[Sca-cooks] Crocodile was Magpies
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Tue Mar 4 21:26:52 PST 2008
On Mar 4, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Kimberly Vallance wrote:
> Well I like all tomatoes but fresh ones... dont like the gooey stuff
You mean the seeds and the gooey stuff around them? You can get rid of
that, you know, and squeezing them out before chopping them is
generally part of a classic tomato concasse garni (which is just an
extra-careful dice cut used for garnishing, but because it's for
garnishing, you don't want excess... fluids... spoiling the look of
your food.
> ...ewww
> ewww ewww though I love snails and sushi and stuff... does that
> redeem me?
It doesn't hurt, certainly. I'm reminded of the Scots farmer in "The
39 Steps", asking the main character, "Kin ye taek th' herrin'?"
> But Khli is fermented meat that is done in an odd fashion... saw it
> on the
> travel channel Bizzar food.s
That would be this, huh?
http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Bizarre_Foods/ci.Morocco.show?vgnextfmt=show
I confess I'm of two minds about this sort of thing. It's good that
they're exposing people to interesting foods, but bad that they're
setting themselves up as authorities on what is and what isn't
"bizarre", and it's in their interest, in the entertainment field, to
play up the bizarreness of foods that really aren't always very odd at
all. Of course, you can always toss in the gratuitous word "fermented"
if all else fails. [I'm in the SCA. I've done a Romanized persona for
years, and I've had an abiding interest in Roman food. I've made
garum. It's not bad, and I really, really despise hearing it described
as fermented or, better yet, rotten. It's really not accurate, and
it's generally used, I believe, solely to foster an attitude of
xenophobia and superiority. See what those silly, freakish people eat/
ate!
Give me anything in Apicius over a lime Jello mold with little
marshmallows and canned fruit, and that includes the enzymatically
degraded/pickled mackerel juice.
So, I Googled khli, and got the Travel Channel Bizarre Foods link, and
several other hits, all of which agreed that khli is marinated, spiced
beef, dried and then preserved in fat to exclude air. Pretty much the
same as they do with duck, goose, and pork in southwestern France when
they make confit d'oie, or du canard, or rillons, any one of which is
essential for a good cassoulet! Nobody but the Travel Channel site
said it was fermented. I'm guessing this stuff is not too dissimilar
to any of several European cured, semi-dried meat products such as
bresaola, bundnerfleisch, and prosciutto (except that last one isn't
beef).
Those lime Jello molds are much more scary than that! And so is
balut... ;-)
Adamantius
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