After the sort-of seriousness of the previous post, I decided it was time to be silly again ... please find below my tribute to the Scotch Egg. And if you're wondering about the suitability of the accompanying photo, you try finding a dog-related picture to match the blurb. Anyway, those puppies are cuter than cute, therefore much deserving of a starring role here.
Take a hard boiled egg, wrap it in sausage meat, roll it in breadcrumbs, deep-fry it and give it a nonsensical name that confuses its origins: the Scotch egg (invented by posh London food emporium Fortnum and Mason in 1738) is about as eccentrically British as food gets.
Originally an intrinsic component of the Georgian-era picnic hamper, these days we’re more likely to associate Scotch Eggs with desperation food purchased in 24-hour garages rather than anything more elegant. Posh delicatessens offer excellent reproductions of the original article, but the more commonly know, bastardised examples of the genre are likely to made with tiny, battery-farmed eggs (complete with greying ring twixt white and yolk) and wrapped in ‘meat by-product’ that claims to be ‘28% pork’ and is probably around 60% fat. What those orange ‘breadcrumbs’ are made of is anybody’s guess, but once you’ve ripped through the plastic wrapper and torn your way into what can only be described as a full English breakfast three weeks past it’s sell-by date, orange dye and ground rusk is the least of your worries. And yet, Scotch Eggs are a disturbingly compulsive addiction. Find them in the supermarket above the pork pies and right next to close cousins the picnic/savoury/party eggs – weird, golf-ball sized mini-versions of big Scottie, stuffed with a dry, crumbling adaptation of egg mayonnaise. Who, exactly, eats these victual aberrations? We do - by our millions, apparently. And you know you’re one of them ...
No comments:
Post a Comment