I think stuffed gut sausages are still made ... the two ladies who run village shop/bar/restaurant usually close for a couple of weeks at the beginning of January, partly to have a break at this quiet time of year but also to make sausages, boudins and assorted charcuterie de la maison. These are primarily for their restaurant's use throughout the year but if you're quick when they reopen (any day now) you can usually buy some of their surplus hand-made sausages. You asked above for a decent sausage ... these ones are rather indecent, being typically amusingly misshapen, twisted and knobbly, and with skins that vary in thickeness which is what makes me think they are made from real intestine. They might look a bit odd but they taste great (and they don't split when you cook them), which is why their seasonal surplus sells out so quickly.

My mother taught me that sausages do not split or explode with a bang if you kill them first with a fork. We are going to Germany next year and I am determined to try several kinds - but which? The best frankfurters I ever had came from Switzerland - genuine smoked efforts. What   is good to try out - and what should I avoid; the pale boiled ones look insipid - are they?

I once bought a sausage from the Princess Royal: she has a sausage shop at Gatscombe Park and on one memorable day she was serving in the shop herself.



Here are some sausages - not royal ones, but similar. Good British bangers. Note bangers are called bangers because they explode.

Oddly enough I am on the point of nominating a Bridgnorth butcher for the BBC Food and Farming Awards for their bangers. I must agree that sheep's ropes are quasi-vital for a really good banger - not quite as much so as ox runners are to black pudding, but still .............

Those sausages look good but you never can tell - and I want to be told the difference.

Re the above melody. In the subcontinent I know of a shop shouting out that it sells Mash and Bangers  - they often get things a bit wrong like that. I thought the whole thing sounded suspect anyway and we always drove quickly past. In that part of town quite a lot of things often went bang

When did British sausages become tolerated, even praised, as being the culinary equivalent of a dustbin ... being made with the very cheapest ‘meat’, I use the word somewhat guardedly, and with cheap starch fillers such as breadcrumbs, biscuit, and rusk? Plus loads of added water of course, which I suspect is the principal reason why British sausages split on cooking: continental all-meat sausages don’t usually split, there's no need to pierce them and neither do you actually want to do so as then you lose much of the tasty juiciness.
 
British sausages never used to be like that. Here’s WM’s recipe from ‘The Queen’s Cloʃet Opened’ (1655):
 
To make good Sauʃages
Take the lean of a Legge of Pork, and four pound of Beef ʃuet, or rather butter, ʃhred them together very ʃmall, then ʃeaʃon it with three quarters of an ounce of Pepper, and and ounce of Cloves and Mace mix’t together, as the Pepper is, a handful of Sage when it is chopt ʃmall, and as much Salt as you think will make them taʃt well of it, mingle all theʃe with the meat, then break in ten Eggs, all but two or three of the whites, then temper it well with your hands, and fill into Hoggs gutts, which you must have ready for them, you must tye the ends of them like Puddings, and when you eat them you must boyle them on a soft fire, a hot will crack the ʃkins and the goodness boile out of them.


Ah, the great British banger ... otherwise known as the emulsified high-fat offal tube:

Did Sir Humphrey comment on the Euro sausage initiative? He would have sorted that Maurice de Bruxelles out.

I fear our European friends can sometimes be a little snooty about our British sausages: they are not all to be dismissed as culinary abominations, you know. A good pork sausage is not composed of slaughterhouse-floor sweepings, and many British bangers are still made using traditional recipes. Here is a useful guide:




The sausage butty (usually with brown HP Sauce) has nourished many a Northerner during times of  personal and/or national crisis. But I suppose the French would be appalled at such a thing. The butty must be washed down by a pot of proper, strong tea.

And what they would make of this I dare not imagine but, on a day like today, I could fair go one for my lunch. A good lorne sausage, not overcooked until it's like cardboard, on a fresh and crispy roll would get one through almost anything.



I notice the sausage poster includes fruit pudding, now that's a delicacy that deserves to be more widely known and appreciated.

