Jan-Feb-2016_Final-1-4-16-attempt2

the Around the World issue

• • •   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

photo by Romney Caruso

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.

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.

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2016