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They eat dogs in Korea. Not because they have to, but because they want to. Cats, too. It all started during the Korean War when the locals were running so low on food they started to eat their own pets and, discovering they rather liked the taste of Daschund Kiev, they carried on when the fighting had stopped and the food returned to the shops. *

Being fairly dense when it comes to Scottish history, I can only imagine haggis came about in similar circumstances (perhaps the systematic and particularly cruel clearing of the Highlands), and somehow survived once people realised it was actually rather nice.

It’s basically a sausage, but the label is far, far too honest. It could have got away with saying ‘Ingredients: pork’. Instead, though, it read ‘Ingredients: pork lungs, oatmeal, pork liver, pork fat, pork heart’. That put off even some of the meat eaters at David’s annual haggis party last night, which struck me as somewhat ironic when they were clearly happy eating such things if they could turn a blind eye to them.

It took us an age to get there, and aeon to return, but the effort was well worth it. David can pull together a varied and interesting group of people, and his cooking is fantastic. I didn’t know it was possible to do potatoes in so many different ways.

Two of the crowd of fifty or so apparently made their living as porn stars. ‘Have you ever noticed everyone in a porn film is apparently a star?’ I asked. ‘How come nobody is just a porn extra, or a porn-in-the-film-naked?’

There was a brief moment of quiet contemplation while the various bodies assembled in the kitchen tried to think of an answer. It was broken by a cackle from the hob. ‘There’s rosemary in this gravy,’ said the cackling guy with the spoon. ‘You know what that makes it?’

More silence.

‘Rosemary’s gravy!‘

The porn question remains unanswered.

* On coming back from Korea a couple of years ago when, thanfully, the worst we had to eat was Kimchi (dogs might actually have been better) I managed to convince several people that we’d gone to a restaurant where they had a big pen full of laboradors, like lobesters in a tank at a sea food restaurant, so you could pick your own and have it prepared on the spot.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.