Red squirrels, a type of rodent, are a protected species in the UK and so it’s illegal to kill or eat them. On the other hand, many organisations these days encourage the killing and eating of grey squirrels. The meat tastes a bit like rabbit but is more delicious.
Try Not Delia’s grey squirrel with fennel.
Lamb’s wool is a traditional English drink which was popular from the 16th to the 19th centuries. It consisted of beer, heated, sweetened and spiced. Then the soft, fluffy pulp of baked apples was mixed in – presumably leading to the drink being so-named.
Samuel Pepys mentioned the drink in his diary on 9 November 1666:
Being come home, we to Cards until two in the morning; and drinking lamb’s wool, to bed.
Maids of honour are small almond-flavoured custard tarts, traditionally made with a lemon curd and cream cheese filling. It’s said that Anne Boleyn invented them whilst she was lady in waiting to Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII liked them so much he named them maids of honour after the Queen’s unmarried attendants.
Asda Good Living Maids of Honour
The word gallimaufry originated from the French galimaufrée meaning a meat stew. The word was adopted in English to mean any kind of hotchpotch, potpourri, or jumble of things. In culinary terms these days it could be used to describe any ragout of mixed meat and/or vegetables.
In earlier times ‘white meat’ was simply a term for dairy products, eg milk, butter, cheese, and sometimes eggs. However, in modern English white meat has two meanings. The main one refers to cooked breast meat and other pale-coloured cooked meat of poultry, as opposed to the darker meat of the other parts, such as the legs.
It’s thought that this usage was initially adopted as a euphemism in the 19th century (Victorian times) by those too refined to use the word ‘breast’ in polite company.
The other modern use of the term ‘white meat’ is to refer to pale-coloured meat in general, especially chicken and turkey, but also pork, rabbit, etc – as opposed to the red meats of beef, lamb, venison, etc.
Dark meat refers to the cooked meat from the legs of poultry, in particular chicken and turkey. As with white meat, the term seems to have been adopted in Victorian times as a euphemism to save the sensibilities of those too genteel to mention ‘leg’ – or worse still – ‘thigh’.
The word drumstick for chicken legs appears to have been coined earlier. According to John Ayto in An A-Z of Food and Drink, “The first known reference to poultry thighs as ‘drumsticks’ comes in the Mayor of Garret (1764), a play by the now almost forgotten dramatist Samuel Foote… They get their name, of course, from their shape, bulbous at one end with the bone protruding sticklike at the other.”
The word ‘joint’ is, in some cases, a similar euphemism for dark meat. In Britain, at least since the 16th century, a joint simply meant a large piece of meat for roasting. However, in 19th century America it meant something different. Given the Victorian-induced taboo of mentioning body parts such as ‘legs’, it was necessary to give these parts an alternative name. Thus the legs of poultry were referred to as joints. John Ayto (see above) writes: “Apparently it caused a certain amount of confusion among British visitors.”