Britainology 116: Christmas Food

The pigs in a blanket being hot dog sausages is a Northern corruption of the Southern version, which uses regular mini-sausages in croissant bread (which tends to be less sweet and more buttery than British croissants). It is, in fact, disgusting if made with hot dogs

Like all other insane cultural touchstones, the caponization of roosters began as a tax dodge. As far back as Roman times, one of the ways in which people were taxed was by how much livestock they owned, and chickens are as good a metric as any other (looking at you, Window Tax). However, roosters were exempt because you would normally only have one, and outside of starvation you weren't keeping it for meat (and certainly not for eggs). Enter a little corrective surgery, and suddenly people have a cost-savings reason to keep their extra roosters.

i just LOVED THIS. esp as im an annoyingly (sorry) glutenfree lactose intolerant person who goes "fk it we ball" at xmas time and gladly suffer the consequences. my mom got a rasperry cream chocolate roulade/swissroll/yule log thing from m&s this year and it RULED. im still listening to this ep in jan coz i dont want xmas to be over this yr idkw? maybe coz it's all downhill from here? anyway tyyyyy ily guyzzzzzz x

Actually quite American of you to compare two foods — one of which contains bacon — and declare the food containing bacon superior

And does Michael have a family name?

We yanks have the bad food, you have bad teeth- the only provable race science.

Why on earth didn't you get a guest who could actually eat the stuff you're serving them??

Black Friday in the US is called that because it was historically the day that many retailers first turned a profit for the full year ("in the black"). Accounting ledger balances were handwritten in red for losses and black for profits.

I don't remember where I heard this but lamb is the dinner choice of pedophiles

Hilarious conversation about children. Took my 2 1/2 year old daughter along to a family dinner this Christmas. $400+ dinner and she was eating scallops, asparagus, NY strip, and waygu steak lol. We figured most rich kids don’t even eat that good because rich parents have wouldn’t bring their kids to places like that.

At first i was like "where the fuck is all the dead air coming from" then i realized theyre eating on air. Then i became very thankful that they werent masticating loudly and directly into thr microphone

Black Friday is the day between a public holiday and the weekend (because Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday), so people with bougie jobs and lots of spending money tend to be off work, and a lot of those people use the day off work to go shopping. The closest equivalent to Thanksgiving in Western Europe is probably Michaelmas, a Christian holiday that tends to correspond with autumn harvest festivals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaelmas Michaelmas isn’t fixed to a day of the week, though, and it is earlier in the autumn than US Thanksgiving, so it doesn’t create a secondary day off work for bougie people to go shopping for Christmas gifts. (Notably, a lot of stores in the US, such as Amazon, tend to have extended return policies—i.e. 60 rather than 30 days—starting in mid-November, so that items bought early as Christmas gifts can be returned in January if they don’t work out.)

Japan has takoyaki, or octopus balls on a stick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takoyaki

I went to an Indian wedding and it was, hands down, the best wedding I have attended.

I've not bought anything from Amazon since they were just a book shop. I'm surely still using their services in some way, but I've never bought anything from the website. Because it's fucking ugly, is a pain in the arse to use, and is a fucking ripoff.

Bread sauce slaps fight me

Christmas Pudding maker here - we do indeed make them in summer, usually when there’s still one left in the cupboard so that the youngest they are at consumption is 18 months; 6 months isn’t really long enough for it to taste right. We make four at a time so the last one we eat is four and a half years old. They’re not really cake at all like Milo said - it’s essentially a big old pile of fruit all smashed together with a small amount of binding ingredients then you shove it in bowls, boil it, shove cloth over the top and put it in somewhere cool, dry and dark until about a month before you want to eat it. They’re like solid bricks so you feed them brandy once a week to rehydrate. Sauce wise tho sod Brandy Sauce or Brandy Cream, you want Brandy BUTTER. Just smash butter, icing sugar and brandy together until it’s so strong you can’t feel your teeth. Refrigerate. I’m also lactose and wheat intolerant so will take a lactase pill and just risk the wheat reaction because it’s the best food experience of the whole year. Om nom nom.

Woops just now learning from this episode that mincemeat is fruit not meat. No one in my family ever told me this and so I just avoided it for the past 34 holiday seasons...

Look, if you're gonna bring up the Afikomen you should also mention opening the door for Elijah at the Passover Seder. "Get the kids out of here for a second so one of us can skull the glass that's just been sitting there all night".

