🚀 go-pugleaf

"Julian Macassey" in  news:slrndpr99d.ia4.julian@bongo.tele.com
> [Tim May] wrote:
>>
>> -- in France, many dishes were made of meats which
>> were organ meats, nonstandard cuts ...and sometimes
>> with either poor refrigeration or no refrigeration at all.
>>
>
>  In the early sixties, ... I saw what Tim saw.
>
> My father then explained to me that often French cooking was dealing with 
> inferior meat. Tough, stringy meat.
>
> Not that I didn't enjoy French food. They eat evry kind of meat, even song 
> birds, and can make any cut tasty.
>
> I read once, I think it was Escoffier that English cooking took advantage 
> of the flavour and texture of the meat.


John and Karen Hess writing about cooking traditions 30 years back said that 
the history of European cooking was the history of "housewives making 
something interesting from pieces the gentry wouldn't touch."  (IIRC)

Several old regions as mentioned in these newsgroup off and on accustomed 
themselves to interesting specialties from tough or cheap cuts and "VarIeTY 
mEaTs" and still maintain the specialties in bourgeois or elegant dining. 
In China on the average, like many places, like even much of the US in some 
periods, they had little food to waste.  When I saw dim sum even in the 
prosperous country of HK a quarter century ago, the spectrum of animal parts 
routine in middle-class dim-sum houses was much wider than I'd seen in any 
US counterparts for instance, even in SF's longstanding Cantonese-immigrant 
world.  When I was learning about cooking around Vienna and its popular 
organ-meat comfort foods, people used to say "of course, in the US you 
probably don't eat these parts." (I answered Oh yes we do,  just ground up 
in hot dogs and so on, less conspicuous.)  There's a famous old simple stew 
supposedly from Italian-renaissance construction workers, "Il Peposo," where 
they took the toughest cheap cuts of meat in the morning from the nearby 
butchers, put them in a kettle with red wine and peppercorns over an outdoor 
fire, and by mid-day had a savory stew.  (Try it, it works.  Of course you 
can add garlic, vegetables, herbs, ... if you are feeling lavish.)  Yes some 
British cooking gets dumped on (including by British people) yet along the 
lines Julien mentioned, it seems to excel at some simple classic things like 
roasts and fresh and smoked fish, and game (not to mention cheeses and 
beer).

I think that along with much-trumpeted side effects, mediocrity, etc., Ag 
and food science and transport have quietly made many things widely 
available, and sometimes cheaper and/or of better average quality, than 50 
years ago.  I'm as fond of "artisanal" produce as anyone but we sometimes 
lose sight of the wider picture.