A Balic

Quantity mostly, but I think that I will get a few older Amorone, some fizz (prosecco I think, so far) and some fortified Australian desert wine (the perfect pudding wine). Hogmanay drinking? Whisky.

Results of the poll are in, and it may be a regonal thing. Some of my friends from the north of England are acknowledging the dish, although they eat it with brandy butter, not as part of a fry up. Is Adam on his own with that one? Anyway, I am now caught up in e-mail correspondence about eating corned beef for breakfast on Christmas Day. Where this is all heading, goodness knows. So, I may have invented a new dish? Cool. I would quote that Brillat-Savarin chap on this subject, but the Fat Guy would only point out the utterly pedestrian nature of doing so.... :cheesy:

Thank you Yvonne. Wilfrid, I can't stress this enough, only use slices of leftover pudding on boxing day. The timing is just as important as the ingredients. I like boiled pudding as you "skin" around the outside of the pudding. To get back on topic (I hate it when people get of topic and just ramble on about any old crap that is on their mind ;)). Milk as a basic food. I fear that this topic may not fly, as how many people have tasted raw cows milk? I lived in a dairy farming area as a boy and we used to get a five litre bucket of milk every three days, as a drink in its own right. I remember at the time that I really hated the taste of pasteurised milk, now I drink semi-skimmed and don't even think about milk as a food stuff, just a type of tea whitener. There is such a basic difference in the flavour of milk from different breeds of cattle, that is is one of the great shames of modern life that we basically only get to have pasteurised milk from the Hostein-Friesian breed, which is a breed that produces high volume with low butter fat and protein content.

Ditto. This is what lorne sausage is. Scrapple sounds so much better though: http://www.rampantscotland.com/recipes/blrecipe_sliced.htm Yeh, I have had the fruit pudding, but I find it a little dry even when fried in butter. For a sweet touch in a fry-up, I prefer Maple syrup (quite good on blackpudding) or at this time of the year, fried Christmas pudding. But, only the boiled-in-the-clout type, not that boiled-in-the-basin rubbish.

I see, in Australian-speak a "slab" is a block of 24 beer cans. This description of scrapple sounds very much like "Lorne sausage", if so why would Wilfrid need it for the holiday season? What Saint's day is associated with scrapple? Maybe, St. John the hungover?

Scrapple? What's scrapple? I assume you drink it and it has an alcohol content, right?

If the low setting will go low enough, they are quite good for making confit of most things except salmon. Other then that, '70's theme nights only.

Butter is the perfect example of a food staple that most people take for granted. The fact the margarine (margarine really is the Devil's spittal) exists at all is proof that most people have never really tasted butter in the context of being a food in its own right, only as the stuff that you spread on bread before everything else. The range colours,flavours, textures, cooking properties and aromas avalible from different types of butter is quite staggering for what has to be one of the most simple of foods. I love the way that Normandy butter melts to a creamy sauce, rather then into an oily puddle, when gently heated. The tangy flavour of a good Italian Burro on good bread is a meal in itself. Butter heated to brown the milk solids, is the basis of some of the best fish sauces, which are sadly, often done very badly. I fear that with such "simple" recipes are ignored, or badly done, because of this very property which is the key to why they are so good.

I simply must go to this place next time I am down south, after all the interesting discussion it has produced. I have been given a proof copy of Henderson's "Nose to Tail Eating", which has been fun to read. For my two cents (Pence?) worth, after reading this book I would guess that Michelin stars are not being chased at all. I had a friend who went there a few months ago and after a good meal they sent their compliments to the chef, when they were leaving Henderson came out and presented them with a bag of Eccle (spelling?) cakes to take with them. I like that attitude, much nicer then being told you have two hours to eat your meal and to get out.

Heather - you make me weep. I lived in Melbourne for eleven years and consider it my true home. The Queen Victoria market, I dream about it here in Edinburgh. My wife is going back to Melbourne in a few days, I can't due to the cost involved, but I have given her strict instructions to take many photographs of the market. I worked near the market, so I went in every morning it was open at about 7:30 am and just walked around, taking in all the smells, colours and sounds until I had found my food items for the day. Bliss. The organic fruit in the Vic. market are great. Here in Scotland, organic food is basically the same product as conventional food, only organic (duh!). No heirloom varieties. I would kill for a real peach. In the local supermarkets here, they are selling Australian peaches, you can imagine what they taste like. Still I have been buying these amazing heirloom apples here. The UK has hundreds of different types of native apples, so to taste all the different flavours avalible from this one group of fruit has been wonderful.

Great image! It looks like perfect sporting event food. Eh, cheese-wiz is that plastic cheese in cans, not something you do after to many cheesesteaks and beers right? I didn't realise that you could eat cheese-wiz. It is a favorite thing to bring back from the states, to show your friends how funny those Americans are, but I had no idea that people actually ate it. Like mushy peas here in the UK, the supermarkets are full of tins of the stuff, but I have never seen anybody buy or eat it. Kind of a food-prop-re-inforcement-of-national-identity thing.

