Breakfast! The most important meal of the day (2004-2011)

[andiesenji]

Here are some variations of "scrapple" which is rarely found outside the area where it originated.

One of my uncles(actually a great uncle, my grandfather's youngest brother), who spent some time at a horse farm in Pennsylvania in the early '50s, mentioned it when he came home and he said he thought it was sort of like haggis only without the sheep's stomach.

As he was born in the border country and schooled in Scotland, he knew plenty about haggis - didn't like it much.

[Deus Mortus]

Here are some variations of "scrapple" which is rarely found outside the area where it originated.

One of my uncles(actually a great uncle, my grandfather's youngest brother), who spent some time at a horse farm in Pennsylvania in the early '50s, mentioned it when he came home and he said he thought it was sort of like haggis only without the sheep's stomach.

As he was born in the border country and schooled in Scotland, he knew plenty about haggis - didn't like it much.

Scrapple originates from Balkenbrij, it was introduced to America by the Pennsylvania Dutch.

It is peasant food, you take whatever offal is left over, you poach it in bouillon, grind it extremely fine, combine with blood and buckwheat flour, just enough flour to firm it up a bit, too much flour and when you pan fry it, it comes out as cardboard, not enough and it falls apart when you pan fry it.

Then you add spices, if you were somewhat richer you might have added some imported spices, but generally just what was grown in the garden. Then it was allowed to set in a cool place in a terrine and stored. Usually this was made in the fall and used to add some protein and fat to the diet through the winter.

Then when you want to eat it, you simply cut off a slice and pan fry it with some butter.

You can make it yourself, but I was born in a small village and the local butcher has a closely guarded recipe for his Balkenbrij and it is far superior to anything else I have tasted and he puts just the right amount of flour in to make it crispy on the outside and mouth meltingly soft on the inside. He usually adds some lamb kidney's for me, as I like the added sweetness it brings.

Now most people despise the stuff these days, but like I said, I grew up in a small village and nothing prepares you for a cold winter day of labor like some slices of the stuff for breakfast.

The main difference these days between Balkenbrij and haggis is indeed the lack of a sheep stomach and the buckwheat, but it used to be rather unique to the Netherlands, because spices were relatively widely available due to our trading, so we were able to add spices, while Scots generally added only herbs to haggis.

Now if you're like me and like to taste some really old fashioned cooking, you'll really love this, if anyone wants an exact recipe, I can probably find one in some older cookbooks.

Edited May 31, 2011 by Deus Mortus (log)

[andiesenji]

I am sure that a food product similar to scrapple and haggis go back a very long way. Thirty-some years ago when my dad did some extensive traveling in the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, researching his ancestors, he kept notes about different foods and got some recipes for me along the way.

He found some distant relations in Orkney and stayed there for a couple of months. One of the things he wrote about was haggis because there was a discussion that it had come with the "Norsemen" who "visited" from time to time in ancient times.

I know the Danish have a similar dish.

There are a couple of versions in Iceland (I used to have neighbors from Iceland) that also use a sheep's stomach. One includes oatmeal, blood, liver, lungs, heart, sweetbreads, kidneys and etc. Some people include shark meat. My neighbor said at butchering time, her mother preferred to make it with barley as she didn't like oats and as they raised goats for milk as well as meat, she used a goat stomach.

In one of Richard Halliburton's books he describes a trip through Central Asia, where "somewhere east of Samarkand," he was served a dish that he said "might have gladdened the heart of one of his Scottish ancestors, being the stomach of a sheep or a goat, filled with offal, grains and various spices."

It seems mostly to be a dish and method of cooking that was popular in cold countries. The long boiling, in a hut, tent, yurt or croft, would heat the enclosure as well as cooking the food.

Edited May 31, 2011 by andiesenji (log)

[Deus Mortus]

I know that that is probably true, but what is also true that Holland has very few dishes of it's own, being mainly tradesmen we have a lot of dishes from various cultures, but few of our own and while we and especially I aren't an especially patriotic people (again because of the trading), I still like to think Balkenbrij is very dutch.

It is frugal, saving all the scraps and it uses spices like only we could, due to our trading.

I am aware that is pretty stupid to hang on to something like this with such a flimsy argument, but every now and then, a bit of love for your own country isn't all that bad.

[andiesenji]

I know that that is probably true, but what is also true that Holland has very few dishes of it's own, being mainly tradesmen we have a lot of dishes from various cultures, but few of our own and while we and especially I aren't an especially patriotic people (again because of the trading), I still like to think Balkenbrij is very dutch.

It is frugal, saving all the scraps and it uses spices like only we could, due to our trading.