Beaman's (my Bridgnorth sausage maker) do a tasty line in pork sausage with black pudding pieces in it. A

I used to have vege sausages sometimes but since I found I was gluten intolerant I've foresworn them.  Changing topic - if you are from somewhere in what USED to be South Staffs (sorry if I am mistaken and you are in fact from Worcestershire) Gilgamesh, is there any truth in the saying that in the old days [and I'm not inferring it was in your lifetime] people in Gornal used to put the pig on the wall to watch the lord mayor walk by?

So runs the local legend - although what was once a hostelry known as "The Pig on the Wall" now purveys inferior "sausage" patties etc as a McD's.

Some years ago, I was helping run the computers at an election office, and a Grande Dame of the party was canvassing in Gornal. She returned to HQ in a state of high dudgeon as she'd been addressed as "Me wench" by one of the denizens of that settlement. Took some convincing it was not an insult.

Success with a teenager  newly into this condition - and already yelling down the stairs, after a door slam, 'I'm not doing that and it's nothing to do with my hormones.' 
Reading  had been neglected of late but it seems the paper white Kindle I gave as a present has sparked a new interest because it it is a screen to stare and and fumble with, I suppose. Smart phones perhaps have their limits  if parent control is effective.

EDIT: Moved my Pontius Pilate(s) story to the bar - more appropriate than the Rave thread.

Looking at some of the earlier posts, the first time somebody called me a 'wench' (I was a child at the time) I thought he said 'winch' as in a contraption for adjusting the tension of a rope.  Several years ago I was "temping" somewhere (I forget the exact location) between Wolverhampton and Birmingham and someone said "They'm a fresh wench in the office" - I'd heard of 'fresh' being used to describe someone being a bit 'randy' in a sexual sense or of somebody being a bit whiffy as in unwashed and hoped neither meaning applied to me but of course it meant 'new girl' - shows how long ago it was if they'd think of me as a 'girl' - I am of course still female but older.

Posting here - may not interest Rest Hist buffs but I was agreeably surprised to find a free resource on the internet today.  The homework from the Sign Language class is to find a cartoon or strip cartoon and sign the message - print media not animated of course.  I managed to find some web cartoons that are copyright free and chose one (with only 4 pictures, not that I'm lazy or anything).  I suppose as it's for educational purposes I might have been able to use something that is in copyright but I'd rather play safe.

This is yesterday's rave, really. Somebody further down the road had left some vegetables on his/her wall for people to help themselves as he/she obviously had a glut.  So now I have some free runner beans and full-sized courgette. So people can do kindnesses still. The note with the veggies said the courgette could be used for making "courgette spaghetti".  Well I'm sure I'll be able to find something on YouTube or Vimeo to help me cook something.  Won't be today as Montezuma* - though I'm not in Mexico - has decided to take revenge upon me and I cancelled attending the U3A Spanish class this morning.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler%27s_diarrhea  In case anyone hasn't come across the expression "Montezuma's revenge", although of course I'm not travelling.

Looking upthread at Gilgamesh mentioning the very posh lady being phased by being addressed as "me wench" in South Staffordshire.  There's a story (I think from pre-Word War II) a denizen of the Labour Party in Stoke-on-Trent meeting the then Queen (queen consort not queen regnant; I think it MAY have been the late Queen Mary) and greeting her with "Pleased to meet yer Queen".

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Somebody further down the road had left some vegetables on his/her wall for people to help themselves as he/she obviously had a glut.  So now I have some free runner beans and full-sized courgette.

Any turnips left? I've just completed my job of carving jack-o-lanterns (turnips and pumpkins) in anticipation of nephews and nieces coming over tomorrow evening for the Hallowe'en party Mrs V throws each year. I don't know why turnips have fallen so much out of fashion because the bright yellow glow of the turnip flesh against the dark purple skin is so much more dramatic than the corresponding light orange flesh against dark orange skin of the pumpkin. Okay, granted, pumpkins are bigger.

