Podcasts

English sausages The glory and gristly details of a much loved food

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:39 — 18.7MB)

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sausage-coilEnglish sausages have a definite dual personality. One of those is a sumptuous, succulent blend of good meat, a bit of cereal, herbs and spices and maybe even a touch of the vegetable, like leeks. The other is a staple of the poor. Who knows what unspeakable things lurk inside its wrinkled exterior? But if, like me, you thought that the suspect sausage was purely a product of the industrial revolution, prepare for a revelation.

Jan Davison was the second ever guest on the show, talking about the air-cured sausages of Europe’s mountainous regions. Her new book is all about the English sausage, and digs deep into its Jekyll and Hyde past, served at the court of Richard II and hiding tainted meat and worse from the sight of the urban poor.

Notes

  1. English Sausages by Jan Davison is published by Prospect Books, along with much else besides.
  2. Including an enlarged facsimile of William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion, in which you will find his instructions on “How to make complete sausages for sale, or for a private family” along with much else besides, again.
  3. Jan talked a bit about Newmarket sausages, one of many regional specialities and one granted a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) in Europe in 2012. There was a bit of a spat because the secret recipes of the two main butchers making sausages in Newmarket were different. The two refused to join forces and promote a single secret recipe, so the PGI leaves a fair amount of room for manoeuvre. Cumberland has a PGI too.
  4. Cover photo by Flickr member John Giacomoni.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 041

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10 October 2016

Authentic food news

  1. The Xylella outbreak in Italy is bad enough without appalling “journalism” to make it worse. Major Italian Daily “La Stampa” Rehashes Xylella Noise as Scoop.
  2. Usually plant domestication and agriculture enables population expansion. Here’s a new idea: Population boom preceded early farming.
  3. That rhetoric, about how US agriculture feeds the world? Not the poor world, that’s for sure. Here’s the big report, and the rabble-rousing exegesis.
  4. And, to follow that, a very thoughtful piece from Katherine McDonald on the past eight years in US farm and environment policy, which I already tweeted.
  5. Craft beer sticks it to The Man.
Podcasts

Whiskynomics How the world conspired to bring us single malts

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:47 — 16.8MB)

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maltIf you heard the episode on microshiners you’ll know that there is something of a boom in small-scale distilling. And you might be worried that every boom seems to be followed by a bust. One distiller, however, told me that it was an economic bust that kickstarted the malt whisky boom.

For most of its history, the only malt whisky most people ever drank was as a component in blended whisky. The stockmarket crash of 1973 and subsequent oil crises meant that people had no cash for whisky, which was costing more as a result of higher oil prices. Distilleries were shut and mothballed, and, desperate for a bit of cash, the big whisky blenders started to market single malts, which had all gone into blends before.

That seemed worth investigating in more detail, so I did just that. And I discovered that the story is a little bit more complicated. Booms and busts, however, have definitely played a part in the history of malt whisky. Will the draft distillery story end in tears? Some say no, others yes. Me, I just want to try some of their products.

Notes

  1. Mark Reynier’s Waterford Distillery looks absolutely fascinating. One to try and visit next time I’m in Ireland, for sure.
  2. Whisky Max, Charles Maclean’s website, is a great source of information about whisky and how to enjoy it.
  3. If you want to go deep, very deep, into scotch whisky, you need Alan Gray’s Scotch Whisky Industry Review.
  4. I learned an amazing amount from Scotch Whisky: History, Heritage and the Stock Cycle, a journal article by Julie Bower.
  5. If you want a personal tour of Scotland, Alastair Cunningham is your man.
  6. Aeneas Coffey is easy enough to run to ground. Aeneas MacDonald, the great whisky writer, maybe less so.
  7. Banner image © Glenfarclas Distillery, seen here
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 040

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26 September 2016

Authentic food news

Some cracking long reads this time around, stuffed with history and cultures.

  1. Bee Wilson chews over London then and now. From here, mid-Victorian London really does look like a foreign country.
  2. From China, Fuchsia Dunlop on the irresistible rise of soy sauce has me wondering whether I have ever had the right stuff.
  3. Ashwaq Masoodi on Dalit food. Hard to get my head around the idea that beef is the stuff the lower classes have to make do with.
  4. Sort of self-promotion: In Canada, some people would have to spend half their income to eat healthily. Last year’s podcast with someone trying to fix the problem.
  5. And – of course – more from the front lines of cultural appropriation, as Disney abandons it’s recipe for princess-approved “healthy gumbo”.
  6. A brief moment of schadenfreude as Bloomberg slathers pea-protein stabilised emulsion on the face of Hampton Creek.