Archives for the 'england' tag
Of Pasties and Crickets
Staff with the British NGO National Trust have tracked down an elusive and rare beach cricket thought lost after a storm with the help Cornish pasties and cat food.
The cricket was rediscovered in a search by Adrian Colston, National Trust property manager for Dartmoor.
He said: ‘After walking along the shingle beach and drawing a blank I changed my tactics in the hunt for this elusive cricket.
‘I set five pitfall traps at various points on the beach at Branscombe using cat biscuits, pieces of apple and a bit of my Cornish pasty as bait.
It turns out–who knew?–that crickets really dig stuff like “stale bread, poultry mash, cornmeal, powdered dog or cat food, tropical fish flakes, pond fish pellets, [and] rabbit chow.” Mmm.
Pasties, for those unfamiliar with them as a food (rather than as an unwelcome adornment), are akin to empanadas, saltenas, and other transportable baked meat pies (often) popular in mining cultures. And, having spent many summer vacations eating pasties in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where many immigrant Cornish miners settled (that includes my uncle’s ancestors), I thoroughly endorse the tastiness of pasties.
Pasties aren’t just for crickets–they go well with cricket (the sport), too.
Bonus: Pasties are so fantastic that they recently saved a man’s arm in Australia.
Jamie Oliver Tells Countrymen What to Put in Their Mouths, Puts Foot in Own
Jamie Oliver, a frequent Crispy target for his nannying ways, is at it again. This time the paunchy mushmouth has seen fit to take on his fellow Brits, calling them drunken laggards who don’t know a good meal from a bad one because, well, they’re drunken laggards, reports the Telegraph:
This time the cook, who made his name as The Naked Chef in the late 90s, has turned his fire on everything from the paucity of British cooking to binge drinking.
In an interview in the latest edition of Paris Match magazine published in French, Oliver contrasts the country with France, where old fashioned cu[s]toms are still observed.
Oliver even claims that he had found a better range of food in African slums than in his home country, where people were more interested in getting “drunk in pubs” than eating well.
Oliver is looking to combat these problems (the ones in England, not Africa) by–amongst other things–launching an effort “to ban pies from football grounds,” an effort that’s earned the ire of punters everywhere. And he’s faring no better in commentators’ eyes, either. In fact, it seems that only the nefariously opinionated celebrity watcher Perez Hilton is unable to formulate an opinion about Oliver’s latest shenanigans.
Crispy on Jamie here. Jamie cracking ill-received Holocaust jokes here. Commentators tired of “being lectured at by a celebrity chef on yet another crusade” here. More Oliver acting foolish here. Still more bad press here.
Brit Gov’t Drinks Measures Cause Brew-Ha-Ha
It’s alright to stop off at your local for a pint, but not for a half-litre, even though they’re pretty much the same thing. That according to English law. And that regulatory idiocy might cost restaurant owner Nic Davison a fine of £2,000.
Mr Davison, an accountant, and his partner Dr Krystyna Ciuraj, a GP, opened their Polish restaurant in Doncaster in May.
Kuchnia Polska instantly became a hit with locals as well as the Polish community.
But last week trading standards officers from Doncaster council served an infringement notice on the business - because it was serving drinks in the wrong size of glass.
This was because the Polish brewer providing Zywiec beer also supplied the glasses, which come in ’small’ and ‘large’ - 0.3 and 0.5 litre sizes.
But under 1988 Weights and Measures legislation, draught beer and cider may only be sold in pints. Serving them in litres, or fractions of litres, is illegal - even through half a litre is almost the same as one pint.
Officers told the couple they had 28 days to change all of their glassware, or face prosecution. The notice came despite there being no complaints from customers.
Mr Davison said: ‘This is nonsensical.
[...]
‘Local people love Polish beer - it’s very good.
‘It just shows the law is stupid.
‘I love Poland and I speak Polish, but the European Community is corrupt as hell and a waste of time.’
Last year Brussels said it would give up its fight to make Britain drop imperial measurements, meaning the Government did not have to bring in laws making it illegal for traders to use pounds and ounces.
But the law on pints remains.
Mr Davison enlisted the help of the Metric Martyrs, which was set up to support Sunderland market trader Steve Thoburn who was convicted in 2001 for selling bananas by the pound.
Spokesman Neil Herron said he was backing the bid to save the litre in this case because it shows that the law is ridiculous.
‘Yet again we have officials who have failed to exercise any common sense,’ he said.
