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From: vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com
Newsgroups: soc.history.ancient
Subject: Ancient Cuisine (Dormouse?)
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 07:04:58 +0000 (UTC)
[About a decade ago I had read that some European animal rights
groups were in an uproar over a Dutch TV show showing how ancient
Romans ate. As I recall the story, the chef took a doormouse by the
tail, knocked it out by drowning its head in wine in a goblet then
toasted it over a candle fire to make an hors d'oeurvre. I went
searching for this in print and got these instead. I would appreciate
if anyone found the one I remember.]
DISHES FIT TO SET BESIDE NECTAR OF THE GODS Roger Tredre May 1,
1994 OBSERVER (Guardian) p10 Ancient Greek cookery is setting a fresh
new fashion among the foodies
WHAT goes around comes around. The modern fashion of cooking with
wholesome ingredients simply prepared is reviving interest in the food
of the gods - Ancient Greek cuisine.
A new translation of probably the earliest Western cookbook, The
Life of Luxury by Archestratus, will be published this week. It has
been written by Dr John Wilkins, senior lecturer in Classics at Exeter
University, and Shaun Hill, chef at the Gidleigh Park Hotel, Devon.
Dr Wilkins has no doubt that the Greeks were supreme in the
kitchen. 'Their cooking was simple, elegant and full of texture. The
Romans inherited Greek cooking and ruined it.'
That process is now going into reverse. Mr Hill, one of Britain's
most highly regarded chefs, said: 'Fifty years ago, we might have
preferred the Roman approach. But Ancient Greek cooking has much in
common with the Nineties belief in a healthy, balanced diet, with less
emphasis on meat and vulgar sauces.'
Archestratus, who wrote in 300 BC, sounds like a modern foodie. He
favoured fish over meat and insisted on freshness and quality. This
was not to be spoilt by strong sauces: he preferred adding oil and
light herbs.
At the Cafe Grec in Charlotte Street, central London, the Ancient
Greek revival is well under way. Peter Tsacpounidis, its ebullient
owner, has spent years researching Ancient Greek recipes. His menu
includes a series of dishes plucked from the works of Athenaeus, a
later Greek food writer.
Mr Tsacpounidis regularly flies to Greece to show his fellow
Greeks how their ancestors used to cook. 'I've been asked to open a
restaurant in Athens,' he said. 'Athens is completely ignorant of
cooking. The city has no proper restaurants.'
The Observer invited a couple of Ancient Greek foodies to sample
some of Mr Tsacpounidis's dishes and ponder the secrets of the
Athenian kitchen. They know their stuff. Andrew Dalby, a librarian and
historian, and Sally Grainger, a professional chef, are working on the
Classical Cookbook, to be published next year by the British Museum.
Ms Grainger is a stout defender of the Romans. 'They were not
culinary barbarians. Maybe some of their recipes are excessively
spiced, but there are some wonderful, first-class dishes in the
writings of Apicius,' she says. But she also appreciates Ancient Greek
grub, which makes her a natural ally of the owner of the Cafe Grec.
Mr Tsacpounidis is ambivalent about the Roman-versus-Greek
argument. 'The Romans borrowed everything from the Sicilian Greeks. In
the beginning they killed it, but later they improved it.'
Mr Tsacpounidis believes some chefs have been appropriating
Ancient Greek recipes for years. 'I challenged the owner of a
restaurant in Paris named after Archestratus,' he growled, plunging
into a plateful of squid stuffed with vegetables. 'He took the dish
off the menu.'
The precise ingredients of Ancient Greek recipes are a source of
rich debate. At lunch, the debate was conducted with exquisite
politeness. Mr Dalby examined some spinach on his fork and queried: 'I
wonder, would Athenaeus have recognised spinach?'
Mr Tsacpounidis grinned: 'No, no, I added that.'
He is planning to wean his regular customers on to Ancient Greek
food. 'Before long, I hope the entire menu will be converted to
Ancient Greek.'
Our experts' meal included a lentil and coriander soup, a hard
cheese in a mint and wine sauce, fried liver and a dish combining
chicken and barley.
Mr Tsacpounidis then produced a homemade golden nectar composed of
honey, wine and the juice of flowers. Mr Dalby was ready with a query:
'Surely this should only be drunk by gods and goddesses?'