I am aware that is pretty stupid to hang on to something like this with such a flimsy argument, but every now and then, a bit of love for your own country isn't all that bad.

A bit of love for one's country is never bad. It is great that people who came to America held on to their food traditions, otherwise our dining experiences here would be pretty BLAH!

I am happy to live in an enclave of several ethnic groups. There used to be a Dutch family down the road but they had lived most of their lives in Indonesia and they had a food tradition spanning half the world! I was very sorry to see them move away (to Hawaii, no less!).

[Blether]

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Traditional Scottish square sausage on fresh breadmaker white - shown just before closure:

- and served with the obligatory tea. I take the sausage from the freezer and put it straight into the frying pan.

As for offal sausage preparations, certainly by the time of Burns-led jingoism, the industrial revolution that brought the explosion in Scotland's sheep population also meant that Glasgow, at least, was one of Europe's largest trading ports. The earliest Scottish recipe I've seen (see p. 355) (1828) for haggis, specifies "a high seasoning of pepper, salt & and cayenne". No-one in modern Scotland would recognise anything that's less than strongly peppery as haggis.

I suspect that offal-and-grain sausage-like and forcemeat preparations have existed for far longer than that, all over the world. I have my doubts about the extent that peasants in Europe enjoyed the luxury goods that were exotic spices, in the older days of trade by sail. Tommy Lipton was the fella who "mass-marketised" tea in the West, in the 19th century - when did pepper and nutmeg move from luxury to commodity ?

Balkenbrij sounds like something I'd like to try - my recent foray into faggots took me into England on the first step in what could be a long journey Where does the name Balkenbrij come from, Deus ?

Edited June 1, 2011 by Blether (log)

[Deus Mortus]

It's pretty simple, a "balk" is a word for a wooden beam, which is more or less the same shape and "brij" is a word for mush which is the consistency of the stuff before you cool it down. So it's "brij" in the shape of a "balk", not exactly the cleverest name, but hey it works

Also next time I go to Scotland, I'm going to try that sausage, it looks really tasty!

The recipe!

Alright, I have scoured some of my older cookbooks and have a few recipe's for making balkenbrij yourself.

Now a small problem in here is the spices you use, traditionally you use “Rommelkruid” this is a blend of multiple spices that is different per region and I have not been able to find a good standard ratio, nor has anyone that makes good balkenbrij been willing to share their blend.

So I will just share what the ingredients most commonly found are and let you guys play around with the ratio's yourself:

Ground Liquorice

(Brown) Sugar

Nutmeg

Anise

Cinnamon

Cloves

Peppercorns

Mace

Ginger powder

Sandalwood

About the last one, I am not all that certain what they mean with that, I have never found anything edible claiming to be sandalwood only essential oils.

Now for the recipe's:

Gelderse Balkenbrij

Ingredients:

1.5L Broth

0.5L Blood (preferably pig's)

0,5 to 1Kg of ground up offal

Rommelkruid

A couple of bay leafs

Thyme

Salt

300g Buckwheat flour

Put all the ingredients except the flour in a pan and let it boil for a short time. Bring back to a simmer and slowly add the flour, all the while stirring, make sure to incorporate the flour completely and then pour it in a terrine. Put the terrine in the oven on a low setting (The recipe's don't state how high, but usually a low setting means something between 130 to 180 Celsius, in this case I would go for 180 Celsius) and keep it in there for 20 to 30 minutes, until there is no more raw offal in the mixture. Cool it off in the refrigerator for about a day. Slice off a piece about a cm thick and pan fry it in some butter. At this point you can also freeze it, either the entire block or individual slices, it will keep well for a couple of months to (in my experience) a year.

Hunter's Balkenbrij

3L Broth

300g ground up Game Liver

400g ground up Pork or Swine belly

100g ground up Game Meat

20g Rommelkruid

400g Buckwheat Flour

20g Salt

The prep is basically the same, you can use blood in this one as well, just use less broth and less flour.

Head's Balkenbrij

2Kg ground up Pig's Head

2L Broth

Salt

Allspice

Tabasco

Rommelkruid

400g Buckwheat Flour

Lard or other animal fats (I would think bacon drippings would be amazing in this)

Same prep as before and again you can use blood, but use less broth and less flour.

((A small side note, it isn't absolutely necessary to ground up the meat, some recipe's call you to keep boiling it until it falls apart or to ground up only a part of it so you have chunks, or to grind it up after boiling it in the stock. However most recipe's call for it ground up, so I stuck to that.))

