I Just Can't Stand It

[infinite monkey]

aaaccckkkk!

[toranokaze]

Yea gizzards and neck is what you make the gravy out of.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by toranokaze

Yea gizzards and neck is what you make the gravy out of.

No,no! That's the half-frozen stuff you yank out of the interior of the Butterball and throw away on Thanksgiving morning! It's a family tradition!

[Sundae]

Trotters!
Now you're talking.

Hot meat pies, saveloys and trotters!
Something you can talk about, something that will blow you out

Have you ever read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning?
Best description of London food (pre-war) I've read.
By a non-Londoner I mean.
Laurie Lee liked his grub though. He's the reason I went to Spain. Well, him and George Orwell. Eric Blair was more into politics than food though.

Anyway, that was the food my Nanny and Grandad lived on. London/ Irish, suet, gravy, offal (now prized by the nobs who would've turned their nose up back in the 30s) bacon, cabbage, your own rabbits, share of a pig if you could get one, fresh fish from Billingsgate and anything you could filch from the place you were working in. There's a complex set of morals in the East End, and stealing from your employer is (was) simply a perk of the job. Lord alone help you if you were caught with something taken from a local shop though.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Sundae

There's a complex set of morals in the East End, and stealing from your employer is (was) simply a perk of the job.

I don't think that's specific to the East End ye know. It's a survival of a much older arrangement between employer and employee and there are/were remnants of it in many traditional working class communities. Though it probably survived in a more defined way in London. The balance between money wages and in kind entitlements was a site of contention between employers and employees from the 18th century on. And within working class communities that sense of entitlement along the margins never really went away.

Personally, I think it has a small survival in the way we view taking home odd bits of office equipment (pens, paper, a holepunch etc), or the way many people who work in the NHS somehow acquire bits of bedding or kitchen towels with the NHS logo on them :P

It's something I've been looking at in relation to eighteenth-century conceptions of crime and criminality. A lot of the cases of theft in both civil and military cases hang on this sense of entitlement to chips and other perks.

[Sundae]

Aha!
Thanks for the historical perspective.
I can only report what I know, so it relates to the people born within the sound of Bow Bells.

I'm pretty sure I said before that Nanny used to smuggle home food in her underwear during the war. And when I was disgusted (as children will be by the proximity of food and knickers) she said you did what you could to feed your family and it you didn't you'd just go hungry. I remember being hungry as a child. Between meals. I'm not sure if families with two working parents are really hungry now. My parents have smoked salmon in the fridge. Yes, it's Every Day Value off-cuts, but it's still pieces of smoked salmon.

Eating between meals?
Eating what?
Nothing. Nothing spare to eat.
I don't mean this to sound like The Four Yorkshire-Men (much as I love it as a comedy sketch) but we were lucky when our London rellies came down and we got to sit on a wall outside the pub with a fizzy drink and crisps. Children get those on the way home from school these days.

So I can't even comprehend what it was like back then. When you had to hide what you grew and what you raised in your backyard for fear it would be confiscated.

And no, I don't resent it. I live right here right now and things are pretty much fine.
I'd never want to go back to a time when a tin of Heinz soup or a glass of "fresh" orange juice was a luxury starter. But I could if I had to.

[Gravdigr]

A couple days ago I spoke with a fellow who was under the impression that a Kindle/Nook/E-Reader came preloaded with the books.

All of them.

[Clodfobble]

In his defense, I bet he also thinks that can't be more than, like, 100 books, right?

[Undertoad]

In his defense, that is how we should be thinking of Kindle and whatnot, because the cloud.

Spotify is 98% of all recorded pop music, it's just not PREloaded. But it is 1 second away from steaming anything, at all times.

[JamesB]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

A couple days ago I spoke with a fellow who was under the impression that a Kindle/Nook/E-Reader came preloaded with the books.

All of them.

I recall about a decade and a half ago, I'd regularly get people asking me if I'd burn them a copy of the Internet onto a CD as they had no internet access and wanted to look at it.

The best was somebody that wanted it copied to a 1.44MB floppy as his ancient computer had no CD reader.

I should have mocked up something like this.