It's also a myth that pumpkins are easier to carve than turnips. In fact I'd say that scooping out the myriad seeds and wet stringy stuff in a pumpkin is actually quite a bind. The firm flesh of a turnip by contrast is much more strait-forward to work with. I use a large screwdriver and a chisel and it takes about the same time as doing a pumpkin and is a lot less messy.

Anyway - today's rave goes to this Manx lady who's flying the flag for turnip jack-o-lanterns:

Carve turnip jack-o-lanterns

She uses an electric drill with spade tip attached. She seems to have been using a spoon hitherto. A spoon? Really? It must have taken her for absolute ever. No wonder she's now resorted to power tools.

I'd imagine these were done with something more subtle than an electric drill with a spade tip ...

The Guardian - The art of pumpkin carving

The free goodies of vegetables on the wall have dried up now.  The turnip/pumpkin (or whatever type of squash was used) lanterns listed above look impressive.  Can the innards of turnip be used to make turnip pie the same as pumpkins can be made into a pie?  I never fancied the taste of turnip all that much.

Turnip is a useful ingredient in a macedoine of vegetables or diced in veggie soup.

The Spanish teacher was handing out beetroots from his and his wife's allotment today. I'm not keen on beetroot  but it's a small one and a little in some soup or similar won't hurt.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

The Spanish teacher was handing out beetroots from his and his wife's allotment today. I'm not keen on beetroot  but it's a small one and a little in some soup or similar won't hurt.

Lady,

was it with you or with MM? Or was it Vizzer? We had here lately a discussion about turnips and a lot of other vegetables of the smae type. I did some research as we have in Dutch quite other terms for all that stuff and I had to vizulaize it all to see about what you were speaking. radish I know as we say also "radijs", carrot I know also as in our dialect we say also carrote as in French, but red beet I had to visualize, as we are so used to in West Flanders to "beten" (Dutch "bieten") and that "bete" is something like that:
In all the images of the "fodder beet" I found only this which ressembled a bit to what I knew from the Fifties:


And I found perhaps the reason now why I didn't recognize "my" beets of the Fifties and that in the Dutch wiki:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voederbiet

Oude, multigerme rassen waaronder lange, paalvormige bieten, die met de hand gerooid moesten worden en
Moderne, monogerme rassen met ovale bieten, die met een suikerbietenrooier gerooid kunnen worden.
Old multigerm races, among which long, stick form beets, which had to be lifted by hand modern monogerm races with oval beets, which can be lifted with a "bieten rooier" ( a machine lifter up?)
And of course those long stick form beets are those of my childhood and from our spray painters in the paint department, there were in the Fifties a lot , who did the "beet season" in the North of France (of course hand lifted)...
They changed even the race of my childhood's beet to fit to the machine...sigh...

But all this to come to my reply on Vizzer's red beet lights...as those tall stick form beets were present in big quantities everywhere they were used hollowed with a knive with a "bougie" (candle) in it, even on other periods than Halloween (that is only a recent American hype) to make dumb people afraid in the dark...now it is the pumpkin and this American hype costs a lot of money for the parents...but as there is more money available then in the Fifties ....

PS: Lady how is it with the roof now and that benevolent who wanted to do it for a "prix d'ami" (a friend's price?)...

Kind regards from Paul.

Beetroots ... Paul, the English name isn't very helpful as it really just means root-root. Beetroot is betterave in French and I think it is rode biet in Dutch, ie red beet, as unlike those beets in your picture, the flesh is very dark red/purple and they're not usually used as animal fodder but harvested small/young and boiled/baked, then peeled and sliced or diced (or often grated/rapé in France), and eaten cold in a salad ... but I'm sure you know all that now that I've said it is betterave:

    

Your Flemish beets grown for winter animal feed would I think be called bette fourragère in French (from fourrage meaning fodder or animal feed), or mangelwurzel in English ... isn't wurzel just the German for root? And so I suspect the English name is corruption of French-German; mange le wurzel, ie eating root?

I know that the Russian for parsnip is pasternak, Пастернак, and it always makes me smile to think that 'Doctor Zhivago' was written by a man whose name was really no more exotic than the English equivalent of Bob Parsnip.