Edited June 1, 2011 by Deus Mortus (log)

[Chufi]

Hi Deus Mortus, welcome to eGullet! always nice to see more Dutch people on the boards

it would be great if you could add this recipe to the Dutch Cooking thread:

click

Rommelkruid is interesting isn't it? I like using just a tiny little bit in braised meat dishes.

[nikkib]

Airplane food on the way to London from Beirut. Omelette with spinach, tomato and potato witha bloody mary (is it bad that i have my own mini tabasco bottles and celery salt for use when flying?!)

[Deus Mortus]

Hi Deus Mortus, welcome to eGullet! always nice to see more Dutch people on the boards

it would be great if you could add this recipe to the Dutch Cooking thread:

click

Rommelkruid is interesting isn't it? I like using just a tiny little bit in braised meat dishes.

I'm actually not a big fan of the stuff, I mean the spices are great, but with mixes like this I prefer to just have the components of it, so I can adjust the ratio's for each dish, if I had some perfect for balkenbrij, they would like the peppery oomph for a braise, while bringing to much of a sweet flavor. I'm the same with all other mixes, I generally despise them with a burning fury, just because when I started cooking I had a lot of spice and herb blends that would invariably make a disappointing dish.

Backing off of the rage for a moment, thanks for the welcome

Airplane food on the way to London from Beirut. Omelette with spinach, tomato and potato witha bloody mary (is it bad that i have my own mini tabasco bottles and celery salt for use when flying?!)

Wow, that is airline food? What airline were you flying with? That looks actually quite edible!

[Blether]

Spoon fed. I bought & butchered this handsome 1.5kg/3.3lb grey mullet late last night, giving two skinless fillets of ~10oz each:

The debris made a good volume of fish fumet. The fish itself turned out to be quite muddy - a thick, black, oozing sort of mud when i opened it up - but I'd pre-empted that by reading up in Jane Grigson's Fish Book, where she points out that this is a common enough phenomenon with this fish. I gave the fillets a double salt-and-vinegar-water rinse as she recommended, and the smell freshened up nicely. I froze half and cut the other half up and concocted a Fijian cocoda - salt, lime (in my case lemon) juice, chillis, onion, then after a wait, coconut milk. I also added a little of the fish stock. No cooking.

Which brings us to breakfast: last of the curried lentil soup, bread & butter, and cocoda:

Edited June 3, 2011 by Blether (log)

[heidih]

Airplane food on the way to London from Beirut. Omelette with spinach, tomato and potato witha bloody mary (is it bad that i have my own mini tabasco bottles and celery salt for use when flying?!)

I have read a number of pieces about Hillary Clinton and others traveling with their hot sauce

Example:

One newspaper reported that, “She likes hot and spicy food. Back home she travels with a bottle of hot sauce to pep up her food wherever she goes; she believes it keeps her healthy.”

[judiu]

Airplane food on the way to London from Beirut. Omelette with spinach, tomato and potato witha bloody mary (is it bad that i have my own mini tabasco bottles and celery salt for use when flying?!)

I have read a number of pieces about Hillary Clinton and others traveling with their hot sauce

Example:

One newspaper reported that, “She likes hot and spicy food. Back home she travels with a bottle of hot sauce to pep up her food wherever she goes; she believes it keeps her healthy.”

They're even putting Tabasco Sauce in MRE now, just to assist in edibility. Personally, it's a bit too much for me, I prefer something tamer, like Texas Pete or Crystal. I do LOVE fresh ground black pepper, though, and have been known to keep a McCormick bottle of black pepper with the built in grinder in my purse, or desk drawer at work. Boy, does it help out a breakfast sandwich! Preground, in a can? GACK! Oddly enough, I LIKE lemon pepper blends, though.

[kayb]

French toast and Petit Jean Meats peppered bacon. You can order their cured meats online; I highly recommend it (shameless commercial plug for an Arkansas company, here....)

[percyn]

Beef Bacon, Fried Egg, Bagel.

[Kim Shook]

Andie – thank you for posting the griddle cakes recipe – I printed it out and look forward to making them soon!

Blether – so what goes into Scottish sausage? In spite of being a total Anglophile, I do NOT care for English sausage. My English stepdad used to sometimes get some here in the states and I didn’t like it as a child. When we went to Bermuda 20-some years ago, I tasted it and again, didn’t like the mealy texture. I requested ‘all bacon’ on my full-English and every morning the waiters would tease me by bringing my breakfast with a flourish on a silver platter and assure me that there was NO SAUSAGE on my plate! During our trip to England last month, I sampled two sausages – a low end deli breakfast and a very high end Manor house hotel breakfast (guess which one included the beans). The high end one tasted better, but the texture was still too mealy for me.

