Mucky Fat
Without Prejudice
Mucky fat is a delicacy now in Yorkshire, not just the diet of the poor anymore, a rare treat. It's drippings from the roast to be eaten with fresh bread and a pinch of salt. My Sis and I enjoy some, lost in our childhood memories of Wakefield Yorkshire. She 16 and me 12, when we returned there after 10 years in Australia.
We find Bonfire Toffee and Pontefract cakes of hard bitter licorice, tasting like black should taste if it were not just a colour. We eat Walnut Whips and long lost fruit gums that we thought were gone forever, butter tablet from Thorntons at the top of Kirkgate, opposite the Ridings. Yorkshire Puddings big as a dinner plate and filled with hash and onions, crunchy English cucumbers with vinegar, scotch eggs and Heinz Salad Cream, creamy and dense.
Tiny Yorkshires at Sainsburys, real English fish and chips with fat marrow-fat mushy peas and pots of tea, covered in a tea cosy. Real stick to the ribs stodgy English Food, warm tiny pork pies with their jelly membrane inside of crunchy pastry. Whole aisles in Morrisons dedicated to biscuits, Jaffa Cakes in a metre long tube and I want to take them home but am limited by baggage control.
Meals and treats of our childhood, the most iconic, Scottish or Butter Tablet, a dry fudge made with condensed milk. We are experts on it, knowing it's texture, it's colour, it's taste. No softness on the tongue but more a snap and a dissolving in the mouth. We stay two weeks and gain twenty stone. That's a joke, Joyce. But my summer dress feels tighter on re entry to Brisbane and then home, to Melbourne.
I take it back off again, any gained weight, as I hit jet lag non eating phase. I have to force myself to drink simple water, my system so confused it has no idea when to feel hungry, when to sleep, when to be awake. This time the worst jet lag I have ever experienced, not having slept for 48 hours, nor feeling hungry at an appropriate time. But it is worth it. All worth it, even the jet lag as I need to sleep, rest, nap, take it all in. An overview of sights, smells, tastes at once foreign and exotic.
I try not to think about the Paris experience of someone eating snails at the table next to us and the buttery sauce topping it. I feel like I am going to be sick as I think of food, English food, full of fat and sugar. I feel the thick saliva of nausea and refuse to give in to the feeling of weirdness. Drink lots of water and wait for jet lag to disappear.
Mucky fat is a delicacy now in Yorkshire, not just the diet of the poor anymore, a rare treat. It's drippings from the roast to be eaten with fresh bread and a pinch of salt. My Sis and I enjoy some, lost in our childhood memories of Wakefield Yorkshire. She 16 and me 12, when we returned there after 10 years in Australia.
We find Bonfire Toffee and Pontefract cakes of hard bitter licorice, tasting like black should taste if it were not just a colour. We eat Walnut Whips and long lost fruit gums that we thought were gone forever, butter tablet from Thorntons at the top of Kirkgate, opposite the Ridings. Yorkshire Puddings big as a dinner plate and filled with hash and onions, crunchy English cucumbers with vinegar, scotch eggs and Heinz Salad Cream, creamy and dense.
Tiny Yorkshires at Sainsburys, real English fish and chips with fat marrow-fat mushy peas and pots of tea, covered in a tea cosy. Real stick to the ribs stodgy English Food, warm tiny pork pies with their jelly membrane inside of crunchy pastry. Whole aisles in Morrisons dedicated to biscuits, Jaffa Cakes in a metre long tube and I want to take them home but am limited by baggage control.
Meals and treats of our childhood, the most iconic, Scottish or Butter Tablet, a dry fudge made with condensed milk. We are experts on it, knowing it's texture, it's colour, it's taste. No softness on the tongue but more a snap and a dissolving in the mouth. We stay two weeks and gain twenty stone. That's a joke, Joyce. But my summer dress feels tighter on re entry to Brisbane and then home, to Melbourne.
I take it back off again, any gained weight, as I hit jet lag non eating phase. I have to force myself to drink simple water, my system so confused it has no idea when to feel hungry, when to sleep, when to be awake. This time the worst jet lag I have ever experienced, not having slept for 48 hours, nor feeling hungry at an appropriate time. But it is worth it. All worth it, even the jet lag as I need to sleep, rest, nap, take it all in. An overview of sights, smells, tastes at once foreign and exotic.
I try not to think about the Paris experience of someone eating snails at the table next to us and the buttery sauce topping it. I feel like I am going to be sick as I think of food, English food, full of fat and sugar. I feel the thick saliva of nausea and refuse to give in to the feeling of weirdness. Drink lots of water and wait for jet lag to disappear.
