One burger, two and a half sausages, two pints of lager and a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday afternoon makes the perfect barbecue, a survey has found.
And they\’re right of course.
That\’s no barbecue, that\’s just cooking outside. Short beef ribs, baby back pork ribs, pulled pork, chicken of various cuts…….there\’s a great deal more to barbecue that a burger and a couple of hostages.
And that is why I call it a cookout, rather than a barbecue, having spent a couple of years of my wasted youth working in a BBQ joint in Georgia.
(The special sauce ingredient was the 20+ year old garden hoe used to mix the sauce!)
I’m glad the hoe was over 20, otherwise he could have been arrested.
Talking about cooking out my most recent acquisition has been a tandoor. And I’ve just about perfected the art of using it. Haven’t done any tandoori sausage yet, I think I’ll leave that to the celebrity chefs.
You eat hostages, or is that a Freudian slip?
Tim adds: it’s a rather famous English joke. In a book called “1066 And All That”, a humorous history of this country, the opening page has the following (roughly, this is from memory).
Due to an error that could not be corrected before publication all “hostages” should be read as “sausages” and all “peasants” as “pheasants” and vice versa.
So the text is littered with fun like so and so was grilling hostages, the King went hunting peasants and so on and on.
Of course it’s intentional…..both in the book and here. And one of those references that however good a speaker of English one is you’re unlikely to get without the cultural reference.
Hmm….it’s also perhaps something that the younger generation wouldn’t get these days either. The book was hugely popular but might not be now.
All depends on the quality of the sausages – which is true of much of life, don’t you find?
It is either a result of Global Warming – or, more likely, of the ignorance of southern, young, Telegraph journalists – that there is even a survey on barbecues in Britain. Manchester is nearer France than the north of Scotland but it managed to have a Test Match washed out by five successive days of rain in an English summer in 1938. And lager?!? Englishmen drink beer or cider, Scots Whisky or beer.
In my youth Brussel Sprouts cooked sausages over wood fires outdoors but sensible Englishwomen cooked under a roof where neither rain nor pollution from factories, could spoil the food (except on bonfire night where ability to cook sausages etc on an unpredictable bonfire was a demonstration of superior skills).