SC - Adamatius in Hot water

[Phil & Susan Troy]

PhlipinA at aol.com wrote:

> Trouble is, the poor
> benighted man LIKES where he's living. 

> Phlip

Well, living where I live is not without shortcomings, but there _are_ certain advantages...

I spent part of this evening in a supermarket with an enormous selection of
fresh fish, the usual gamut of ordinary butcher's meats, plus a section for
things like goose and rabbit, black-skinned, unbled chickens, plus ordinary
chickens but for the fact that they are sold with the heads and feet on,
suckling pigs (cokyntrice???)  cooked pork and duck blood, sold in blocks like
bean curd, real stockfish, cock's combs, an assortment of different animals'
testicles, for those into that sort of thing, and an unidentifiable (to me, at
least) package among the prewrapped meats, labeled "cow pennis". Looked like
some sort of tendon to me, until I saw it in cross-section. I'm quite an
adventurous eater, and while I'm not prepared to say I would never eat a
bull's pizzle, I can honestly say it's not at the top of my list of things to
try. Lord Ras, on the other hand, would have been in heaven ;  )

For those into herbal medicines, several (maybe a dozen) different grades of
ginseng, as well as various other medicinal dry goods like reindeer tendon,
sea horses, various dried abalone and scallops. All this within a ten-minute
walk of my house.

Actually, I had another interesting culinary experience this evening, in a
restaurant around the corner from this store. The chef/owner knows us fairly
well, and when he gets tired of selling a bazillion orders of a half a fried
chicken and fried rice (I'm exaggerating, he doesn't actually sell this; maybe
a bazillion orders of beef with American broccoli florets would be more like
it) he's always glad to see us. Tonight he came out with a conspiratorial
glance at us (the last time he did this was to tell us he had some oysters the
size of catchers' mitts) and told us he had a very special fish for us. He
didn't know the English name for it, but said it was a very special freshwater
game fish that you can't buy in any fish market. We told him this sounded like
a good idea, and he brought one up, still alive, from the basement. I still
have no idea where he got the durned thing from, but apparently he had brought
some in from somewhere for a couple of big dinner parties he was cooking for,
and he had an extra one. I caught a very brief glimpse of it as it passed us,
and it was sort of silver/grey -sided, with a sort of greenish-bronze patch on
its back around its dorsal fin. The whole thing was shaped vaguely like a
football, or possibly a football player. Then it was whisked away from us to
the kitchen before I could make a positive ID.

When I saw it again it was steamed with ginger and scallions, wine and soy
sauce, and topped with a trickle of boiling peanut oil. As it happens, when I
finally got a good look at the thing (before various family members began
ripping it to shreds with chopsticks) I realized, with some shock, that it was
a small-mouth bass. 

It was a bit of a shock, first because the man was right, I've never seen or
heard of small-mouths being sold in any market, nor largemouths either, since
they're much easier to catch and less fun to fight. Second, because I just
returned recently from spending a week in the Adirondacks trying to catch
small-mouths, with pretty limited success. Abso-fraggin'-lutely the last fish
I expected to see in a local restaurant. We all were vaguely suspicious that
some game laws had been broken, so we discussed it and decided to destroy all
the evidence immediately...we all had some, to be sure we were all equally
implicated in the crime, if any, so nobody would squeal to the cops.

Now please understand I'm not saying that other locations aren't good places
to live, but yes, I do rather like where I live, in spite of everything.

Adamantius
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================