Actually, Beta vulgaris is nearly as prolific as Brassica oloracea in its varieties - mangold, wurzel, spinach beet, chard, beetroot, sugar beet and fodder beet are all varieties of the one plant. The original wild variety, sea beet, grows wild in coastal areas of Europe and the Middle East.

I haven't done anything with the beetroot (betterave) yet.  When I was at school I remember reading that wild cabbage still grows (near the sea I think) and that wild garlic still grows in some places.  I have never attempted to forage them because as I said about fungi, I would probably pick a poisonous plant.  I believe that (with sweeteners) rose hips (and the cultivated rose in my garden has been overtaken by the eglantine on to which it was grafted) can be made into something for coughs though whether it actually cures or just treats the symptoms I can't hazard a guess.

Paul, somebody is coming on Tuesday 6th to do the roof (so of course I'm hoping for a dry day).  This week has been the half-term holiday for the local schools so the person has been doing parent duty.

Lots of wild garlic along the line when I'm on the Welshpool railway. Otherwise known as "ramsons". see https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/plants-and-fungi/woodland-wildflowers/ramsons/

btw - Wild cabbage is poisonous. All brassica oloracea is.

Green George wrote:

Lots of wild garlic along the line when I'm on the Welshpool railway. Otherwise known as "ramsons". see https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/plants-and-fungi/woodland-wildflowers/ramsons/

btw - Wild cabbage is poisonous. All brassica oloracea is.

I'll bear that in mind G, is the wild garlic edible?  Not that I'm going to try it.

Yes, edible and even esculent - but the after effects are - shall we say "aromatic"?

Ho ho!  Since I had the coeliac disease diagnosed I have to take a digestion tablet daily.  I suppose it depends which end of the alimentary canal the problems are caused.  At the moment I am a "femme seule" and not planning to kiss anyone, not with passion anyway.

Meles meles wrote:

Beetroots ... Paul, the English name isn't very helpful as it really just means root-root. Beetroot is betterave in French and I think it is rode biet in Dutch, ie red beet, as unlike those beets in your picture, the flesh is very dark red/purple and they're not usually used as animal fodder but harvested small/young and boiled/baked, then peeled and sliced or diced (or often grated/rapé in France), and eaten cold in a salad ... but I'm sure you know all that now that I've said it is betterave:

    

Your Flemish beets grown for winter animal feed would I think be called bette fourragère in French (from fourrage meaning fodder or animal feed), or mangelwurzel in English ... isn't wurzel just the German for root? And so I suspect the English name is corruption of French-German; mange le wurzel, ie eating root?

I know that the Russian for parsnip is pasternak, Пастернак, and it always makes me smile to think that 'Doctor Zhivago' was written by a man whose name was really no more exotic than the English equivalent of Bob Parsnip.

Yes Meles meles, of course you are completely right about that "rode biet". As nowadays the veggy press makes you nearly mad, especially the wife...red beet is healthy she said and we bought a liter of red beet juice...not that expensive I have to say, unlike a lot of that stuff from the "health" shops and department branch stores? (warenhuisketens), which make fortunes with that new belief.
Although I am not against some red beet cubusses among the food as on your photo, this particular liter red beet juice was not to drink and we have to put it in the garbage, something we normally never do with rest of foods...eat them with the next meal...you know the generation from the war and immediate after the war...

"or mangelwurzel in English ... isn't wurzel just the German for root? And so I suspect the English name is corruption of French-German; mange le wurzel, ie eating root?"

You English ones you have some "words"! "mangelwurzel" for God's sake...
I first thought for "mangel" the normal connotation: lack, shortage
But no it is from "mangold" and they don't know from where the word comes:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_German_Language/Mangold
And "wurzel" is indeed "root" as the Dutch "wortel" and it is both used also for "carrot" (carotte)...
And we have also in our dialect: carottier, karotetrekker...komediant, plantrekker (tirer son plan)...
http://www.vlaamswoordenboek.be/definities/term/karotentrekker

Kind regards from Paul.

