Special bonus weekend report: Mr Brain’s Faggots
Because if you can’t trust a weasel to keep a promise, what is this world coming to?
When I first saw Mr Brain’s fine product, I’m sure it was labeled “Mr Brain’s Frozen Faggots.” I can’t work out if “pork faggots” is more or less funny than “frozen faggots.” Anyhow, of all the absurd things in the British supermarket that make an American fall to the floor and bark like a hound, Mr Brain’s offering takes the prize.
I’ve always meant to try them. I almost left it too late; we had to visit several supermarkets before finding one down-market enough for MBPF’s.
I was pretty sure I was going to be okay with the pork balls, but the “rich west country sauce” worried me a good deal. Looks like some unholy mash-up of moose testicles and Shoney’s strawberry pie filling. Frozen, it was a symphony of shit brown and ice crystals.
Cook from frozen, 30 to 40 minutes at 230 Eurodegrees.
On the whole…not bad. Tasted very strongly of sage and onion, like country sausage but less firm. Subsequent research has turned up worrying information about the traditional composition of faggots, but it looks like the Brain variety involves nothing more terrifying than pig liver. Ugh. Liver.
I ate all four. I’d do it again on a bet, but I won’t crave them in the middle of the night. Just as well, really.
I leave you with this classic BBC news item about the Doody family and their famous love of the British faggot.
If I die in the night, tell the weasels I love them.
May 26, 2007 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 10
Friday, May 25
May 25, 2007 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 2
An embarrassment of mustelids
We visited Wildwood Trust today, an animal sanctuary outside Canterbury. Not the best in some ways, but the staff is friendly and it’s awfully heavy on mustelids, so we like it. Stoats, weasels, badgers, otters, pine martens, pole cats. One elderly graying mink, who slept splayed out on top of his cage box like he didn’t give a shit, which he didn’t.
I saw my first real, live stoat here. His name was Socrates (“Soccy” to his friends) and he came out and did the weasel dance for us that day and everything. It’s one of those golden weasel memories. We went back to visit Soccy many times.
Of actual weasels, we saw hide nor hair. Not that day, nor any other. (Well, they’re all weasels to me. Brits call regular sized weasels “stoats,” and only the little teeny ones “weasels”). Anyway, the teeny ones always hid from us, even at feeding time (now with extra bunny asses!).
Today, Soccy’s cage was full of weasels! Well, two. Curled up in a happy sleepy funtime weaselball behind the glass wall of the hidden lair.
Get the size of these guys! Fully grown, they aren’t much bigger than mice. This little vicious killer dude could curl up and nap in a teacup.
Soccy, alas, has gone on to that great Weaselheim in the sky. We asked.
Got some great pictures of the lynxes (which are new, I think) and the wolves, who howled for us prettily when an ambulance went by. And the harvest mouse (surely, they must be on the sixth or seventh harvest mouse by now). The Scottish wild cats have had themselves an adorable vicious psycho killer kitten (beautiful and famously untameable, those things. They look like big stripey housecats and think like Ted Bundy). I started to post more pictures, but this blog isn’t a particularly good gallery.
Anyhow — farewell, Soccy! I lift my glass of…whatever the hell this is I’m drinking.
He was a stoat. The very stoat. The stoatiest of stoats.
— 7:05 pm
Comments: 24
Booze of the Day: Bellini
It can’t be champagne every day. Oh, no. Sometimes, it’s only sparkling wine.
B had one of these with a client and thought it was very nice. It’s a Bellini: prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine, and peach juice. For the record, two parts prosecco and one part peach juice (or peach pureé). A couple of raspberries or strawberries floating in it is very nice, too. Refreshing on a hot day.
Something about this nagged at me, until I realized…I blogged this cocktail last Thanksgiving.
Yes, it’s true. Even I learn things from S. Weasel.
— 12:00 pm
Comments: 3
Shapnots: Botolph’s Bridge
Eep! It’s enough to drive you to drink, this sign. It’s monks, burying the body of St Botolph at midnight.
Or, as we have taken to calling him, St Butt-Elf. Because, all things considered, we’d rather go to hell together.
Botolph was born in the 7th Century…sometime. He died in 680 and was buried in the foundation of the church he founded in Icanho. Wherever Icanho is. Nobody knows. In 970, King Edgar moved his remains to Burgh. In 1020, Cnut moved them to Bury St Edmunds. Later, parts of him were moved to Thorney, parts of him to Westminster Abbey, and his head was taken to Ely.
Not surprisingly, he’s the patron saint of travel.
Botolph led to Botolphston led to Boston. Uh huh. Weasel don’t make this up.
— 1:00 am
Comments: 4
Shapsnots: St Rumwold’s Church
The thing about this corner of England is not that there are wonderful old buildings about — that, you would expect. The astonishing thing is that there are so very many wonderful old buildings. They can afford not to be precious about them. There’s nothing the least unusual about an 18th Century home, a 15th Century pub or a 12th Century church. In fact — at least as far as churches and pubs are concerned — there seem to be more from those particular centuries than any other. Perhaps it was a fad, like hoola hoops or the environment.
