Miscellaneous rants by a little old ladyJune 22nd 2007
Miscellaneous rants by a little old ladyWhere has all the meat gone? When I was growing up, butchers' shops were full of all kinds of meat that you never see nowadays. There were delicious lambs' tongues that became meltingly tender when cooked in a pressure cooker. For a family, you could cook an ox tongue or an ox heart. There were brains (which I didn't like) and sweetbreads (which I loved) and lights (which were very good cooked the Austrian way, minced with lemon juice, marjoram and a bay leaf). You could buy half a pig's head, which my mother knew how to cook, despite her Jewish roots. She would remove the ear, eye and snout and slice off the fatty cheek to be converted into crackling and lard, then pop the rest in the pressure cooker for forty minutes.It not only tasted divine but you got a wonderful soup as a by-product.
Another good dish for the pressure cooker was neck of lamb. It came in the form of individual vertebrae enveloped in meat. Sometimes it was sold as a "soup pack". It was best seared in a hot frying pan, then stewed under pressure with a paprika sauce. It was rather messy to eat as you had to suck the meat off the bones and you got the sauce all over your fingers, but there were few meats that tasted better.
Poultry came complete with all the innards and most of them were edible. The feet, neck, brain, heart, kidney and gizzard went to make giblet soup. The liver was fried and minced up with onion and a hard-boiled egg to make that Jewish speciality "eingehackte Leber". Any eggs were carefully replaced inside the body cavity to bake.The skin of the neck was stuffed with a mixture of breadcrumbs, herbs and dripping and roasted with the bird. Nowadays, chickens are empty shells containing a plastic bag with perhaps two hearts and half a gizzard inside. I sometimes wonder how a chicken with such an odd combination of entrails would survive in real life.
Butchers' shops in the fifties sold real meat and were proud of it. The floor would be covered with sawdust, and sides and legs of animals would dangle from the ceiling. In the run-up to Christmas, a fringe of geese and turkeys would appear on the awning in front of the shop, hanging by their feet, their necks left fully feathered so that you could tell the species apart. I always looked forward to the sight of these.
Of course the food hygiene rules of the European Union do not allow such displays today, just as they do not allow birds to be sold with their innards in place. But even if it was still legal, I somehow doubt if it would happen. People don't feel happy with that sort of thing any more. There has been a consistent movement away from the honest display of dead animals as food, first to carefully cut and packaged meat in supermarkets and then to reconstituted products like hamburgers, chicken nuggets, turkey twizzlers, crab sticks and the like, which are even further away from the real thing. I suspect that all those lovely offals have disappeared into the pet food trade because their true nature is not so easily disguised.
Such an increase in squeamishness may also explain why so many young people nowadays seem to be vegetarians. There is of course a moral case to be made for vegetarianism but I don't think that it is any stronger now than it was fifty years ago, nor do people seem to be generally more sensitive to moral issues than they were then (the reverse if anything). No, I suspect that modern people just don't like the feeling that they are eating dead animals. So either they don't eat them or they disguise the meat so completely that they can forget what it actually is that they are swallowing.
The other day, I looked for some cooking bacon in Tesco (it's very good stewed with barley and black-eyed beans) and couldn't find it. Iceland used to sell the same thing as "bacon misshapes" but they no longer have it either. It's sad how little variety there is in food nowadays.
| Home | Previous | Next |