No - a Wurzel is a purveyor of "Scrumpy and Western" music.
Scrumpy - rough cider popular in the South West counties of the UK, and in the country known as Kernow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb63PdPweDc

Green George wrote:

No - a Wurzel is a purveyor of "Scrumpy and Western" music.
Scrumpy - rough cider popular in the South West counties of the UK, and in the country known as Kernow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb63PdPweDc

Gil,

I will have to decode this one from the enigmatic Gil during the year...go to bed in the new year of 2019...

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

PS: And a happy new year to the lady and the monsters too....

Paul, Gil or George was having a joke. The group singing the song are called Adge Cutler and the Wurzels.  (Adge Cutler being the lead singer).  They were a west country (well they may still be) a comedy folk group.  Kernow is a Celtic name for Cornwall.  I think I will just try and watch a bit of Sky News Live (my last visit to YouTube for today) and then rest myself.

Edit:  There was (well still is) a character in children's fiction called Worzel Gummidge who is a talking and moving scarecrow.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worzel_Gummidge  There was a children's TV show some decades ago with John Pertwee in the title role.

Lightning engulfs a volcanic eruption in Chile:



photo Francisco Negroni

Splendid photograph, Tri.
Regards from Paul.

At last - a British politician I admire: Rory Stewart. I think he has the makings of a future Prime Minister. His Hedgehog Speech to the House of Commons is excellent. 

I had no idea that hedgehogs were last mentioned in the Chamber in 1566 (listen to link below) - also that Aristotle was fond of the little creatures.

Not often you hear a speech in the House of Commons these days which begins with a classical allusion about foxes and hedgehogs (" Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum,"). The speech quotes  from Shakespeare, from Thomas Hardy and  from Aristotle; and is so good the Deputy Speaker hails it as "one of the best ever" heard in the Commons chamber. Not to every one's taste, maybe, but I must confess I loved it. 

I'm serious: I think this interesting, intelligent and unassuming man is one to watch in future years.


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/03/rory-stewart-interview

I have been asked to explain why on earth hedgehogs were being discussed in the House of Commons: I'm sorry, I should have made that clear. Rory Stewart was responding to a suggestion made by MP Oliver Colville (in 2015) that the hedgehog should replace the lion as our national symbol. I heard Stewart talking on  the BBC yesterday and I was struck by how sane, unassuming and reasonable he seemed, so I googled him and discovered his YouTube appearance. A bright lad. (Mind you, sanity, humility, reason and intelligence will probably get him nowhere in British politics today.)


British Hedgehog or British Lion?

Bump again.

Surprised no one picked me up on the "multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum" allusion. It is actually from the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

I found this in the Wall Street Journal of all things:

In a famous essay, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers into two categories, hedgehogs and foxes. The distinction comes from a saying of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Hedgehogs have a single grand idea that they apply to everything, while foxes come up with a new idea for every situation. Berlin argued that Plato and Dostoyevsky were hedgehogs, for instance, while Aristotle and Shakespeare were foxes.

I think that is jolly interesting, but I'm sure no one else does. But why did Berlin consider Plato to be a Spiny Norman, whereas Aristotle was not? Answers on a postcard, please, as in the Good Old Days.

I found your hedgehog posts interesting. When reading your first one featuring Rory Stewart's impassioned plea for hedgehogs, rather strangely perhaps the thing that first came to my mind was the hedgehog, or urchin as he is called, in T H Whites's 'The Book of Merlyn' (the concluding part of his retelling of the Arthurian Legend, 'The Once and Future King'). 

On the eve of his last battle - in which we already know King Arthur, now old, tired and having been betrayed by all around him, will be defeated and so the forces of darkness will prevail - all the animals gather again to discuss the fate and future of Mankind, or Homo ferox as they have tended to refer to us. The prognosis is not good and Arthur, understandably, despairs for his fellow man. While all the animals sympathise with him and humankind, none can venture any convincing argument in Man's defence, and sadly they accept that humans are simply destined to do terrible things to the detriment of all, animals and humans equally. It is only the scruffly little hedgehog, lowest and humblest of the animals present, who comes forward, slips his dirty paw into Arthur's hand, and speaks up for Mankind ... not defending Man but simply saying that, as there is good and bad in all, who can judge ... and just "to let 'im be".