The Ancient Greek revival is not restricted to food. This summer's
fashions also reveal an interest in things Athenian. Designers such
as Vivienne Westwood and Karl Lagerfeld showed draped and pleated
shift dresses and tunics on the catwalks. But after a long lunch
washed down with ample quantities of the wine of the gods, our experts
decided to leave fashion until another day.
AROUND THE TABLE OF THE ROMANS; Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome
Publishers Weekly October 28, 2002 p60 Patrick Faas, trans. from the
Dutch by Shaun Whiteside. Palgrave, $29.95 (352p) ISBN 0-312-23958-0
Faas, a Dutch food historian and chef, opens with the caveats that
this is "no historical treatise" and that the more than 150 recipes
will be difficult to prepare in a modern kitchen. Excuses aside, this
is a capable study of the fascinating ancient Roman culture and the
foods that graced its tables. A culinary history leads up to and
through the Empire, when imported foods were all the rage and forks
were unheard of. (Slaves were ordered to grow long hair so that their
masters could wipe their hands on it.) Granted that these recipes are
unlikely to be usable, as Faas points out, it's still unfortunate that
such recipes as Broad Beans with Meatballs leave out certain details
(such as, the type of pan used and the cooking time). Although Faas is
most enthusiastic about foods that won't cause the modern palate to
salivate - e.g., Stuffed Mouse and Dolphin Balls as well as "the meat
of nursing puppies" - of greatest interest here are the comparisons
between ancient Roman foods and modern Italian cooking. A dish of
Fried Courgettes marinated in vinegar would not be out-of-place on
today's antipasto table, and the Lupin beans that were once fed to
livestock are now brined and eaten as a snack.
SALTY, SUGARY AND VINEGARY - ALL FLAVOURS OF ANCIENT ROME;
Birmingham Post (Midland) March 1, 2003 Pg. 47 JO IND. We know a great
deal about Roman dress thanks to sword and sandals epics like
Gladiator and period comedies like Carry On Cleo, but how much
do we know about Roman cuisine?
Tasting food from around the world is one thing. It is so much a
part of our daily life that we take it for granted - a curry on Monday
night, Chinese on Tuesday. Pasta and pizza have become staple fare.
But food from another era is a different matter altogether. How
did the Aztecs and Incas cook? What would it have been like to have
sprawled round a table in ancient Rome?
The latter is the subject of a book, Around the Roman Table by
food historian Patrick Faas.
Rather ominously, it contains the following warning: 'The
publishers offer these recipes for historical interest, but there is
no guarantee they will suit the modern palate.'
All of which raises the question - why bother? Why be concerned
with the food that was created before microwaves, fridges, freezers
and fan-assisted ovens were invented, especially as, to our tastes, it
is likely to be disgusting?
One answer to that is that food is central to any society and
therefore a way into understanding another culture is to tell the
story of its attitude towards food.
What does it say about our own society, for example, that food
programmes on television are popular entertainment but actual cooking
is thought of as taking too much time?
In ancient Rome, where slave labour was free, preparation time was
not considered an issue.
Many of the methods that they used took what to us would be an
inordinate amount of time.
'In addition, many laborious methods of preparation and production
had a religious significance,' says Faas.
'Plants were sown and harvested in harmony with nature, the gods
and the constellations.
'Agriculture, cattle breeding, harvesting and slaughtering were
performed according to holy rituals.
'Herbs and spices were pounded in a mortar, and grapes were
crushed by bare feet.
'All of this affected the taste of food. It's easy enough to grind
spices in a mortar, but making wine by dancing barefoot on macrobiotic
grapes is a different matter.
'It's just a question of how far you want to go.'
Indeed. Furthermore, re-created Roman cuisine involves stretching
our imagination back to the days before Columbus had brought back his
goodies from America.
Hard as it is to contemplate a kitchen without potatoes, that was
what it was like in Roman times. Neither were there tomatoes, red
peppers, brown beans, avocados, pineapple, paprika, maize, vanilla,
cocoa, peanuts or turkeys.
Still, the Romans looked for variety elsewhere. They ate all the
birds, fish and mammals that were known at the time, including pig's
ears, fish eyes, wombs, udders and intestines.
It is likely that Roman food was heavily spiced, though it is hard
to tell because very few of the recipes of the time contained quantities.
