Head Cheese: gack! does anybody like this stuff?
Limburger Cheese: really a bad stink-and almost impossible to find!
-Brussels Sprouts: awful, rancid flavor-akin to spoiled cabbage
-Salt Pork: essential to calm chowder-but imagine eating this stuuf?
-“Black Pudding” (blood sausage)-the smell of this stuff will kill you!
Oh, back to mead.
In the old days you’d slice open the honeycombs and let the honey drip/ooze out of the wax combs. But then you’d always have quite a bit of honey stuck to the combs, and so you’d use water to wash off the leftover honey. And of course, that honeywater then becomes mead, and you use the clean beeswax for candles/whatever. Any sugary liquid is going to ferment naturally, you can’t prevent it unless you pasteurize or freeze the liquid, which is a lot of trouble since all it does is prevent the creation of sweet sweet alcohol.
So any honey producer would unavoidably produce some mead but never very much, and so mead becomes a staple luxury good, the drink of kings and gods while beer is the drink of regular folk.
Nowadays they use centrifuges to get every drop of honey out of the combs. No washing required, meaning no leftover honeywater, which means no obligatory mead. Sure, you could intentionally make mead out of the honey, but that’s now optional.
Now such stuff goes into “pork byproducts” and processed beyond recognition into cheap hot dogs and crap like that.
No, that’s just the gawdawful 70s style frozen brussels sprouts. Fresh brussels sprouts are just tiny cabbages that taste like…(wait for it)…cabbages.
You aren’t supposed to eat hunks of salt pork. It was always used as a flavoring agent, like you said in soups, or in beans, or any other bland dish that could use a bit of flavor. You cook it gently to render the fat from the salt pork, then brown the vegetables and/or aromatics in the rendered fat. So the salt pork adds delicious fat, salt, and carmelization to a dish. It’s basically unsmoked highly salted fatty bacon, any recipe you’d use bacon in you could use salt pork as long as you remember to control for the much higher salt. People in the old days working 12 hour days on the farm didn’t have to worry about getting too much fat in their diet, the problem was getting enough.
Got some geese, turkeys and ducks fattening up in the paddock right now=) Along about first week in december they have an appointment with MrAxe and the freezer, except for Fred, who is going to stay alive a couple more weeks and be invited to christmas dinner=)
Are you sure about the process? I thought it involved heating the wax, which floated to the top with impurities (like bee parts). You lost some volatiles out of the honey, but it was all ok because it was clean.
Additionally, I thought mead was a result, not an accident. When you get to the fruit and flavored meads, it’s not just honeywater. Cysers, melomels, they are not just the result of washing comb. Those are planned products and certainly predate the centrifuge.
Some years ago I bought a menu from the coffee shop of a large Los Angeles hotel on Pershing Square (I can’t remember the name, but it is still there. The hotel, I mean.)
I bought the menu because it was dated November 3, 1942, which was a week before I was born. I noticed a number of items on the menu that are alnost never seen in restaurants or coffee shops but which used to be common. Kadota figs, for example . Or prunes, both on the breakfast menu.
Another breakfast item I recall from my childhood was milktoast, or to be fancy, milquetoast. My uncle, who loved the sttuff, used to call it “Graveyard stew” and said it was commonly called that in restaurants.
I assure you, the milquetoast exterior hides the creamy goodness. I like mixed dried baby cereal with a bit of sugar. Sometimes I add a dose to my breakfast cereal. It’s a great and gruel texture to the cold and crunchy.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to gruel?