I picked up the above - now mostly finished - packet of pork scratchings, from our local convenience store/Post Office in the village square, last night. Now, not all pork scratchings are created equal. Some are tough, some are soft (!). Some are highly [over?] salted, some are bland. Some are spot on, like the above pictured: easily crunchable rind under which lies a lardy layer of soft fat, to which is attached delightfully flaky dried meat. Absolutely scrumptious. There was a time when scratchings sold in packets in public places like pubs and off-licenses [you'll have to Google the latter reference], were almost exclusively a Midlands thing; particularly the Black Country, where most were and still are made, as indeed are those above. As with so many working-class foods and snacks, there is a certain general opprobrium directed towards them: a sort of looking-down-the-nose foodie sensibility that tends to dismiss such foodstuffs as somehow beneath the sophisticated palate of the gourmet class:
The very gourmet class that thinks nothing of consuming huge quantities of Fois Gras [expensive liver paste], Caviare [fish roe - also expensive], Escargots [snails, for God's sake: glorified and less tasty, land-bound seafood: usually also expensive]; but would baulk at scratchings, winkles, cockles, and the sundry other traditionally favoured snack foods of the hoi polloi: who, in turn tragically, have also largely turned their collective backs on such fare, preferring beef jerky or biltong as an 'up-market' alternative nibble/chew of choice. Now, I'm not averse to a bit of beef jerky or biltong; or a pastrami sandwich on rye with all the New York deli trimmings, or whatever: but when push comes to shove, give me a decent packet or two of The Black Country's very own biltong: the not-so-humble Pork Scratching, any time...
Comments
Post a Comment