Interestimg stuff - yet all my mind can fix on is the brilliant little Mrs Tiddywinkle cameo by the great Frederick Ashton in the title credits of the Beatrix Potter ballet film.
Possibly as a national symbol not a bad idea. If the world goes vegan, lions will fade away on feeds pf chickpeas and spinach. hedgehogs eat slugs  and  will  preserve  endless meadow replacing fields of veg.

P ... had you noticed, and with due regard to one of your other threads, ... that in Temp's youtube posting of Rory Stewart's Parliamentary defence of hedgehogs, at 9:25mins he in invokes "18th century ... English naturalists and eccentics"? By way of example he then mentions the Rev. Gilbert White.

However I don't think anyone could call Gilbert White eccentic, rather he was thoroughly methodical, practical and scientific in his approach to recording and studying the natural history of his parish, Selbourne in Hampshire. Indeed he was so good that, although some of his ideas and speculations have subsequently been dismissed, his meticulous day-to-day records and observations (spanning decades from over two hundred years ago) are still of incredible value today, largely because they were so well recorded and that the measurements (eg temperatures or atmospheric pressures) are traceable back to, and can be directly compared to, todays national standards. Frankly for Rory Stewart to claim that Gilbert White was one of a long line of lovable English eccentrics is incredibly insulting, principally to White himself. He wasn't eccentric; he was an intelligent, passionate, and bloody good, scientist. 

(In his speech Rory Stewart also seems to have forgotten that his quoted 1566 legislation regarding a bounty on hedgehogs did not apply to the "whole united Kingdom" as he claims, but at most just to Elizabeth I's England ... but I'll forgive him that bit of exaggeration, because of his entertaining and erudite address).

Check out these bods:

Giant Technicolour Squirrels

Circumhorizontal Arc or "Rainbow Bridge"

Ice crystals in clouds lit when the Sun is at or higher than 58 degrees:

Circumhorizontal Arc

Meles meles wrote:

Frankly for Rory Stewart to claim that Gilbert White was one of a long line of lovable English eccentrics is incredibly insulting, principally to White himself. He wasn't eccentric; he was an intelligent, passionate, and bloody good, scientist.

Yes - I remember in 1989 some of the patronising comments made by the UK media regarding the Green Party. Following the European elections on 15th June that year (30 years ago today) the Greens received over 2.25 million votes which amounted to 14% of the vote but didn't get any seats because the UK was still using the Single Largest Wins voting system in that election. At that time one of the questions under debate was the issue of unnecessary plastic packaging in retail, the disposal of which was already causing problems even back then in the 1980s. The UK mass media, however, rather than highlight the backwardness of the electoral system or discuss practical solutions regarding waste management etc instead chose to depict Green politicians and their supporters as just so many 'vegetables'.

30 years later Waitrose has become the first major supermarket chain in the UK to trial plastic-packaging-free shopping:

Waitrose Unpacked

Better late than never.

Yes, here in NZ we had the Values Party in the 1970s which was presumably the forerunner to the Greens (and which I can say I voted for once at least). It talked about global warming (now climate change) back then and what we should do about it. Among other things. 

I missed earlier that lovely photo Triceratops posted of the most unusual rainbow. I have never seen one of those. I did one day see a white rainbow, which I looked up and saw was a natural phenomenon. I think it was white, but am having doubts now, but it was a very unusual one anyway.

There's this thread too. Perhaps trike will find a decent photo or two to lift the tedium. I made a halfway decent apple pie today but that is really an unworthy rave to inform the world about.

Noon at Belgrano Base, 77 degrees 52 minutes South, on the 1st August 2020. The sun is 5 degrees below the horizon. View looking North from Bertrab nunatak: Photo by Jose Damian Ojeda.