Introducing the wonderful Betsy Masson's verdict on our Great British Cuisine, as a complete newcomer! It's priceless.....
Bangers and Mash
There is an entire language of food in England that I have discovered.
We went to a new restaurant in our castle grounds (we have now been to
almost all of the restaurants in the Oxford Castle grounds –note
earlier comments about the Krispy Kreme shop for coffee and the Swan
and Castle for our earliest meals of fish and chips and all have been
really quite unique and excellent in their own ways), which only
opened two weeks ago called The Big Bang and were introduced to the
world of bangers and mash.
Actually we had walked over to peer into The Big Bang a few days ago,
carrying a box of pizza leftovers, and were greeted by Max (owner)
who popped out and handed us a newspaper to cover our pizza
box- it was raining so I wasn’t sure if he was worried about a wet
pizza or wanted us to realize that we should hide a pizza box when
walking past an authentic English bangers and mash restaurant. I read
the newspaper from cover to cover- all 4 pages of it - and realized I
had no idea what most of the food in the menu (2 of the 4 pages) was!
So we went back for breakfast and Max very kindly sat with us and gave
me a vocabulary, history, and culinary set of lessons about English
food.
Let me start with “mash.” Apparently a mash begins with mashed
potatoes and then can be expanded from there. Max spoke with great
admiration for the English potato - it apparently sits in the ground
for 8 months, absorbing water and various underground flavors (dirt,
bugs, appropriate composts?), and then is dug up and becomes the
central component of any mash. Just as we might add cheese, garlic, or
sour cream to our mashed potatoes, the mash over here has a far
greater range of possibilities and seems to be a fairly central staple
of English food. For example, there is the simple creamed mash (most
like ours I suspect), the garlic and rosemary mash, the grain mustard
mash, the spring onion mash, the rose mash (beets and red cabbage
added), or the celeriac (fabulous word- almost religious in tone) mash
(celery root mashed and added). All mashes are accompanied by gravies,
which also have a range of possibilities, including red wine gravy,
stilton gravy (Isn’t stilton a cheese? How does that work?), rosemary
gravy, or vegetable gravy. It has occurred to me that with only a week
left here and given there are twenty different bangers and mashes on
the menu, I need to immediately go and order a meal of just mashes-
maybe a bowl of each kind with a small pot of each of the gravies.
Sounds like heaven.
But that leads me to the bangers or sausages on this menu. I asked Max
why a sausage is called a banger. I believe his answer (by this time I
was taking notes, and Max was leaping up to greet every customer, chat
a bit, then return to me and my questions, and within a few minutes,
off again, so I was both delighted to have such an incredibly helpful
source of information but quite discombobulated by the intermittent
flow of the details) was about the poor quality of sausage meat during
the war (important note- apparently “the war” refers to World War II,
while the “great war” is World War I—I think- remember, Max is moving
at high speed now about the restaurant and since I am old- my mind
doesn’t catch every detail these days) so when the bangers were
cooked, the higher content of water in them (I think) caused them to
explode “bang” and they became known as bangers. And if that somehow
isn’t correct, I think it sounds awfully good so I will just stay with
it. So bangers are a whole vast array of sausages. Some at the Big
Bang include Welsh pork and leek sausages, lamb and mint sausages,
wild venison sausages, basil and vine tomato sausages, wild boar and
pigeon sausages, stilton and walnut sausages and about 15 other
choices. His menu is totally entertaining to read- he has something
called the Cheapskate Sausage with a note- “2 less delicious sausages
with a simple mash”. Why would one buy this? I have no idea but the
English have a very strange sense of humor. Or his Wild Boar and
Pigeon Sausage comes with the note, “Don’t even ask, just be brave and
try them out.”
The bangers and mash were only the tip of the iceberg in this food
language lesson. When Max first sat down, I asked if I could ask a few
questions and my first was from the first item on the menu- "What are
“boiled eggs and soldiers”? OK, the “boiled eggs” I could guess,
except we are talking soft boiled, not hard-boiled. But the “soldiers”
refer to toast cut in triangles to dip in the egg yolk, and apparently
this is even a bit controversial- the toast is either thin cut or
thick cut (depending on the individual) with a bit of butter but not
melted butter or it will drip into the egg—you see where I am going
with this. I mean really, who has time for this kind of angst over
eggs and toast. I guess if one lives on an island with only 15 minutes
of news (repeated on SkyNews in 15 minute loops for 24 hours every
day), boiled eggs and thickness of toast becomes important. Then after
we ordered our breakfast of two eggs (bright orange yolks again),
sausages, a rasher of bacon (no idea what a rasher is but it means two
rounds of a ham like food), baked beans, sauteed mushrooms, 1/2 a
sauteed tomato, and triangles of toast (I guess ready for any dipping
we might do), Max mentioned that we might like some "marmite." Marmite
comes in a little tiny plastic pack, much like a butter pack, and is
apparently spread on toast by individuals who have some highly
developed masochistic tendencies. This stuff was AWFUL!!! It is brown
and gooey and tastes like a combination of boiled down Worcestershire
sauce, cider vinegar, maybe mustard, and possibly other ingredients I
was unable to taste because I was so horrified by what was in my
mouth. Once I recovered, the rest of the breakfast was fabulous.
Then there is the Bubble and Squeak. I am REALLY unclear what this is
but it has to do with frying together all your leftovers from
Christmas dinner on Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas and
is apparently a VERY important holiday here, because it is an official
day off from employment so that everyone can either go shopping or fox
hunt (checked in Wikipedia on that detail). So the Bubble and Squeak
has mashed potatoes as its base and then I suppose whatever vegetables
are traditionally eaten on Christmas day, fried to a crisp golden and
served with cold beef or turkey.
Another menu uncertainty was the Toad in the Hole. Again this is
something with sausages in a batter and fried. Why any food eaten by
humans is purposely called a Toad in the Hole was never explained (by
now Max was moving at supersonic speeds greeting and chatting) so I
had to simply remain in the dark on this detail. And I might add from
a personal point of view that any food item that has “toad” in its
name remains seriously suspect, given how I feel about toads!
Unfortunately, the night we went to try out the dinner menu, the Toad
in the Hole was not being served, so we made do with Shepherd’s Pie, a
ground meat thing with baked mashed potatoes on top. Mom used to make
this, so I had to give this one a 9.5 as compared to Mom’s 10, but it
was quite delicious.
So, the English’s rather strange sense of humor, combined with living
on a small island for several thousand years, has created a truly
interesting culinary vocabulary that actually is almost childlike in
its appeal. It begins to explain how Harry Potter and the Rabbit Hole
can arise from such wonderful, odd imaginations.
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