SC - Re: Trenchers

[RuddR@aol.com]

Nanna Rognvaldardottir wrote:
> 
> ><< point of fact I never heard of a "Pie floater" until I read Pratchett's
> > The Last Continent - and was horrified to discover what it really was; and
> >that
> > people actually ate it!) >>

> The 'Pie Floater' is a uniquely South Australian dish. It consists of the
> following items :
> A hot meat pie (small, handheld thing)
> A bowl of split-pea soup
> A bottle of tomato ketchup (or catsup)
> To make one, you put the bowl of soup on a non-moving flat surface, place
> the pie in the soup and cover it with tomato ketchup. Then eat.
> 
> If you think that sounds bad, they are normally sold in late-night mobile
> vending stalls called "Pie Carts". These wait along well-used streets and
> sell them to drunken passers-by who are too inebriated to know better.

The vision of a drunk person standing up to eat a bowl of soup with a
pie floating in it is vivid with a sense of peril...

The impulse isn't unprecedented, though, and not even exclusive to the
inebriated. I usually attend at least one Hieland Games per year
(primarily to buy T-shirts that fit; Pennsic being my other source), and
it's kind of funny to watch mobs of Scots-Americans waiting in line to
buy various meat pie products in an effort to recapture the taste of the
Old Country. Usually they sell chemical meat pies that look and taste
like hockey pucks, putative Forfar Bridies which are usually more like a
smear of dog food and chopped potato in fake puff pastry, and sausage
rolls, bangers in the same puff pastry, about which I'll only say that
my views on commercially prepared bangers are uncomplimentary and
probably archived somewhere with other early posts to this list.

(Please understand I'm _not_ knocking the cuisine, which I love under
the right circumstances, but it's often so poorly executed that it's no
wonder people who've never actually cooked from wonderful sources like
Mrs. Beeton, and who therefore have no idea what it's supposed to be
like, make fun of the food of the U.K.)

Now, my point: it is customary, it seems, when you buy meat pies and
such at Hieland Games, to walk over to the _two-gallon_ jar, complete
with a pump-spout on top, of HP Sauce and slather your pie with this
stuff. I've seen people walking with a paper plate with one or two pies
in one hand, and a plastic bowl of the sauce in the other, presumably
for dipping. The jar is off to one side of the counter, BTW, because
people tend to engage in public assembly around it. They might want more sauce.

I don't mind the stuff, you understand, but I don't want it flowing
through my veins.

There's a lot of nineteenth-century literature, mostly French, about the
British preoccupation with bottled sauces. Most of it is ironic
commentary on the (I think) seventeenth-century French traveller's
account saying the French have one religion and hundreds of sauces,
while the English have many religions and only one sauce [melted
butter], but how the English have hundreds of sauces, too, nowadays.

Adamantius    
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
============================================================================

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".

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