Classic dishes which stiffened the backbone and upper lip of Britain in days gone by are set to vanish from the nation's larder, according to a survey of changing food tastes. Jugged hare, brawn and junket are unknown to the overwhelming majority of under-25s, who also shudder when confronted with many of the recipes' down-to-earth ingredients.
Increasing prosperity is tending to drive offal from young people's kitchens, the poll suggests, along with ingredients such as haddocks' heads and scrag end of neck. The runaway success of international cuisine, from pizza to Thai curries, has also eroded the appeal of pigs' cheeks in brine and boiled calf's foot, which date from periods of austerity.
The survey finds a distinct generation gap, with the over-60s well aware of all the dishes -- although not much bothered about the prospect of them dying out. People brought up on rationing, which only ended for some imported ingredients in the early 1950s, have embraced "new foods" as eagerly as everyone else.
At the top of the endangered list is Bath chaps, details of which appeared in the first English recipe book in 1769, written by Elizabeth Raffald, a housekeeper at a stately home in Salford. Back then, cooled pigs' cheeks, plus half the jawbone and tongue, in breadcrumbs were key to the national diet. Not today. Only 1 percent of under-25s knew about the dish.
Similarly, jugged hare -- boiled and served with hare blood and port -- was once part of the staple diet. It was immortalized in Hannah Glasse's 18th-century masterpiece The Art of Cookery, which starts its jugging recipe in early editions with the sage advice: "First catch your hare." But only 1.6 percent of young people had heard of it and 70 percent of young people said they would refuse to eat either the hare or the chaps.
At the other end of the age scale, 30 percent of over-65s knew and had eaten jugged hare, a figure rising to 40 percent for Bath chaps.
Some venerable puddings also face extinction, with the time-honored standby of junket -- sweetened milk set with rennet and sprinkled with chocolate flakes -- sadly on the way out. Lardy cakes and even spotted dick, the stuff of school meal jokes for much of the early and mid-20th century, are also in the top 10 list of sweets too bothersome to make and no longer familiar to the young.
"A huge generation gap in culinary knowledge seems to be opening, that could soon result in some dishes being lost forever," said Paul Moreton, the head of the television channel UKTV Food, which questioned 2,000 people for the survey. "Pig's cheeks and squirrel casserole are clearly not to everyone's tastes, but they are a powerful link to a bygone culinary era."
The regional factor was emphasized by survey results in Scotland and Wales. Scots are close to forgetting crappit heids (boiled haddock heads stuffed with suet) and whim wham, a fruit and bread trifle which meant nothing to 94 percent of under-25s.
The Welsh have gone off rook pie and are even showing signs of rejecting the former national dish of laver bread -- seaweed pureed with fine oatmeal.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS