless variety of mystery meat pies that the British seem to consume. And as if the name were not repulsive enough, a baby's head is a pie filled with diced pig or lamb kidneys (sometimes together with steak, or what passes for steak in the UK).
The Brits seem to have an unlimited number of weird names for their food. Here are a few more:
*Liver and lights is a dish made from liver and lungs. Who eats lungs? I guess even the Brits want to disguise the nature of this food with a vague name.
*Cornish pasties are meat turnovers, not something worn by a stripper to hide her nipples.
*The English don't eat English muffins, but they do eat crumpets.
*A chump chop is a type of lamb meat. It sounds like an undesirable cut of meat, frankly.
*A coley is a black codfish. Naming a fish dish after a lump of smelly inedible hard decomposed plant material is just what might expect from the British. One can only imagine what meal of coley might taste like.
*A garibaldi is a large cookie, full of currents. I think the name of this treat is a reference to the Italian patriot, not a comment about a candidate for minoxidil. Apparently, Giuseppe Garibaldi sat on an Ecces Cake during a visit to Tynemouth, England in 1854, and thereby invented this biscuit.
*A ginger nut is not a type of nut (that is, a desiccated anhydrous indehiscent ripened ovule-bearing nether portion of the pistil of a gymnosperm or angiosperm, well-known photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms) at all, but a ginger snap.
*Corn is the term used for any type of grain in the UK, but maize is the British name for corn.
*Bully beef, alternately called salt beef in the UK, is corned beef. In the US, a bully beef would be whining by someone who picks on others, and a salt beef is an action taken to add sodium chloride to cooked cattle flesh or maybe a complaint about the sodium content of some food. Obviously, there are lots of chances for confusion and misunderstanding.
*In the UK, floss is not necessarily something you use to clean your teeth, but can describe cotton candy.
*A jacket potato is a baked potato. Does that mean that a peeled potato is a jacket off potato?
*Perry is pear cider, not the first name of a 50's crooner.
*Polony in the UK is bologna. Is this an attempt at rhyming slang?
*A ring doughnut in the British Isles is a doughnut, but a doughnut in the UK is a jelly doughnut.
*Sherbet is not only a frozen dessert in the UK, but a type of powdered candy.
*Squash is not a vegetable in the Britain, but a juice drink.
*A dessert in the UK is typically called "pudding", even if the dessert is not literally a pudding (just like tea in the UK often refers to a meal, not necessarily accompanied by tea). Obviously, some puddings are not dessert at all, like the previously mentioned black pudding (a kind of blood sausage), and hog's pudding, which is a sausage from Cornwall that is similar to haggis (here is a recipe from a British newspaper for "hog's pudding and sweatbreads on toast". Ooh, how inviting!).
*A swede is a yellow turnip, or rutabaga. Turnips are called neeps in Scotland.
*British Demarara sugar is turbinado sugar, named for the Demarara colony in Guyana, paying tribute to the UK history of involvement with slavery.
*A tart is not only a slag (a British term meaning "slut"), and a word that describes a sort of unpleasant sharp or sour taste, but a type of pie in the UK. This produces endless opportunities for jokes and puns in what passes for comedy in the UK. "Tart jokes" are ubiquitous in British humor, as can be seen by viewing Benny Hill reruns.
*Mayonnaise sounds distinctly French, and is sometimes said to be named for the town of Mahón. However, a little investigation shows that the origin of mayonnaise is not clear at all, and one of the theories about the invention of mayonnaise suggests that the British contributed to the creation of it. [5] This is just what you might expect for one of the blandest and most nasty condiments.
After all, who else would put something that looks like pus on their sandwiches and french fries? The only thing that is more unpleasant than the Pommys putting mayonnaise on french fries is the British habit of dribbling gravy on their "chips". I won't even mention what that looks like.One of the complaints about British food is that it is often bland. This is mostly correct, but it is not completely accurate. An exception is the well-known Worcestershire sauce, which is popular the world over. However, most brands of Worcestershire sauce are flavored by something called 'asafetida' (sound it out), also known as "devil's dung" because of its foul stench, and is therefore usually unlisted on food labels.
In addition, Worcestershire sauce often contains "xanthan gum", made from the microbe xanthomonas campestris, a plant pathogen. Plants infected by xanthomonas campestris have disgusting slimy black spots on their leaves.
