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0 pointsYeGoblynQueenne8y ago0 comments

Not every culture in Europe, I'm afraid. English people have a pretty strong aversion towards "offal" (innards). I live in the UK (I'm originally from Greece) and it's impossible to find any trachea or lungs, let alone small intestines for some traditional dishes I really miss (g. kokoretsi, gardoumba).

You can find hearts, livers, kidneys and stomachs, but except for chicken livers, pretty much only in halal (i.e. middle easterner) butchers, as far as I can tell.

Edit: Most English also tend to find blood saussages disturbing. There's black pudding, a blood sausage they make oop north, in Yorkshire, but people under the north-south divide won't go near it with a ten-foot pole.

And you should just see the expressions of disgust towards haggis (a Scottish dish made with innards and quaker oats).

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PeanutNore8y ago

Black pudding is a central component of the "full English breakfast" that seems to be readily available all over London. Someone's gotta be eating it, and probably not just tourists like me.

There's a huge class component in eating offal, though. It might be that you're associating mainly with middle class people who find eating offal to be beneath them, or looking for it in middle class areas. Small intestines (chitterlings or "chitlins" in the US) is a good example - I'm a middle class white person in the northeastern US and I've never had them and no one I know has ever admitted eating them to me, but they're popular among poor people of all races in the rural south and among black Americans in northern cities.

I do enjoy kiska, though, along with a number of my friends - a Polish blood sausage flavored with marjoram. A lot of people here have Polish ancestors who came here for work in the steel mills, and it's a very working class sort of food.

YeGoblynQueenneOP8y ago

Black pudding is part of the full English in Yorkshire, but not more southerly than that, as far as I know. It's not surprising to find it in London- you can find anything edible in London, including a restaurant that specialises in cooking animals whole and letting nothing go to waste. I forget the name, it's one of those trendy expensive ones so I've never been.

Where I live in the South, the full English is french toast, baked beans, hash browns, fried mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, eggs, bacon, sausage and spam (sorry, couldn't resist). I sincerely believe that a majority of English people would not touch their breakfast if it had black pudding in it.

Also, I'd think the middle classes would be more likely to eat offal, just to show they're superior to the plebs. But I might be wrong.

riffraff8y ago

there are a lot variations (hungarians seem to consume a lot of chicken liver which I have _never_ seen in a supermarket in Italy, while beef liver is very common in Italy and seldom sold in Budapest), I just felt the blanket statement towards "the west" was wrong.

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