Maybe you could all enlighten me, what is a "Cheesesteak"? Is is all cheese or does it contain meat as well? Oh, is it good?

What's all this about being pressed up against walls and remembering grapefruit? Not exactly Proust's lime flower tea and madeleines is it. :shocked:

Cool! pre-buttered popcorn. I bet there are hugh multi-nationals that even now, are trying to develop transgenic popcorn that has the same properties as your heirloom variety. The fools.

Yeh, taste is a little subjective. Wine nomenclature is a bit dodgy too. To clarify, "fruity" do you mean the flavours of fruit in the wine or the intrinsic flavours of the mother grape? If the former is the case, then I have to say that I do find fruit flavours in champagne and co, but this may just be me. Certainly, grapefruit/citrus and white peach flavours in blanc de blanc, red fruit flavours in rose styles.

I mentioned on my Bio. the taste of a good fresh egg was something that few people will ever get to taste. This was expanded by Steven, that we would be surprised by the flavour of many basic food stuffs in their true/original form. I was reminded of all this by a large box delivered from Chianti. In the box was two litres of new olive oil (thanks to my sister in law). The oil is about one month old, is bright green and completely opaque. It tastes of fresh grass and reminds me of the sun, even here in Scotland. The colour and taste is from the chlorophyll from the olives, this will degrade over the next few months until what is left its just excellent quality olive oil. My sister in law tells me that in the village were she lives the entire population is eating everything with this oil, while it lasts, my wife and I are doing the same here in Edinburgh. This oil is that good. What a revelation to find in something we use everyday. Has anybody else had a similar experience?

Quite right, bone dry wine with plenty of "fruity" characteristics is so often called sweet, #### stupid english language. I have noticed that US sparkling wine is quite sweet (residual sugar sweet), to me at least, compared to the Australian version. At first I put this down to house styles etc, but now I am inclinded to think that the two countries differ in what they consider to be "Dry" or "Sweet". To expand on my comments about "Extra-Dry" champagne, I was told at Mumm that it was a made-up term to get people who like sweeter wine, but think they like dry wine to buy a sweeter wine (does that make sense?). There was a lot of winking going on, so they may have been telling me a tall tale to make me feel good about buying Brut. I would be interested to know how much various house styles have changed over time to suit changing tastes in wine. Have they remained basically the same or have they bent with the wind? At the end of the day I like all styles, but with different food. Extra-Dry with Oysters? Not to my taste, but with ripe strawberries yes. Brut with strawberries? Both wine and fruit end up tasting acidic/metalic.

B.H. - If you are interested in Irish whiskey than you may like to look at the following short article: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/2001/12/11/FFXYTF1K2VC.html Wilfrid - what is this "fines-becs" thing you speak of?

Rock, after Jason's excellent comments I have little add, except that while in Champagne I was told that "Extra Dry" champagne was made for the USA market. All part of the long tradition of producing different types of champagne for different countries.

My personal favorite is Ardbeg from Islay. Although, it is from Islay it isn't over the top in tems of charcoal/smoke flavours, just sweet, rich and savoury. Yum. Even non-whisky drinkers enjoy it. Some other good bets are Highland Park produced in the Okneys and The Balvenie from Speyside.

Some will say that Plymouth Gin is the original Martini gin: http://www.plymouthgin.com/index.html But I like Bombay Saphire.

Here in Scotland I can drink single malts straight from the barrel, at a local club. They are all well over 100 proof (55-65% alcohol), as they haven't had water added to them like bottled whisky. They are very drinkable, although I tend to add a little water to some. Having said that, I use 75% alcohol to "fix" tissue samples. So that may explain the slightly raw throat I have after drinking the stuff all night!

Bovril!!Bovril??? Satan only has one cocktail - Bovril and Creme de Menthe. Opohmelit'sya, not Bovril.

Thanks for the information about Karen MacNeil, a very interesting book indeed. Having moved to the UK has given me some pause for thought about wine. Australia is a wine producing country and I think that this gives people the a little more freedom in the way that they drink wine. I started this topic because I had noticed that in the UK, Australian sparkling wine was priced very strangely. Wines that were very basic in quality in Australia are very expensive in the UK, but top of the range Australian sparkling wine is cheaply priced and only a few pounds more expensive then the drose. This is all about price positioning blah, blah. But, it does raise the question, what are our tastes in wine (and everything else) are dictated by. As an example, last Christmas I bought a bottle of 1976 Chateau Climens for about US ำ. An excellent producer from a good vintage and a very low price. Why, because Sauternes is not popular for the moment. Why not though, thats the rub. Anyway, this is starting to read like a first year students first assay, but does anybody else have an example of what they think is a great wine style, that is not currently popular?

Jason and Robert, I have also received an email from Robert with the BadTransB virus in it. I haven't ever emailed anybody from eGullet, nor has anybody from eGullet emailed me. Any idea what's going on?