'The Roman cook didn't believe that lamb had to taste of lamb,' says Faas.
'As far as he was concerned, a piece of meat was like an artist's
blank canvas, to which he could apply colour and shape.'
For flavourings, Romans would use vinegar, lemon juice and salt.
Vinegar was very popular. Some was made from figs, but most came
from wine of which the Romans had plenty.
Vinegar was also used to purify water, sterilise wounds and soothe
insect bites. Pliny claimed it suppressed hiccups and had cooling
properties if held in the mouth during a hot bath.
By our standards the Romans consumed a great deal of salt, partly
because food was preserved in it.
In addition to this, or perhaps because of it, the Romans loved salty food.
Salt was a kind of currency to the Romans. Originally magistrates
were paid in salt - sal in Latin is the word from which 'salary' is derived.
Salt was also considered sacred. The master of the house kept it
in a silver salt-pot, which he used to banish the spirits that spoilt
food or caused it to rot.
Honey was the other great love of the Roman kitchen.
It was used with meat, vegetables, and fish as well as in
desserts. The cook Apicius lists 34 sauces for fish, of which only two
are entirely savoury.
The Romans used sweet tastes to counter overpowering saltiness.
Honey was seen by the Romans as a gift from heaven, closely
related to the nectar drunk on Mount Olympus. One Greek myth has it
that Jupiter transformed the lovely Melissa into the first bee.
It is also one of the few ingredients of Roman cuisine which would
have tasted the same in ancient days as it does now.
Herbs were popular too. Spices that were available in every Roman
larder included saffron, pepper, ginger, myrtle berries, lemon grass
and cardamom.
Essential seeds were poppy, laurel berries, aniseed, celery, fennel,
lovage, rocket, coriander, cumin, dill, parsley, caraway and sesame.
Mint, sage, oregano, juniper leaves, shallots, thyme, coriander,
Spanish camomile, parsnip, dill, garlic, elderberry, mustard and
fenugreek were also very popular.
Despite the fact that lovage has fallen into disuse in Italy
today, it was an essential Roman ingredient.
It has such a pronounced taste that it gives every dish a typical
Roman note. Cumin, coriander, mint and basil were also very popular.
Originally Romans ate little meat, says Faas. They were reluctant
to slaughter their cattle, since farm animals fulfilled all kinds of
practical functions.
Sheep were kept for wool. Goats gave their milk. Geese and
chickens laid eggs and supplied down.
The bullock, which grew into a sturdy ox, pulled the plough for the cart.
Some farmers also had a donkey, a mule or a horse, all of which
worked for a living and were allowed to reach old age.
The only animal that had no other use than for the pot was
pig. The pig enjoyed such popularity that the Roman chef Apicius wrote
'meat' when he meant 'pork'.
It was believed that pork has 50 different flavours.
The Romans ate every bit, apart form the bones and the eyes - the
ears, the cheek, the jaw, snout and tongue were all considered
delicacies.
Faas has discovered recipes for stuffed womb and sow's nipples.
Sometimes pork delicacies were called 'boiled meat' because they
were boiled for a long time and sometimes served in soup, which
contained so much gelatine from the bones that when it cooled it set
to a stiff jelly.
But the pig on spit was a symbol of great feasts as it is today.
Before being cooked in the open air, the beast would be precooked
in a huge pot, or held in steam by slaves.
But as Faas explains, not having a swine-sized pot or a few slaves
lounging around doesn't mean modern cooks can't enjoy the dish.
'A pig spit-roasted in the open air is very tasty,' says Faas.
In fact a spit-roasted pig cooked in the open air seems like a great
variation on the barbecue theme.
With friends in togas, drinking copious amounts of wine, lying
around on the lawn, a Roman themed dinner party could be the craze of
the summer.
Around the Roman Table by Patrick Faas is published by Pan
Macmillan and costs pounds 15.99.
O TEMPORA, O MUNCHIES; JELLYFISH OMELETTE, ANYONE? CHRISTOPHER HART
Independent on Sunday (London) February 9, 2003 Pg. 14
We take a peculiar delight in finding the eating habits of
previous ages disgusting. Roman delicacies such as flamingos' tongues
and sows' udders seem to us to epitomise the freakishness and
decadence of that age - and our own superiority. A very Whig and
witless view of history: the Romans, after all, might be even more
disgusted at our own eating habits, with our penchant for
factory-farmed chickens so tasteless that they have to be injected
with MSG-enhanced chicken flavouring to make them taste of
something. Anything.
