Off-topic: Pease Porridge, Pease Pudding
catlady_de_los_angeles
catlady_de_los_angeles at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 3 17:59:00 UTC 2000
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From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Off-topic: Pease Porridge, Pease Pudding
Date: 7/3/00 1:59 pm (ET)
Yesterday in the chat room I mentioned a piece of trivia I "know":
that our beloved New England baked beans were called Pease Porridge
back in Colonial times. Neil politely murmured some concern about split
peas. So I have been Web searching, first on Pease Porridge and then
on Pease Pudding, and my first finding is that he is correct: ALL the
recipes for pease porridge and pease pudding are made of split peas,
not pinto beans or black beans.
Another discovery was that Pease Porridge is the 'pease porridge hot'
of the nursery rhyme and Pease Pudding is the 'pease porridge cold'.
And I found two bunches of FUNNY info. One is a history of pease pudding:
There seems to have been pease pudding ("Pease porrige hot") as long as
there's been an England -- although, as C. Anne Wilson dryly notes in
Food and Drink in Britain, it was probably not all that much enjoyed until
salt was available to season it. There is no dating the moment when some
inspired British cook thought to make the porridge into a pudding by tying
it up in a sack and boiling this with pickled pork. As the peas swelled,
they drew in some of the succulent fat and the savory cooking water,
with its delicate taste of pork, salt, and cooking spice. (Unlike ham,
British picked pork is not smoked or dried, and so its subsequently much
milder flavor does not overpower the simple
pea-and-herb taste of the pudding.)
The taste of pea and pork proved so compelling in combination that
by the time of James I, a common street cry was "Hot grey peas and a
suck of bacon!" -- with the purchaser receiving literally that, for
the piece of meat was tied to a string, and the vendor quickly yanked
it out of any mouth that was taking more than the paid-for taste.
And the second Finally has a Tangential relationship to our Topic: a
community newsgroup that is full of names suitable for JKR to collect. I
don't know how many of the names are Authentic, and when I read the
following thread, I thought it was for sure a hoax until I read other
threads on the site:
http://www.sunderland.com/forum/messages/823.html
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