Nikki – I agree with Deus Mortus – that airline breakfast sure looks a lot better than what US Air served us!

Kayb – your French toast is lovely. Funny, I think that I’ve typed that exact sentence before .

I very much enjoyed the haggis/ Balkenbrij discussion – I even googled everything and learned a lot – so thank you!

Not cooking a lot yet, since coming back from our trip, but I did make brunch today:

Peaches and some strawberries from the farmer’s market. The peaches were just supermarket peaches, but smelled so good that I couldn’t resist. They were sweet and juicy and actually almost past ripe! I was planning to grill them for dessert on Tuesday night when my in laws are coming for dinner, but they won’t last that long!

Cheese omelets, bacon and some of Jo’s hot cross buns from the freezer. The bacon was interesting – it was VA bacon that we bought at the farmer’s market.

The guy bet us $5 that it would be the best bacon we’d ever eaten. How could we pass that up? Well, being that our usual bacon is Benton’s, it was NOT the best that we’d ever had. It was good – as good as Neuske’s and well priced - $5.99/lb. But we both thought that it was slightly undersmoked (that might be us just being used to Benton’s). The odd part was that it wasn’t particularly ‘porky’ tasting. I think that we’ll stick with Kunzler’s (which we can get at the supermarket) or Benton’s – both of which cost about the same.

[Deus Mortus]

That is some great looking bacon!

[Blether]

Yes, that bacon. 　And strawberries and peaches ! If raspberries make them Melba, the strawb version definitely deserves a name. (PS Kim, have more faith in your in-laws).

Lasagne deconstructed for summer:

- Marcella's pink shrimp cream sauce, Marcella's tomato-with-olive-oil-and-chopped-veggies again, and Valle del Sole's capellini, all straight from the fridge in 30 seconds flat, so I've a whole half hour to squander on the net before pointing the Skyline at Shonan and work. Focus failure included free of charge.

Edited June 5, 2011 by Blether (log)

[Blether]

As for sausage, Kim - Scottish sausage has its rainbow of variations. In British sausage, watch out in particular for rusk, used generally to keep some of the melted fat inside.

In the square sausage pictured are beef & pork 50/50 commercial mince, home-minced pig heart, breadcrumbs, wheatgerm, a lot of white pepper, nutmeg, and salt.

[Kim Shook]

As for sausage, Kim - Scottish sausage has its rainbow of variations. In British sausage, watch out in particular for rusk, used generally to keep some of the melted fat inside.

In the square sausage pictured are beef & pork 50/50 commercial mince, home-minced pig heart, breadcrumbs, wheatgerm, a lot of white pepper, nutmeg, and salt.

Ahhhh - so they were homemade? That, as they say, is a horse of a different color! It looked really good!

[catdaddy]

robirdstx – your homemade roll is a thing of beauty!

Breakfast this morning –

Mr. Kim’s:

ET bagel w/ olive cream cheese and bacon

And mine:

Grilled fried egg sandwich

Holy hen's teeth Batman, that grilled fried egg samich looks great.

[Kim Shook]

robirdstx – your homemade roll is a thing of beauty!

Breakfast this morning –

Mr. Kim’s:

ET bagel w/ olive cream cheese and bacon

And mine:

Grilled fried egg sandwich

Holy hen's teeth Batman, that grilled fried egg samich looks great.

Thanks, catdaddy! That sandwich represents a huge 'aha moment' for me. I've always made fried egg sandwiches on toast or bread. One day I was grilling a cheese sandwich and realized that what I love about grilled cheese is the contrast of the crisp outside and the tender side next to the cheese. I thought it would be perfect for a fried egg sandwich and it was! I haven't made it any other way since. Why it took me 50 years to realize this, I have no idea!

[davidkeay]

Thanks, catdaddy! That sandwich represents a huge 'aha moment' for me. I've always made fried egg sandwiches on toast or bread. One day I was grilling a cheese sandwich and realized that what I love about grilled cheese is the contrast of the crisp outside and the tender side next to the cheese. I thought it would be perfect for a fried egg sandwich and it was! I haven't made it any other way since. Why it took me 50 years to realize this, I have no idea!

My new go-to method for toast (and as such for the bread that goes into my fried egg sandwiches) is to toast on one side! I just put two slices of bread in the same slot in the toaster. It started because I was making two toasted sandwiches at the same time, and didn't want to wait for two toast cycles!

Of course, the difference is that I like to keep the tender side on the outside.

[BaconKing]

My "Triple B" Breakfast(Bacon Belgian Benedict)

[hongda]

OMG