Patrick Faas's Around the Roman Table is a smorgasbord (or
gustatio) of gastronomic wonders and delights. He tells us what the
Romans ate, how they cooked, whether they really vomited between
courses (they didn't), and what they wiped their hands on (the hair of
a passing slave). He includes 150 recipes, and he flavours his erudite
text with pleasing oddities. I never realised that the name Cicero
derives from the Latin for chickpea. Marcus Tullius Cicero: Mark T
Chickpea. I will never read the Tusculan Disputations in quite the
same way again.
The similarities between Roman and modern Italian cooking are
plentiful. The three-course dinner was standard. They ate varieties of
pizza and pasta: their globi were essentially tortellini filled with
cheese. The most striking difference would have been the absent
tomato. A proposed dinner menu in one of Martial's poems goes: tuna
with boiled eggs and a Cappadocian salad (salad Nicoise); white puls
with sausage, bacon and green beans (risotto); and to finish, raisins,
Syrian pears and Neapolitan roast chestnuts. Three or four portions of
fruit and veg in a single meal, and no E numbers in sight. Nor does it
seem particularly greedy, although the image that has come down to us
is of a race of gluttons: a misconception due to joyless prudes like
Pliny, who complained that "man is the only animal to suffer from an
insatiable desire to eat." (He obviously knew nothing of golden
retrievers.)
But they were different from us, of course. They ate the livers of
obese pigs fattened for months on beer. [Talk of foie gras!] They ate
jellyfish omelettes. They ate sows' wombs in brine. On the other hand,
I'm quite taken with some of their other ideas: dolphin fishballs,
lobster sausages, a peppery sheep's brain pate, wild boar cooked in
seawater. Even deer cheese, rabbit cheese - why not? Any mammal will
do. (This rather set me off: vole cheese! Otter yoghurt! Aardvark
fromage frais!)
Faas deals sensibly with our vulgarised notion of what a Bacchic
orgy might have been: a solemn religious ritual in honour of the god
of wine and ecstasy, and not the Roman equivalent of a wife-swapping
party. And although there were moments of madness and extravagance,
they didn't last. Yes, the Emperor Elagabalus really did serve up
dishes such as peas with pieces of gold, lentils with onyx, beans with
amber, and rice with pearls, as well as the brains of 600
ostriches. But what can you expect if you make a boy of 15 absolute
ruler of an Empire? And he was dead by 19.
Apart from the occasional bits of jewellery in your vegetables,
the Roman diet was 100 per cent organic and free from all artificial
additives. Not that the Romans were remotely eco-friendly or
animal-rightist, of course. They fattened sows to death on mead and
dried figs, and small birds were simply drowned in wine to improve
their flavour (although Faas is surely right to argue that these
sporadic cruelties bear no comparison to the industrial scale of
misery inflicted on animals today). And the insatiable million mouths
of Rome devoured many species to the point of extinction, most
lamentably the delicious North African herb laserpithium, which tasted
something like garlic but better. It was one of Libya's major exports
and worth its weight in gold. For some decades it seemed to have
vanished altogether, until a single surviving specimen was found in
the Cyrenaic desert. Was it nurtured and protected and guarded day and
night until it should seed again? I should coco. It was dug up and
sent to Rome, where the Emperor Nero ate it. And that was the end of that.
Fish entrails and squelchy organs a taste of Ancient Rome Evening
Standard (London) January 13, 2003 Pg. 44;45 Felipe Fernandez Armesto
AROUND THE ROMAN TABLE by Patrick Faas (Macmillan, £15.99) THE
Romans didn't have microwave ovens," Patrick Faas helpfully reminds
us, and today's kitchens lack "slaves prepared to hold a pig in hot
steam". If your slaves are uncooperative in this respect, our author
assures us, "a pig spit-roasted in the open air" is just as tasty. It
is hard to tell whether Faas is really a platitudinist or whether his
truisms are samples of the humour of his native Holland.
His book is adventurously arranged in sections corresponding to
the "four elements" into which Romans divided the world: earth for
vegetation, water for fish, air for birds.
