Re: Cants

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Roger Mills wrote:

> Tristan McLeay wrote:
>
>
> > * Meat pies are a specific kind of pies. Basically, they take the meat
> >   that's left over after they've made the sausages, mince mean, dogfood
> >   etc., mix it in with something they pass off as gravy, and shove it into
> >   a pie. They serve one person.
>
> That's ghastly. Same thing here in Michigan-- they're attributed to the
> Cornish, and called pasties ['p&stiz]. Very ho-hum.
Pasties /pa:stiz/ here are generally vegetarian. If the choice is pies,
pasties or sausage rolls (you'd be amazed at how often that phrase comes
up. It's almost worth making a word for it), I'll alternate between
pasties and sausage rolls. The insides of a pastie (very rarely spelt in
the singular) are kinda like the insides of a sausage roll in texture,
though it's an odd green with peas and sometimes corn visible.

>  Get acquainted with Argentine empanadas, the same idea but no gravy:
> fry up chopped beef, onion, garlic, chopped olives and raisins (yes!!
> the best part); some add chopped egg and diced potato (non-authentic).
> Bake in a pie-pastry (small, for one).  Yum. (The same mixture is
> equally good in a pita-pocket, if you can't make decent pie dough).
Sans olives and with sultanas (sp?) not raisins, that sounds like it
wouldn't be too bad :)

> >   I have nothing against a pie whose main ingredient happens to be mince
> >   meat.
> In the US, that's a dessert (though Vermonters may eat it for breakfast, as
> I've done too)-- chopped apples, pears? raisins, citron, a little chopped
> beef and, traditionally, suet, all marinated I think in vinegar/sugar/spices
> and brandy or rum. Yum2.
Sorry, I forgot that 'mince meat' doesn't cross the Pacific well (I knew
'mince' didn't, but I thought adding 'meat' would be okay). I think what
I'm talking about is 'ground beef'? The kinds of things I'm talking about
are similar to meat-ball mixture in a pie, and certainly mains, roughly
what you described before, though I wouldn't've thought to add the olives
or raisins/sultanas. Beef in a dessert sounds odd to me.

> Appropriate to this time of year, Thankgiving and Christmas dinners.
Whereas I'm thinking of barbecues and potato salad and stuff :)
(Sometimes we have cold turkey and various other cold meats, but.---my
youngest brother's speech is rubbing off on me.) And only Christmas time.
A thanksgiving would be useful though. We've only got three public
holidays in the second half of the year, and two of them are Christmas and
Boxing Day (26 Dec.). And the other is not recognised by Universities
because it's out of semester and anyway, its not Australia- wide (Aussie
unis are closed only on national holidays. This makes it difficult getting
there on especially Labour Day when the public transport is on Sunday or
Saturday timetables).

Christmastime is confusing. Not only do we associate summer with it, but
also winter. But the fact that it's in summer makes one think more of
summer things, like bbqs and holidays and such. (Nothing to make one feel
more like a barbie than a 27 degree Celsius day.)

--
Tristan