From poor man's food to luxury item

[ninchursanga]

Friday after work I wanted to do my last food shopping for the christmas holidays: meat. I went to the butcher's and asked for oxtail and beef shanks.
To my dismay the lady behind the counter told me taht these are considered old-fashioned items. Oxtail and beef shank was once for poor people but
over time demand became so low that butcher's don't sell it anymore and now it became a luxury item.
To cut it short, she told me I have to order two weeks in advance.
:-(

[auntieannie]

it has found renewed interest here in England, or at least it did for a while, a couple years ago.

another one of these if you look through history is oysters. They were what poor celts would eat in Kent settlments near the Channel. And look what they are considered like in recent years.

[auntieannie]

or - who was telling me that when she was young, her mom was often buying pig trotters, as they were really cheap. I said you can go to Paris and pay lots of money for some of these nowadays.

[slowcoach]

From the UK, at least, unloved pieces of animals are exported, notably to the Far East.

I ate a lot of offal as a child, I cannot recall exactly but I think I was in my twenties before I had ever eaten things as lofty as beefsteak, for which I never did acquire a real taste.

British oysters were once cheap because they were so plentiful all around the Isles. Overfishing and pollution made them a luxury or not respectively.

[shrjeff]

maine lobsters were once food only for the poor, too!

[Baz Faz]

I lived in Durban which is subtropical and we had a couple of mango trees in our garden. My father didn't care fir mangoes so we sold the fruit to a couple of Indian men who scaled the trees and picked the fruit to make chutney. They paid us a penny for each mango. These were old fashioned pennies before the South African currency went metric. So that is 240 mangoes for £1. And here in Britain...?

[ninchursanga]

Interesting fact about the lobsters & oysters!
Lots of people in western society spend little time on cooking and it's easy to see how meat / food items that need to cook for hours went out of fashion.
When I lived in Virginia I often got meat from a local farmer and there the oxtail, shanks and tongue were always incredibly cheap. The farmer said that he could hardle get rid of these but also wondered what on earth I did with them.

[shrjeff]

shanks and tongue as well as other offal are major parts of jewish cuisine - from all areas - as they were cheap and only the poor would eat them... that means that in israel there is an anomaly where all these parts are readily available - but not cheap for example, chicken heart skewers are staples of kebab restaurants... as are sweetbreads, turkey testicles, etc...

[ninchursanga]

After all the years Mr. Nin can still rave about the tongue he had at a Jewish restaurant somewhere in the States. It was the first time he had eaten tongue and he loves it ever since.

[auntieannie]

love tongue. and sweetbreads are very expensive, in Switzerland at least.

If you want to bring laughter to the older generations, tell them about kale and pumpkin... it was animal fodder only not so long ago.

[Baz Faz]

At our last house in France we grew Jerusalem artichokes. We had an abundance of them but had absolutely no luck in giving them away in our village. Finally we asked why. We were told it was because they had been reduced to eating them during the war. Even people who hadn't been born in the war gave this excuse.

[tzarine]

chicken feet
a delicacy @ dimsum

all the bean soups that are $12 us a bowl

yes, oysters crack me up bc of their history

[ninchursanga]

I've also noticed that soups or "soup-to-go" is becoming the new hipster food here.

[tzarine]

like soupman in manhattan?

poke here

also corn was pig feed
now it's in posh salads