MISTAKES THAT MADE GOOD.

Otago Witness, Issue 3961, 11 February 1930, Page 63

MISTAKES THAT MADE GOOD.

Pork without apple sauce is reminiscent of mustard without beef, as threatened by Petruehio in the “ Taming of the Shrew.” It is significant, but in the country apple sauce, though its raw material is abundant, is seldom served with pork. If you are given anything with your pork it is usually country chutney. Thereby showing that pork was not originally served with ap sauce. Actually the habit comes from Yorkshire, where they are exceedingly fond of mixing sweets with their savouries. Legend lias it that a famous Yorkshire gourmet, having partaken of a mighty home-killed leg of pork, felt nausea creeping over him and turned for relief to a wooden howl full of pippins beside him. With the result that his indigestion was cured and the gourmet had found yet another dish to his palate.

It is easy, then, to trace the origin of jam roly-poly with hot mutton, redcurrant jelly with the same, currant dumplings with beef, and orange sauce with duck (the last an old favourite recipe from the French Court of other days). In France they cultivate and eat the dahlia, having discovered quite by chance, when other food was short, that the bulbous root, cleaned, cut up, and fried, makes a pleasant food. And in mediaeval England pigs were used to scent out the delicious truffle, now in season in France, which hides itself just beneath the ground. Truffles, also, are cleaned and cut in slices and fried, to resemble and even rival our friend the mushroom. Cream and milk were used to soften the one-time harshness o c tea until they are now a conventional habit; but < Chinese would shiver if you offered them such additions, preferring to “ take it neat.”

Ham and eggs is rumoured to be the Scottish tribute to British culinary art, and when in olden times bacon was coarser, stronger, and salter than it is in our rarefied days, eggs were obviously used to tone down its saltness or brine.

Tripe and onions hails from the home counties. Delving into a book of reminiscences, one finds that the old-time tripe dresser was a man of substance; that the dish flourished greatly in the early part of the twentieth century and that not an eating house from one end of London to the other but boasted of being the originator of the salubrious dish. Actually, tripe and onions was originally concocted by a pieman, who sold it from door to door over 200 years ago, when it cost the magnificent sum of threepence per portion. Peas pudding and pickled pork hails from Kent. Pudding pie, that quaint mixture of eggs-eum-rice-cum-cinnamon, currants, pastry, and milk, was once an Easter dish and offered to the poor on Easter Sunday as a mighty relish. It is also a native of Kent. Many dishes there are that owe accident for their origin; they hail from Devon and from Cornwall, from the Midlands, from our coast and from Wales. It is possible, however, that no dish is quite so famous as the complement of bread sauce to turkey, and in this case economy was responsible; at one time the bread sauce outvied the turkey in its largesse. It was used to fill up the stomachs of those who required too much bird! —Answers.