1:06:00 have a strong memory of Hugh Fearnley-Whittinhstall advocatjng a "traditional” mincemeat recipe with beef in it jn Waitrose Food Illustrated c. 2000-03. Which may have dated from some period where either beef was cheap, or dried fruit was filler? Spices, fruit and meat; it’s basically hybridity inflicted on Iranian food. My bourgeois ankle may be showing; apologies.

Re: Japan and food on sticks: man has mind blown by discovery of yakitori. The non-vegan chunk of the 120 million can‘t be wrong.

Also caponisation is illegal in the uk under The Welfare of Livestock and the brilliantly named The Mutilation Regulations

I enjoyed this while prepping our own Christmas capon, which is cheaper, easier to cook and better quality than turkey here in Switzerland. And yes, a brief life as a eunuch is surely better than being ground to a paste within minutes of hatching…

While visiting the UK as a teenager, I was eagerly presented with a Christmas pudding even though it was summertime. It was unironically one of the best thing this American has ever eaten (though, for clarity, I also really like fruitcake).

tbh not that difficult to live without amazon craving a bunch of british christmas foods just reading the title

I could listen to Milo do impressions for an eternity.

You have to pull the crackers at the start so you can get the paper crowns to wear for the duration of the meal.

Black Friday is when Americans gather together to stampede over one another for a nominal discount on an overpriced tv

Milo said parsley. He meant parsnips surely?

I will defend bread sauce as the practice of thickening a sauce with leftover or slightly stale bread is a great way to make a sauce if you don't have a bunch of butter or flour on hand but you have to be like, making it out drippings or fond or lots of spices etc etc

Predators have more parasites than herbivores, because they eat a bunch of parasites filled prey animals. This makes it poorer meat to eat, because you have to process it more. When you get to keeping predators to eat, it's a nightmare because you have to raise meat for them to eat, and at that point why not just eat the prey you are eating.

If you release a rat into a hungry group of chickens you will not see that rat again. Chickens will eat anything.

Black Friday started mostly as a coincidence. People who work Monday-Friday traditionally would get Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving weekend, which made it an incredibly popular shopping day for presents as it is the last day most people will be guaranteed off before Christmas. Stores noticed this and started having bigger and bigger sales to encourage even more people to come buy crap

man i’ve missed britianology

For the record, pumpkin pie is a Tudor creation

Marcel Proust rolling in his grave right now, in a very unhurried and digressive way

gotta be harder to catch predators for meat surely?

One of the explanations I heard for the lack of seasoning in a lot of traditional British food was that it was a class thing. If you look at medieval cookbooks, which were mostly compiled by guys cooking for kings and nobility, they really went to town on the spices because it was a way of showing off how wealthy you were. But as trade improved, empires got built, etc. to the point where even poor people could afford spices, the upper classes were like, “eating food with a lot of spices in is bad, actually” and there was this swerve towards much blander food, basically because a bunch of toffs couldn’t stand the idea that the poors were getting to eat the same as they were

‘"Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a popular song written by Frank Loesser in 1944 and popularized in the 1949 film Neptune's Daughter. While the lyrics make no mention of a holiday, it is commonly regarded as a Christmas song owing to its winter theme.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby,_It%27s_Cold_Outside

If I could have asked Milo for a present it would have been, “please describe & explain “Proustian Reverie” to a Jewish Australian comedian off the dome, whilst eating a prawn dog on a stick” and yet I could never have imagined. Ho ho ho

My husband’s father (born and raised in Ontario, Canada) makes bread sauce every year for both Christmas and Canadian Thanksgiving. I’m Polish and we eat a lot of weird food but even I was taken aback by bread sauce.

this mf said "michel proust"

Great work gents. Got one right on the mood. One note: yes, mass produced Pumpkin 🎃Pie is indeed a$$. But, the homemade stuff, divine warmed up with a bit of cream.

Turducken as a name is american, but engastration as a technique is roman, and three bird roasts involving turkeys are tudor. There's plenty of blame to go around for this perversion.

Does anyone else get a weird cut at the one minute mark

Black Friday in America is after Thanksgiving as the idea is to begin your xmas shopping now that the next closest holiday is over.

before technologies like the elastrator made castration cheap and low-risk, male animals not intended for stud use were simply culled before puberty changed their behavior. these days steers are more profitable than veal calves so we don't see a lot of it in markets. and with the decline of market share consumer opinion about veal has shifted towards viewing it as more cruel.