Faas associates quadrupedmeat with sacrificial fire, as the Romans
did. He ranges commendably wide in the source-material, finding many
uncommon recipes - or, at least, descriptions of dishes from which he
infers a recipe.
Usually, we are given the original Latin, then a translation, then
a paraphrase for the modern cook.
WHEN roasting sows' nipples, for instance, wrap them in tin foil
"to help avoid the skin getting too tough". You fancy a nice stuffed
womb? "Use a non-virgin womb for this," Faas advises. He tells the
reader to remove sausages from their skins when stuffing suckling pig,
though it is evident from a passage in Petronius that Romans did not
do this.
Sometimes Faas seems timewarped, as when he suggests tenderising
octopus by beating it against rocks. [Greeks still do this] At others,
he is Islington-hip, advocating grated Parmesan as a garnish for
electric eel. First catch your eel.
Though he waxes convincingly enthusiastic over a chicken galantine
with lambs' brains and fish relish, Faas usually describes tastes
vaguely or not at all, so that one wonders whether he has really tried
his dishes: "This is very salty," he says typically, or "this sauce
goes well with ostrich".
He is alert to some of the indelible conventions of Roman cooks:
the mania for disguise and surprise, in which a chicken is moulded,
tweaked and enamelled to resemble a loin of pork, or a sow's womb is
re-crafted in the form of a fish. He explains it well: "Where is the
art in preparing lamb to taste like lamb?"
He spots the obsession with sauces and the preponderance in them
of pepper, lovage and asafoetida. He admits the difficulties:
surviving Roman recipes are vague about quantities and it is hard to
know how far everything really tasted of garum - the ubiquitous relish
made from stinking fish-entrails. On the other hand, Faas fails to
appreciate the bottom line of Roman taste: viscous textures commanded
the highest esteem.
Hence the demand for squelchy shellfish, obese snails, engorged
goose livers, squashy tongues, glutinous wombs, slick throatlinings
and the innermost of organ meats.
The writer's scholarship is deficient: he ignores some of the best
work on his subject, including that of the leading classical
cookbook-writers Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger. He sketches the
historical context enthusiastically but shakily.
Although the book begins with a rather breathless, routine digest
of Roman chronology, the treatment of Roman cooking lacks a sense of
development over time.
RECIPES from the republican era jostle those of late antiquity in
an undifferentiated menu. It undermines readers' confidence to find
many mistranslations.
Some of the errors are serious because they distort the recipes:
laser, for instance, was fennel-root extract in liquid form
(asafoetida is the same substance, but dried).
The cicer arietinum was not a pea but a bulbous chickpea said to
resemble a ram's head.
Colephium was almost certainly a meat product, not taro (which Faas
elsewhere correctly identifies as what the Romans called
colocasia). The egg yolks which Faas repeatedly treats as the basis of
emulsions may have been boiled and grated or simply stirred raw into
the sauces of which they formed part.
Disconcertingly, Faas asserts absurd lines of descent from ancient
to modern. Risotto, for instance, made by sweating flavourings in oil
and adding rice and water, has nothing in common with the ancient
porridge the Romans called puls, which was a boil-up of wheat or spelt
grains with vegetables.
Globi were not 'a kind of tortellini' (which are pasta parcels)
but resembled croquettes.
Still, this may not matter much: Faas's is a book more for fun
than instruction - unless you were really wondering how to cook
flamingo (boil with vinegar and a date) or dormice (stuff with
asafoetida and fish sauce) or make dolphin balls (don't forget the rue
berries).
When it comes to preparing a lovage sauce for crane, even Faas is
defeated: "Pound together the ingredients," he suggests, "in
quantities to suit your taste."
Even a Gastronomic Adventurer Like Me Draws the Line at Dogburger
December 15, 2001 ben.macintyre@thetimes.co.uk
When Man bites Dog, should he swallow? This issue has become a fierce
bone of contention in the run-up to next year's World Cup, pitting
France against the competition's co-hosts South Korea or, more
specifically, Brigitte Bardot against the millions of South Koreans
whose idea of Seoul food is a big steaming bowl of dog stew.
The French actress turned animal rights campaigner has written an open
letter to the Korean people abhorring the practice of eating dogs
and demanding that they stop it, immediately. Sepp Blatter, the Fifa
President, has also called for the South Koreans to take "immediate
and decisive measures to put an end to this cruelty".