Restaurant website here. More on the Polish beer controversy from the Daily Mail. Learn about the whole English measurement brew-ha-ha from the Metric Martyrs’ Movement. Crispy on EU regulatory food nightmares here.
This Week in Bacon
Westerners become accustomed at an early age to the idea that Eastern cultures engage in a bunch of wacky practices. China is a particularly strong example of the type–whether its people getting their ears cleaned with a metal rod in a public park or eating countless and incomparably bizarre foods. We grow so used to the idea that China = Strange that it is probably easy to forget that a lot of the crap we Westerners do is equally strange.
Take the Dunmow Flitch Trials, which pit married couples against one another in a storytelling contest, with the winners getting a “flitch”–a whole side of bacon.
What the hell’s up with that? Let’s let the incredulous Chinese news agency Xinhua explain:
A bizarre ritual dating back to the 12th century was staged on Saturday in Essex of Britain.
The “Dunmow Flitch Trials,” held every four years, requires each couple, who should be married for at least a year and a day to tell the story of their marriage, from how they met to the proposal and how their families reacted.
The winner can win half a pig by trying to prove to a mock-court that they have the happiest marriage.
Several couples won this year, including (and I had no idea what this meant until I looked it up) “Des Raynor and his agony aunt wife Claire.”
More here from the trials’ official website.
Jamie Oliver’s Obesity Fearmongering Reaches New Lows
Just in time for Christmas, Atari is set to launch a Jamie Oliver cooking game. It’ll celebrate Oliver, “a phenomenon in the world of food… [who is] one of the world’s best-loved television personalities and one of Britain’s most famous exports.”
But that’s not all Oliver is. He’s also a tremendously wealthy prattling twit whose “woefully” ineffective yet mushrooming anti-obesity hysterics I’ve gone on about from time to time.
But even I was unprepared for his latest export–the docudrama Eat to Save Your Life–which is debuting this week in foodielicious Australia:
It is also tough-love Jamie-style: he calls all the ladies “darlin” - and then makes a particularly rotund one submit to a bath in which she is doused in slithery liquid to represent all the excess fat she’s consuming. The piece de resistance, however, is expert Gunther von Hagens: at Jamie’s request the good doctor cuts up the innards of a 28-stone corpse in front of all of us. It’s very, very tough love - and very watchable.
Jamie, darlin’. I met you a few years back, and I have to say you seemed a pleasant and charismatic enough chap. But, dude, the only autopsy I want a chef taking part in is the slicing and dicing of a cow, pig, chicken, or other non-human carcass for purposes of making me dinner.
If you really want to do something about obesity–and this advice is as free, moneywise, as the change people need to make to lose weight–cut the showboating, stop trying to scare everyone to death, stay away from quacks like von Hagens, stop grossing people out, and remind your fellow countrymen how to go for a walk.
Oasis Frontman Slags Gordon Ramsay’s Cooking–On Ramsay’s Show
Liam Gallagher, the Oasis frontman, appeared on a recent episode of The F Word, one of Gordon Ramsay’s ubiquitous (and usually very good) British TV shows.
Ramsay, as you know, can curse with the best of them. And Liam, frankly, is the best of them–a randy Mancunian who’s about as salt of the fookin’ earth as they come.
The basic premise of The F Word, for those not blessed with BBC America, is that it has too many premises. You have Ramsay challenging a few everyday Joe guest cooks (i.e., firemen) to make dinners for Ramsay diners; a celebrity cook whose engages in (usually) a dessert challenge against Ramsay (who always loses); a celebrity diner, who keeps things lively; and a guest expert (usually the bawdy Janet Street Porter) who teaches viewers about some Ramsay-fetish food issue like sustainable fish or home pig farming.
It’s totally disjointed, hectic, and, while not as good as the often-awesome Kitchen Nightmares by half, it’s certainly better than his abominable old show Beyond Boiling Point.
Anyways, back to Liam, who played the part of celebrity diner while his wife–All Saints “singer” Nicole Appleton–engaged in a cookoff against Ramsay.
What did Liam think about his chow? He didn’t think much of Ramsay’s dishes, and wasn’t afraid to say so. From NME:
“Me missus is a better effing cook than you!”
Gallagher then later told Ramsay: “Your cooking is bobbins.”
According to the Daily Star the word “bobbins” is slang for lousy.
Appleton took on Ramsay with a starter of pasta and clams, a main course of spiced pork chops and sweet potatoes and a desert of apple tart.
