Parmo v poutine: The ultimate post-pub nosh deathmatch It's Friday, and since we have no doubt you lot will be rolling out of your local hostelry later having partaken of a few liveners, you might want to consider just what mouthwatering treat will best cap off your night on the town. Well, we at the El Reg Special Projects Bureau have a couple of suggestions from the wonderful …
My mother-in-law takes unadventurous a step further, she won't even eat anything I've cooked and this is a woman who will suck the brains out of a chicken's head. I'm a pretty reasonable cook but the first thing she'll ask at dinner is who's cooked the meal.
I also have a friend who when we go out for a meal we have to decide before he arrives where to go otherwise he'll get in first with McDonalds which is as adventurous as he gets.
Apparently it's not only food, I read earlier that a third of Spaniards haven't even been outside their own province.
Thank you for your excellent exertions in the field of vital consumer research.
I do however have some reservations about the health of your poor experimental subjects... I can't get this image out of my head:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/220166.stm
Are you John Selwyn Gummer in disguise? And if so, I claim my £5.
If we keep trying to tell the spanish there's food from outside the pueblo that's good, and then some clowns come with curds drowned in gravy and cheap pork fried with random other things --- well, thanks for undoing all the efforts. This just convinces another generation not to try.
I have some unforgettable recollections from a few years in a US college and something called "Chease Steak". It was meat sheets 3mm thin which were grilled on a flat grill with LOTS of fat and a thick slice of cheddar topped on it. Add two buns of bread fried on the same grill and voila you have your ultimate death-by-cholesterol post-drinking bout fix...
Most deep-fat fried stuff is on an order of magnitude less fatty than anything like that.
Brown gravy and cheese curds were never meant to go together, least of all atop fries (or 'chips' if you like) and the result is every bit as disgusting as one might expect from such an infelicitous combination.
On the other hand, it's very hard to go wrong with deep-fried meat and Bechamel sauce.
Ne'er a truer word spoken.
Cheese... eeew.... The only place cheese belongs is..... hmmm.....
(long think) .... on a pizza, or a toasted ham and cheese sandwich/croissant/whatever...
As for pork... The only way I don't like pig done is raw.
FFS, now you've made me hungry... Time to go find a pig....
To any passport-carrying Lancastrian chips and gravy is the food of the gods (indeed gravy is the main thing I judge proper - i.e. Northern - chippies on). But why you'd want to shove cheese curds on it is beyond me.
With a bit more squeezing that curd and you'd have had a nice paneer. Much better in curries than on your chips.
When I worked at a certain disreputable PC "manufacturer" in Burnley we used to go to a local pub on Fridays and partake of their speciality, which was chips, cheese & gravy. Assembled in that order.
This, along with the Thwaites bitter used to wash it down, was one of the reasons not to buy a Time PC made on a Friday (or any other day to be honest...
Many years ago my parents held a dinner party. One allegedly "expert" guest was volunteered to make the Irish coffees. Yes, you guessed it, he didn't see the Maxwell House (jar) when looking for Nescafé (tin) and produced the most wonderful-looking but (even in his state) undrinkable Irish coffees ... made with Bisto.
Broke my dad's heart to pour all that whiskey and cream down the sink... Maybe if he'd had a poutine recipe he'd have been able to salvage something?
Lightweight fare!
To do the job properly you fry up some onions, bacon, salami and garlic. Mix with the properly larded chips then top with gravy and lashings of cheese. Now grill to melt the cheese.
During the meanwhilst fry off the pork schnitzel, top with pizza sauce, ham, bacon and cheese. Slap in the grill alongside the chips.
Once cheese has melted and both concoctions are buibbling nicely then decant to a plate, grab a pint of whatever, eat then call heart surgeon!
Bliss!
If you'd like to continue the search for the ultimate post-pub nosh may I suggest that you try a Dutch 'Kroket'. These are similar to the French 'Croquette', but instead of mashed potato they are filled with a scalding-hot mystery-meat 'sludge' that sticks to the inside of your mouth like savoury napalm. Of course if you are drunk when you eat one you usually don't notice exactly how hot they are until you sober-up the next day and the find the skin peeling-off the roof of your mouth... :)
More info, and a recipe for krokets here:
http://almostbourdain.blogspot.com/2010/01/kroketten-dutch-croquettes.html
I congratulate you sir, for the use of the phrase 'savoury napalm'.
I must say, you're not really selling it to me very well as post pub food. But then I can't bring myself to face a British kebab shop or van even when drunk.
A proper portion of fish'n'chip shop chips does it best. Proper fat ones, none of this frites malarkey either please. Although when I lived in Brussels, they were an OK substitute. I will however give credit to our Belgian friends for their excellent curry ketchup, which seemed to be some sort of sweet chilli, fake-tomato-y (OK, let's be honest, non-specific red flavour), yummyness.
As for mayonnaise and chips? Down with this sort of thing!
Just a typo there, the German frikadel (meat ball) is very different from the Dutch frikandel (sausage of the CMOT Dibbler type).
BTW a bitterbal is just a kroket but smaller, and round rather than cylindrical. They are usually served at cocktail parties and receptions. The correct etiquette after biting one is to say "Eeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuh" with your hand in front of your mouth.
Thumbs up to "savoury napalm"
It is, but the Italians are a bunch of gastronomic frauds anyway; pay them no heed. This is the country that sincerely believes having a differently shaped pasta is enough to make its "regional" pasta dish special in some way.
The Italians can deep-fry with the best of them, however:
Supplì — typically a sausage of ragù risotto with a lump of mozzarella cheese shoved inside, then deep fried in breadcrumbs; most popular in the Lazio region and its neighbours.
Arancino ("little orange") — very similar to supplì: deep-fried risotto, but a different shape with no tomatoes, originally from Sicily,
Calzone ("big sock") — usually a local meat product deep fried in a sort of pancake-ish batter;
Olive Ascolane— olives stuffed with meat and deep fried in breadcrumbs
And, of course, various forms of deep-fried cheese (usually mozzarella).
(Seriously, why else do you think older Italians are so bloody fat? They *invented* fast food! The Romans even invented the burger!)
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