Kent and Sussex are dotted all over with little churches with their distinctive squat steeples. You see the square outlines poking out all over, surrounded by quaint villages, being squeezed by vulgar modern cities and way, way out by themselves in the middle of sweet nowhere at all. They have many structural features in common, not least of which that they always stand unlocked. Point of religious principle, I suppose.
We’ve turned the latch and stepped inside many of these empty little churches (and we haven’t been struck by lightning or nuffink). They all feel heavy with the passage of time. More by the passage of time, certainly, than any great burden of religious piety. These aren’t great and ancient cathedrals; they’re very old, very small churches for small and rural people. Generation after generation of ’em. Somehow, I have a more vivid sense of the flirtations that have surely taken place inside than of the prayers.
Maybe that’s just me.
Anyhow. This one is St Rumwold’s. As usual, there is a list of past rectors posted in the entryway. The first was S. deWeston in 1286. That, children, is what you call very fucking old. Though, as usual, chunks of it have been replaced and repaired over the years. More of this one than most, actually — the stone tower has, at some point, been replaced by a wooden one, and the steeple by lead one (early Nineteenth Century, that…I could read the dedication from below).
St Rumwold, I discovered, was a 7th C saint who only lived three days and fell out of the womb preaching sermons. Hey, I don’t make this stuff up. People 1,400 years ago made it up.
May 24, 2007 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 6
Tea, old school
It was fine and hot today. We walked along the shingle beach at Littlestone to Romney Bay House, a big square pile built for Hedda Hopper in the late ’20s. Then, it was painted bright yellow and nicknamed the Mustard Pot. Now it’s white and a hotel. It stands off by itself right on the edge of the Channel.
We sat in the sunshine and ordered cream tea for two. It was us and the waiter, a dark man of indeterminate nationality. Not even the cook showed up today, so we couldn’t have sandwiches, but scones and jam and clotted cream would do us fine. Presently, a little fluffy dog trotted out of the house, curled up in the shade under our table and begged the occasional bit of scone.
To the North, the white cliffs of…Folkstone, actually. Dover is the next promontory up. Behind us, the local golf links. In front of us, the neat green lawn stretched right down to the beach and thence the sea. Big ships and little went up and down the Channel.
We heard subdued applause, and turned to see the English Women’s Golf Tournament had stolen up behind us and were making neat ladylike putts across the dunes. I shitteth thee not.
“Right! That’s it!” I banged on the table with the pommel of my Bowie knife, “somebody’s got ten seconds to find me a goddamned deep fried ‘possum barbecue sandwich before I start kicking limey ass!”
You really can’t give these people an inch.
— 5:01 pm
Comments: 7
Shapsnots: I heart salmon and cucumber
Yep. Got a sushi mold for my b’day.
The ordinary course of action is to roll up all your sushi doo-dah on a bamboo mat, by hand, and then give it a squeeze. But you can also press the ingredients into molds of various shapes and configurations.
The key is the sushi rice, which is both sticky and puffy, and compresses into firm shapes. Plus the seaweed wrapper, which is very dry but sticks to itself nicely when dampened.
Somehow, I always finish a sushi-making session with little sticky gobs of sushi rice stuck to me in improbable places, like itinerant boogers.
May 23, 2007 — 4:14 pm
Comments: 5
Booze of the Day: Veuve Clicquot
Back on the fizz tonight. We turned up an ancient bottle of Veuve Clicquot what B here was given for a long-ago birthday. Some sites will tell you not to hold champagne for more than six months or a year; a woman at a local winery told us you can hold non-vintage champagne for several years and it will improve (and vintage even longer). This stuff? Not vintage and could be as old as a decade. No way to know. But Veuve Clicquot is a decent brand, so we had to give it a sample.
Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin married François Clicquot (dabbler in champagne, banking and wool) in 1798, but he died seven years later, leaving her in control of the company. “Veuve” means “widow.” She guided everything toward champagne production. In fact, the factory production methods she pioneered went a long way toward establishing champagne as the preferred tipple of European royalty.
Today, it’s…top end of average. Just below vintage. In the £30 range.
This bottle? A little worse for wear. A little flat. A little dark. Eminenly drinkable. I give it
three and a half drunken weasels, even past its best.
At the Wikipedia article on Veuve Clicquot, I found this neat picture of the various sizes of champagne bottle, which I nicked and captioned. For your boozing edification:
May 22, 2007 — 6:10 pm
Comments: 4
Shapsnots: The Alfriston Knob
They describe this object as a market cross but, really, who are they kidding?
A truck driver jumped the curb and shattered it in the…Fifties, I think. They pasted it back together again. So it’s the Shattered Knob of Alfriston, even.
Alfriston is an ancient and beautiful little town. Very old, very unspoiled. Morning Has Broken, Cat Stevens’ signature tune, is a hymn written in the Thirties by Eleanor Farjeon, supposedly about the beauties of Alfriston.
— 4:01 pm
Comments: 9