Habitat with most odds off obtaining all your wild food needs in the U.K.
- Thread starter Poacherman
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I'm a good vegetarian, I can foresee no circumstances where I could ever find duck heads palatable.
That said, my Grandpa loved a singed sheep's heid.
My Granny insisted that Grandpa singed....singe.... as in burnt off, the fur, etc. outside. The head was then roasted and he ate the brains with a horn spoon, and black pepper. He lived healthily until his late 90's.
Now, thanks to scrapie, etc., the dish is totally banned.
We still make haggis though.... doing it at home from scratch it's stomach churning to most of us. The lungs have to be boiled to get the mucous out. The trachea was left to hang over the edge of the pot so that it bubbled out. When the lungs are cooled enough to handle the trachea and the tough bronchiole bits are cut away. Then the lungs are minced.
Humanity has a long history of making stuff edible by cooking it.
I still don't think I could ever be hungry enough to eat some things I know are edible though....that's another long human history. Like Brits don't eat horses or dogs kind of thing. I don't see many being at all interested in eating duck bills. Put them in the stock pot and boil them up with the bones though.
Mmm... not according to my dataset - Brain (pork or beef) per 100g has 10 to 12g fat and 130-150kcal. It also contains a lot of cholesterol.
I've never understood that cultural difference considering France and England used to have far better relationships at periods of history.
When our parents and grandparents, great grandparents, etc., were keeping the home fires burning during WW2, no one here starved. No one here had any reason to have a poor diet. There were huge efforts made to make the most of what we had, to manage to keep the entire nation healthy.
That wasn't the case elsewhere.
We were very fortunate as well as very organised, and though the UK was bombed, it's farmland was never obliterated the way fields abroad were.
Every scrap of uneaten food was saved and boiled up and fed to the pigs....so there was still bacon. Limited but there was bacon, and butcher meat, and eggs, and everyone had a right to a share.
Horses were both the engines of the farms and the transport and the steeds of the military and not seen as food.
It's a cultural difference that was reinforced by the lack of dire necessity. We never needed to boil up leather to make it palatable, we never needed to roast tree inner bark to eke out flour, nor grind up eggshells to make sure our children had enough calcium.
It's not just WW1 or 2 though, it goes back for centuries. Napoleonic wars, and so on.
The British Isles have not been successfully invaded in a very long time. I know the British Channel islands were not so lucky, and they endured the hardships of occupation; I'm not belittling that.
The Romans thought horse and dog meat to be profane, and it was only offered to the gods of the underworld.
I think it was Pope Gregory who banned the eating of horses in the 700's, though a pagan rite survived in Germany, and then the French really took to eating the horses after their revolution, because horses were of the nobility
So, basically Brits just never did eat horses, or dogs, not since Britain became recognisably Britain.
That wasn't the case elsewhere.
We were very fortunate as well as very organised, and though the UK was bombed, it's farmland was never obliterated the way fields abroad were.
Every scrap of uneaten food was saved and boiled up and fed to the pigs....so there was still bacon. Limited but there was bacon, and butcher meat, and eggs, and everyone had a right to a share.
Horses were both the engines of the farms and the transport and the steeds of the military and not seen as food.
It's a cultural difference that was reinforced by the lack of dire necessity. We never needed to boil up leather to make it palatable, we never needed to roast tree inner bark to eke out flour, nor grind up eggshells to make sure our children had enough calcium.
It's not just WW1 or 2 though, it goes back for centuries. Napoleonic wars, and so on.
The British Isles have not been successfully invaded in a very long time. I know the British Channel islands were not so lucky, and they endured the hardships of occupation; I'm not belittling that.
The Romans thought horse and dog meat to be profane, and it was only offered to the gods of the underworld.
I think it was Pope Gregory who banned the eating of horses in the 700's, though a pagan rite survived in Germany, and then the French really took to eating the horses after their revolution, because horses were of the nobility
So, basically Brits just never did eat horses, or dogs, not since Britain became recognisably Britain.
Fat soluble vitamins A D and K2I know someone who insists on adding the giblets to the soup because she loves sooking the meat and juices off the bones.
I think folk are weird
There's a reason that humanity's numbers increased, as did life expectancy and child survival, when farming became popular
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