Savoury ducks

Yesterday, that is to say Monday evening, we were able to renew our acquaintance with savoury ducks.

It so happens that Lyme Regis, where we were visiting, still runs to a butcher, Colyton Butchers, possibly derived from some butcher of old who used to fatten cows for slaughter in the meadows adjoining the River Coly, a few miles to the west. But although his roots may be in cows, he does not spurn the pig and also sells savoury ducks, which he calls faggots, a form of meat ball, sold cold but cooked, more popular when I was young than they are now.

I remember them as being of a greenish tinge, wrapped in a white fat membrane, taken from somewhere inside the animal. Yesterday's butcher explained that the greenish tinge came from the tripe which used to be added to the mix, while yesterday's faggots were more dark brown and with the white fat cooked away.

Reheated in the oven, served with gravy to moisten, mashed potato and boiled white cabbage. Gravy made from a Knorr chicken stock pot, flour and water. All of which went down very well, with the two of us dealing with four faggots, leaving one to have cold in sandwiches today. The meat of the faggots was firm, brown and livery in taste. A sort of coarse paté - and given the popularity of this last in delicatessen counters in supermarkets across the land, odd that faggots are no longer popular, at least not in the home counties. Perhaps meat and two veg., the staple of my childhood, is a thing of the past - as indeed it should be, given the big contribution of mass produced meat to global warming and insect extermination. For which last see reference 3.

The illustration is taken from the relevant page of reference 1.

PS: it now occurs to me that while consumption of faggots does promote the production of meat, at least it is making good use of that meat, using up all the bits and pieces that so many of us would rather not know about. From where I associated to the peoples of the Far East, who are far less wasteful than we are in their consumption of meat, even managing to make a delicacy of such things as the feet of our Christmas turkeys.

Reference 1: Food in England - Dorothy Hartley - 1954. Third impression of the first edition. Lots of more modern editions appear in places like Amazon and Abebooks - with the latter now being a subsidiary of the former. You can't get away from Mr. Bezos; see reference 2 below.

Reference 2: https://techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks/.

Reference 3: Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers - Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, Kris A.G. Wyckhuys - 2019. It has already leaked out from behind its Elsevier paywall and an accessible summary is to be found in yesterday's (Monday's) Guardian.