Couscous, barley, millet, sorghum. I dont recall ever eating rabbit or squirrel.
In the USSR (and I guess even today), if you were on a tour and they took you to a restaurant for dinner, the standard fare was a chunk of beef baked in a sour cream sauce inside a little clay pot. We referred to this dish as “Hunk-o-Meat.”
sounds ok to me. Did they give you something to eat it with? Mashed potato? Noodles? rice? Something?
I was served KFC-style fried rabbit (home grown and butchered!) for New Year’s brunch in Czechoslovakia. Everybody says rabbit tastes like chicken, but I didn’t think so. The flavor was very mild.
In Scotland, I had braised hare. Very gamey. I imagine squirrel tastes the same.
When I was doing living history in Minnesota, I knew a guy who was treated to a woodchuck (groundhog) dinner by an Indian (Sioux or Chippewa) family. He said if he hadn’t known better, he’d’ve sworn he was eating pork chops!
Okhroshka is truly awesome on a stinking hot day. The first time I tried it, I had been unexpectedly hiking up the Altai Mountains with no proper gear. There was no path, and I kept slipping and trying to grab any nearby vegetation so I wouldn’t fall and break an ankle. That was also the day I learned the Russian word for “stinging nettles.”
I think there were some chunks of potato inside the pot, but not very many. The sauce you ate with a spoon and sopped up with bread. That was basically it.
It was okay, but definitely not haute cuisine. Two things missing from Russian cooking even today are (a) tender cuts of beef and (b) flavorful seasoning. Most Russian dishes (and Nordic ones, too) are pretty bland. The main seasoning seems to be dill.
A friend of mine in Moscow (an American) was involved in a project to import some decent beef cattle a while back. They have packaged Angus beef in the supermarkets now, so I guess they’ve had some success. I still haven’t seen any other cuts with any appreciable marbling, though. The fresh cuts available at the meat counters are always very lean.
There’s a supermarket near my apartment in Toronto that stocks kvass. I always treat myself to a cold bottle when I go shopping there, like I did today (85 degrees F and 80% humidity, yeccch!).
Hang on—I think you’re confusing white pudding with haggis.
White pudding is basically oatmeal and animal fat mixed together and shaped into patties, then grilled. (Very Scottish, eh? ;)) I’ve had it and, unfortunately, did not care for it at all.
Haggis, on the other hand, is divine! It tastes like warm, savory liverwurst.
Black pudding is best when served with rashers of bacon (not the streaky kind). The first time I had it was when I was staying with a Scottish family in '76. I didn’t know what I was eating until I’d developed a real taste for it.
Finely ground pork is not unusual in white pudding (all the Irish types I’ve had had pork, as far as I remember.) I do believe there is a kind made with liver, too.
Not exactly, no. Mush/polenta is just cornmeal, like you make cornbread from. It is dried and ground up corn, as is.
Grits are hominy grits–they’ve been soaked in an alkali (the old timers used lye, I believe) until they swell, soften, lose their hulls and go through some other changes to become hominy. Like in pozole. This is then dried and ground up and sold as grits.
A bowl of mush and a bowl of grits might look much the same, but taste and mouth feel are quite different. Grits are much tastier by my palate.
I’ve never had cornbread, either.
Lime, as far as I know, as in calcium hydroxide. I actually see it at some of the Mexican groceries around here sold in the herbs/spices section (for nixtamalizing corn), labeled as “cal.”
We were in Amish country years ago having breakfast with a bunch of friends. One woman was severely hungover and just sipping coffee. Perusing the menu, someone asked the waitress what “puddin” was.
She went into detail about what “puddin” entailed, how it was made, etc, suggesting that if you didn’t grow up eating it you wouldn’t like it. The hungover woman raced to the ladies room, barely making it there in time.
My mother’s Pennsylvania Dutch people eat most all the same stuff the Amish serve. I have always enjoyed those foods, even when hung-over. Your friend is unfortunate to be so fragile.
I’ll have to try that sometime then. The stuff I had here in Toronto (store-bought) tasted like cardboard. Yeccch! 
Fragile? She’s anything but. She was equal parts hungover and still drunk; the description of puddin just pushed her over the edge.
should we ask what “puddin” is?
Is “puddin” the stuff they call “hash” in Carolina barbecue joints?
All the parts of the pig that didn’t go into the barbecue pit cooked up and mashed together into a gray mass with salt and pepper mixed in? I love “hash.” Mmmmmm…livery.
IIRC she described boiling bones and scrap, collecting and reserving the “scum” from the surface of the pot. That was the point where Jackie ran off to puke.
In the U.S., we would call that ham, right?
I like to mix black pudding with runny egg yolks.