Journalists like to think the unthinkable, but also to eat the
unfeasibly exotic: the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. My
mother always insisted that you can't say you don't like something
until you've tasted it and with that in mind, in various parts of the
world, I have always sought to find the oddest dish on offer, so long
as it was not endangered or capable of speech or fetching one's
slippers.
With various gastric effects, I have dined on deep-fried Texas
rattlesnake, roast kangaroo, horses of different breeds, Louisiana
alligator, llama sausage, broiled zebra, ostrich burgers, hump of
bison and Pakistani goat testicles with tomatoes, garlic and chilli,
served with warm chappatis. I have eaten braised python in China,
locusts with honey (from the school incubator, during my Messianic
religious phase), and pan-fried escalope of armadillo with a group of
Guarani Indians in the Paraguayan jungle, when it would have been rude
to refuse.
I have even eaten deep-fried pizza, a speciality of my native
Scotland.
But I could not eat a dog.
Mind you, I don't have to, because my friend the food writer Paul
Levy has eaten dog, and describes it as "fatty chewy with a very
strong, though not disagreeable flavour, like mutton, venison or
goat". In Western Europe, we are intensely squeamish about eating
what we now regard as domestic pets, but it was not always
so. Hippocrates recommended a little puppy as part of a healthy,
balanced diet; the Romans ate mice; the Spanish have a recipe for
Estremaduran cat stew, which is an Estremaduran cat braised in white
wine, thyme and bay leaves; the Swiss have been known to chew on
gedorrtes hundefleisch, or dried dog.
Parisians during the siege of 1870 initially expressed deep qualms
about eating their cats and dogs, but then tried to outdo one another
in elaborate feline and canine concoctions and ended up consuming more
than 6,000 of them, as well as countless rats and the entire
zoo. Absolutely typical. Let them eat dromedary, said Her Majesty.
Gastronomic hypocrisy and speciesism is rife in the debate over
what does and does not constitute fair game: the Japanese and French
disdain dog, but consider horse a speciality; the Koreans eat plenty
of dog, but utterly disdain horse; in Britain, we won't eat dogs or
horses, disdain the Japanese, Koreans and French, and stick to the
chicken tikka of Old England. We are appalled that dogs might be
reared in cages for food, but don't give a damn that the battery
chicken in the tikka lived an even crueller, darker life. Koreans
argue that Confucian culture does not hold with the anthropomorphism
of animals. In Europe dogs grew close to man through hunting, whereas
in Korean agrarian culture they had little utility except as guards
and, on special occasions, supper.
Chinese medical texts hailed the benefits of dog meat several
thousand years ago, but contrary to popular belief in Korea,
dog-eating became widely popular there only during the last war, when
there was not much else.
Similarly, the French taste for horsemeat originated more from
desperation than desire: after the Battle of Eylau, starving French
troops of the First Empire were instructed to slaughter a few horses
and then stew the meat in their breastplates, with just a soupcon of
gunpowder to bring out the flavour.
In Britain, during the Second World War, the "Continental Butcher"
opened in Chelsea, to sell horsemeat discreetly to the upper classes;
Theodora Fitzgibbon served up rook pie to her appreciative dinner
party guests, who assumed they were eating game.
Some two million dogs are consumed every year in South Korea, and
Bardot's campaign has inevitably provoked charges of gastronomic
imperialism. We have no right to tell Koreans what to put on their
plates. But the attention brought by the World Cup may at least
persuade the authorities to do something about the horrible conditions
in which dogs are bred and slaughtered in Korea. Some of the poor
brutes are even fed opium before they are killed, to give the eater an
additional high.
There is no such thing as hand-fed, organically reared dogmeat and
precious little in the way of Korean animal welfare laws, but any
pressure in that direction might at least improve the short and
squalid dog's life of the Korean canine.
Many Koreans believe that a meal of dog heightens the sexual
appetite. We don't want any of that sort of thing distracting our
boys as they go into the group of death next May. A plate of dog is
supposed to provide relief from the extreme summer heat, but I am also
told that dog is rather heavy and has a tendency to bite back in the
form of chronic midnight indigestion.
So my advice to the English soccer team is to avoid the real dog on
the menu, and stick to the hot variety; but perhaps even David Beckham
is bright enough to steer clear of a dish that advertises itself as
Soo Yuk.
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