After tucking into his wife’s meal Gallagher told Ramsay: “Me missus does a better sweet potato than you do.”
The F Word site here. Various show clips here. “Celebrity food thoughts” from Girls Aloud lasses here.
Thanks to my friend Dude for the tip.
UK Grocer Tells Shoppers to Leave Kids in Car if Buying Booze
England has to be about the most horrid place to live these days.
Tesco is refusing to sell alcohol to parents shopping with their children under rules designed to tackle underage drinking.
The supermarket has told cashiers not to supply alcohol if they suspect an adult is buying the drink for an underage youth.
Staff have been told to “err on the side of caution” when interpreting the policy, leading to cases of parents out shopping with their children being told to put alcohol back on the shelves.
Tesco says it believes parents will support the policy and it would rather apologise where it has misjudged the situation than sell to underage drinkers.
[...]
A Tesco spokesman said: “I can understand the frustrations of the customer but I think that any reasonable parent would understand the problem and support our policy.”
I’m guessing Tesco’s a bit mistaken on this one. As in people are just going to buy their booze–and groceries–elsewhere. More here from the Telegraph.
[Via Slashfood.]
UK BK Flirts with £85 Foie Burger
Best done in the voice of that movie voiceover guy…
In a land ruled by a queen… an upstart king tries to lure customers with a golden goose… against the wishes of a ninny prince… and PETA… and some other, lesser-known group of anti-humans…
This summer, it’s Burger King: Home of the Foie-pper Gras-pper .
Coming soon to a theater theatre near you.
Hey Brit Kids, Watch This and Click Here
A British law against showing ads for so-called “junk food” to kids on the telly is writhing in defeat, apparently, due to something called Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, a popular TV show in which ads play a central role. The problem, as the whining nannies see it, is that, though it’s an adult show, kids like Ant and Dec, too, and so the show should be relegated to showing only ads for celery, watercress, or barley.
A ban was introduced in January on adverts for foods high in salt, sugar or fat during programmes whose viewers were mainly under the age of 16. It did not, however, affect the programmes with an audience mainly made up of adults, even though many more children watch them.
Among the programmes affected was the children’s cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants, which attracts about 170,000 child viewers. But Saturday Night Takeaway, a family show watched by more than a million children, was not.
New research has concluded the number of times children watch junk-food adverts during these family programmes has risen in the past two years by 26 per cent. The figures come from Dr Will Cavendish, director of health and wellbeing at the Department of Health, who described the trend as “worrying” at a time when almost a third of 11-year-olds are classified as overweight or obese.
In a report to the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum, Dr Cavendish said ministers could take tougher action. “We know large numbers of children are still seeing TV ads for high fat, sugar and salt food and drink, though in programmes not specifically aimed at children,” he wrote.
The figures will fuel calls for a total ban on junk food ads before the 9pm watershed. A private member’s Bill to that effect, introduced by the Labour MP Nigel Griffiths, will receive its second reading this month. It aims also to create “significant restrictions” on marketing on the internet.
Restrict this. And this, this, this, and this. More here.
English Nanny State Laws Set to Silence Pub Banter
Andy Capp is rolling in his grave, as new English anti-discrimination laws set to take effect on Sunday are keen on taking the banter out of the pub. The Morning Advertiser explains:
New discrimination laws to make employers liable for customers behaviour may make banter with the barmaid a thing of the past.
Landlords who allow sexist jokes or even words like “darling” or “love” at the bar could be taken before tribunal and handed unlimited fines.
Operators will need to show they have tried to combat sexual harassment of workers by customers if they are to guard against the risk of compensation claims.
Pubs have been advised to put up warning notices telling punters that staff harassment will not be tolerated.
Now, I’m all for bartenders feeling comfortable behind the bar. And that includes not taking any crap from the clientele. But I’ve never known a pushover bartender–male or female. They’re a hearty bunch, able to dish it even better than they take it.
But all that banter will be in the past, laments Tony Payne of the Federation of Licensed Victuallers Association. “[T]here has been rapport in the past,” he says, “you just can’t have it anymore.”
Rapport? Dead? In pubs? In England? Bloody sad, innit?
I have one question for Women and Equalities Minister Harriet Harman, the arse behind the rules. Harriet, love, can I get you a clue?
A Prince Unfit for a Meal
With his son Harry serving in the war in Afghanistan, Prince Charles is no doubt preoccupied… with other stuff like foie gras.
