[Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks Digest, Vol 8, Issue 140

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Jessica Tiffin:
>At 07:58 AM 1/27/04 -0600, Adamantius wrote:
>>Clearly, though, this suggests that you don't see the dish as a
>>secondary by-product of something else. (This is a common, if
>>heretical, interpretation ;-) ) Perhaps, if you did, the vegetables
>>would make more sense.
>yes, true; but it's interesting that it wouldn't occur to me to make 
>food in such excess - particularly large chunks o' meat - that I'd 
>have enough left to make proper rechauffee cottage pie.  I tend to 
>overcater, but not _that_ badly.  Which suggests that contemporary 
>cooking values tend less to certain kinds of excess than those of 
>the 19th or early 20th century.  Or more towards a fetish of 
>freshness?

To put it simply, I think fewer people can carve a roast with bones, 
or butcher even a primary cut of meat, than used to be the case. 
While that is a disadvantage, it also means that people don't have to 
cook a whole joint one day and figure out what to do with the rest of 
it. Another consideration that may or may not be a factor: What's the 
average weight on a leg of lamb in your neck of the woods? I seem to 
see small legs of frozen New Zealand lamb (for practical purposes, 
mutton is not sold in the US, although our lamb is often closer to 
mutton than in some other countries), weighing in at under 4 lbs, 
which is probably about 2 or 2.5 pounds boneless meat. American legs 
of lamb can weigh nearly twice that, and often come from the 
supermarket butcher (who is usually a sort of culinary Luddite) with 
the entire hip/sirloin bone intact, making for some difficult carving 
and often, waste. A real butcher will remove everything but the 
femur, or perhaps everything but the femur and the shank bone, making 
everything a lot easier.

So, I'd say that freshness issue and the daunting bulk of a whole leg 
of lamb (virtually everything else becomes chops or stew meat, 
normally, except in the various ethnic butcher shops) are important 
considerations in why many Americans think of shepherd's pie as a 
ground beef/mince dish. Add to that the fact that Americans 
traditionally spend less time over their cookery (and everything 
else, and this is not a new phenomenon: one of the big adjustments 
for new immigrants in the 19th century was not only the general pace 
of life, but of the stupendous amount of labor that was expected of 
workers for their, admittedly, usually higher wages). But before we 
get too deeply into social issues, my point is that a lot of 
Americans don't seem to like to plan out what they'll be eating over 
the next few days, which often pretty well precludes anything that'll 
take more than an hour or so to prepare and cook.

>   the drift towards ground fresh meat instead of chopped cook meat 
>seems an inevitable by-product of our different notions of health 
>and desirable qualities in cooking.

Yes. That, and the simple fact that beef is generally preferred by 
most Americans, and a high proportion of that total is ground beef. 
It is, perhaps to our national shame, The Staff of Life.

>
>>Yeah, weird. But ostrich is not... I calculate some two extra grams
>>of fiber per serving, plus the 870 extra grams of fat per serving
>>from the cream cheese; I'd say that evens out, no? ;-)
>hell, who's counting?  cottage pie is comfort food, as far as I'm 
>concerned.  One _needs_ the extra calories when depressed.  Although 
>not in this weather ;>.

Yes, we _are_ talking about different weather... ;-)

Adamantius (looking out window, thinking baseball spring training 
starts in three weeks, shaking head)