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MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2016
phenomenon and industry here (but of such incidence and influence
that, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan declared that June 25
th
of
that year and forever hence would be known as National Catfish
Day. Mark your calendars!).
But for centuries before the United States was even conceived as
the imperfect union we have become, Africans, Asians and middle
Europeans dined on polliwogs, but by a different name, of course. In
Malaysia, it’s called
ikan keli
. In the United Kingdom, Vietnamese
catfish are called Vietnamese river cobbler.
Cobbler? That’s the most chuckleheaded thing I’ve ever heard!
Here at Rouses, by the way, we call those catfish native to Southeast
Asia — Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia —
Swai
(and
there’s nothing like a littleThai Swai to set your taste buds dancing).
In Nigeria, catfish pepper soup is a national dish. And so on. No
matter what you call it or where you get it, chuckleheads and
polliwogs and catfish make the belly feel good (and they’re so much
fun to say). And, as with many of the dishes we consider to be our
native pride, their true international provenance is a delightful,
head-spinning, mouth-watering journey across the globe.
• • •
Back to the U.K for a minute: My favorite British delicacy available
in New Orleans is the Scotch Egg (no British cuisine jokes, please;
in this story, we are promoting international peace and harmony.
And good eating).
The Brits are the folks who gave the world blood pudding, which
is sausage, not pudding, and Yorkshire pudding, which is bread, not
pudding, and bangers and mash, which is sausage and potatoes —
but with a much cooler name than sausage and potatoes.
The Scotch Egg is an English specialty named after Scotland and
the best one in New Orleans is, naturally, at a place called The Irish
House. Go figure.
A Scotch Egg is a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage (Pudding?
Bangers?), and then dusted with breadcrumbs and seasonings and
then baked. It’s a popular pub food in the U.K. because you can just
grab one and be on your way, eating it straight out of your hand
(although at the Minnesota State Fair each year, they are served on
a stick).
The London department store Fortnum & Mason claims to have
invented the Scotch Egg in 1738, but the record shows that a
Scotch Egg is just a different variation of the much older popular
Filipino street food known as kwek kwek. The difference being
that kwek kwek uses a quail egg and is tempura battered instead
of breaded.
It seems to be a rule of thumb that the weirder the name of the
food, the further away it comes from, and the better it tastes.
Let’s take bubble tea, for instance. I love the stuff.The best place
to get bubble tea on the Gulf Coast is either at Boba Time in
Mobile or at Sugar Rush in the quaint fishing village of Bayou
Le Batre, Alabama (that’s right, Forrest Gump’s hometown!).
The sizable Vietnamese shrimping community there has
sprouted a vibrant local cuisine culture. A mainstay of every
menu is bubble tea. But here’s the thing about bubble tea: Very
often, it’s not even tea. And it doesn’t have bubbles. And, for that
matter, it’s not even Vietnamese.
Bubble tea is most often a fruit and ice slushie-type drink
flavored with chewy pearls of tapioca. It comes from
Taiwan. Well, at least the recipe
originated there.Tapioca, of course,
is made from the roots of cassava
shrubs, which are native only to
northern Brazil.
And bubble tea is actually a very
modern phenomenon; its first known
appearance was in Taichung,Taiwan’s
third largest city, in the 1980s. But it
traveled fast — by the 1990s, bubble
tea bars had popped up all over the
United Kingdom.
So that’ll be one pineapple bubble tea
and a Scotch Egg, to go, please.
It’s a small world after all.
the
Around the World
issue
photo by
Romney Caruso