Andrew Farquharson, the Deputy Master of the Household at Clarence House, said his chefs were ordered not to buy or serve the food.
“The Prince of Wales has a policy that his chefs should not buy foie gras,” he said.
“His Royal Highness was not aware that the House of Cheese sells foie gras and this will be addressed when their warrant is reviewed.”
Justin Kerswell, of Vegetarians International Voice for Animals, which has campaigned against foie gras, said the move was overdue but welcome.
“We are very pleased but foie gras should have been banned a long time ago,” he said. “There is a groundswell of opinion against the food.
“Foie gras is seen as very posh and the heir to the throne is probably the poshest person in Britain so for him to ban it is very good news.”
More here. Proving he wants to ban not just “posh” foods, Prince Charles last year called for Abu Dhabi to ban McDonald’s, for which he drew round criticism.
In other foie news, Henry Hong, writing in the Baltimore City Paper, has a pretty good piece on the battle over foie in Charm City. Crispy on efforts to keep foie gras legal in Baltimore here.
This Week in Bacon
Stand by your ham! That’s the refrain coming from chefs and pig farmers in Britain, where local bacon and pork products are evidently less frequently consumed. Gordon Ramsay (who raised pigs for slaughter on his great BBC show, The F Word) is on board, as is his sometime F Word collaboratrix extraordinaire, the bawdy Janet Street Porter. And British pork fans aren’t stopping here. There’s not only a best bacon in Britain award, there’s even a song, “Stand by Your Ham,” sung the tune of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man”.
Farmers’ video site here. More on the pro-pork campaign here, and at the aptly named pigsareworthit.com.
National Chip Week Launches
Though the Belgians and Dutch do a better job with chips (aka French fries) — we like them crispy, you know — the Brits love their chips.
This week is National Chip Week in England. To celebrate, the British Potato Council’s Love Chips website has gobs of fun facts, games, and a bit of history. The site also features a series of classic films re-created by the spuds themselves. As the Sun reports (because reporting on short films starring French fries is, you know, part of being a crack journalist):
Chip-lovers can watch Jack and Rose sail the ‘Titanchip’, Goose and Maverick’s dogfight in ‘Top Chip’, James Bond face the ketchup laser in ‘Chipfinger’ and Sally get naughty in ‘When Sally Got Saucy’.
Though that all sounds a bit too reminiscent of Be Kind Rewind (which I haven’t seen because I’m sure it sucks), Titanchip (I never saw the original, either, because I’m sure it also sucks) is quite gripping. Especially with some malt vinegar.
English Censors Ban Singing-Kids Voices from Egg Ad
The nanny state may be creeping forward in the U.S., but it’s positively at full gallop in England. The country’s censors have banned the singing voices of children from an egg ad because eggs… well, because “most children would not be interested in” eating omega-3 eggs.
An egg advert that uses children’s voices has been banned by the advertising watchdog
The move comes just six months after a re-run of the “Go to work on an egg” campaign, fronted by Tony Hancock, was barred from the air waves.
This time, the children’s song, “Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, lay a little egg for me”, has incurred the wrath of the advertising watchdog.
An egg company planned to use the tune, sung by 10-year-olds, to promote its omega 3 eggs.
More from the Telegraph. As Megnut and anyone else growing up in Massachusetts during the 1980s (including me) knows, brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh.
Surviving University One Value Product at a Time
The eminent Times of London enlisted a college student in an experiment to see if he could live for a week only buying Tesco Value products. The results proved hilarious:
If I have breakfast at all it tends to be soggy cereal shovelled down my throat from a mug as I walk to a lecture, or possibly an under-toasted slice of bread with some cut-price jam slapped on it. Having said that, Tesco Value cornflakes taste disgusting with or without milk. I do not encourage anyone to eat them, although I’m sure they’d make very cheap confetti. Their version of Coco Pops is to be recommended however, as it has two crucial points in its favour: it contains sugar, and is packaged in a plastic bag, allowing for easy access as you place fistfuls of the stuff in your mouth.
Tesco Value offers two varieties of soup. Both are bad in my opinion. The soup in sachet form results in a slightly chalky concoction that leaves an unpleasant scum on the bottom of your bowl. This particular scum is oh-so-difficult to remove when it comes to washing up - using Tesco Value washing liquid.
Read on to learn exactly just how unfortunate the tomato soup tastes here. Tesco site here.