There are some special dishes associated with holidays, celebrations and special occasions in the UK. For example, parkin (a sort of oatmeal bread) is consumed on Guy Fawkes Day in Yorkshire. Parkin is made with ginger and molasses, and is another monument to Britain's proud history in maintaining slavery in the Americas, since both ginger and molasses were produced by slave labor in Jamaica and then imported to the UK. Guy Fawkes Day commemorates a great UK historical event, when Roman Catholic Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Parliament buildings because of religious inequities in the UK (one of the conditions that fueled UK emigration).
Guy Fawkes celebrations are a little peculiar; it would be like the US having an Osama Bin Laden day on September 11. However, Brits engage in all kinds of revelry on Guy Fawkes Day, including setting off firecrackers that they have "shoved up the bums" of neighborhood cats. [6] What great fun! And of course, this tradition gives a bit more evidence of the obsession most Brits seem to have with butt holes.
Many holidays in the UK are associated with a special dessert. For example, "hot cross buns" is not a nickname for a sexy angry guy with a nice backside, but a type of baked roll eaten at Easter.
A conventional British wedding cake is an iced fruitcake. Fruitcakes are often given as gifts at Christmas as well. Fruitcakes are so unpalatable that they are the one kind of cake that most Americans will not eat (and that is saying something). Fruitcakes are typically not consumed in the US, but "regifted" to someone else. People even joke about using fruitcakes as substitutes for cannonballs. [7] [8] [9] [10]
A special British Christmas dessert is the "Yule log", which is also what they call a tubular tree section they put on the fire. Naming a dessert after a large cylinder of wood is the sort of thing one might expect from the British, I guess, and I can imagine that many British Yule log desserts probably taste like a piece of wood as well.
In one college, some students in the dorms decided to have a "Yule log contest" over the December vacation break. They competed to see who could squeeze out the longest "Yule log" and they saved their efforts on old newspapers in a linen closet. Unfortunately for these students, after about a week a janitor opened the closet (which was in a somewhat pungent state by then) and the students were threatened with expulsion. The students decided to protest this action, staging a "shit in" to attempt to convince the University administration to let them stay in school.
On "Mothering Sunday" in Lancashire, the beer is not just served warm, but is even heated by shoving a red-hot poker into it
(I hope this does not get some of my female readers too worked up, although I guess there are a few gay readers who might like that idea as well). The mulled ale is eaten with "simnel cake", which looks like a vomit-colored dessert which is growing a bunch of tumors. [11] Gross. In this case, I think it might be more appropriate to classify the simnel cake as more of a "baked bad" than a "baked good".After surveying some of these British foods, the behavior of a British man who was arrested for urinating all over some of his country's foods becomes a bit more understandable. [12] The only question is, could one even tell the difference afterward?
Can you imagine a good slogan for this drink? How about "Have a Pee", or "I love the taste of Pee"
Addendum: A naughty limerick
As noted above, these bizarre British food names give rise to all sorts of gags and jokes. I decided to try my hand at it, utilizing an extended form of that classic British poetic form, the limerick:
There was a young lady from Wumpet
who enjoyed hot tea with her crumpet
'long came a lad, exceedingly bad
Who asked her to blow on his trumpet
'Cept the lass was sort of a strumpet
and she liked to have boys hump it
she told him 'stead of givin' him head
to get down to work and to pump it
The young boy was too 'fraid to jump it
And then she pulled out her plump tit
She said I've a need, ain't gunna plead
Take me right now, like it or lump it.
Addendum II: BSE risks
I did a bit of investigation to see if I could find any evidence for the hysteria in some health food media about BSE risks in the US. [13] [14] [15] There have been only 3 verified variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) cases in the US up to June , 2008, while there have been almost 1400 verified cases of vCJD in the UK through the end of 2008. [16] The three in the US had lived in the UK or Saudi Arabia and presumably contracted the disease there. One mystery case of a woman in Massachusetts turned out to have taken supplements made of imported cow brain parts for years. [17] A very interesting paper from the CDC gives a careful assessment of the BSE disease, and the risks for BSE in the US. [18] Although the risks in the US are not vanishingly small, they are not quite the reason for alarm that the "health food Nazis" seem to think either, at least in my opinion.
However, it is quite interesting to me that there appear to be some similarities between BSE, vCJD and Alzheimer's Disease. [19] [20]
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