several times in some cases






We were amazingly rude about school dinners. The kindest name we had for tinned tomatoes was failed paratroopers.




Scrote once saw someone choke when, after a careful study, his table-mate confided thoughtfully that the chop he was eating had clearly come from an animal that had died from having its ribs kicked in.


The area, which nowadays would be referred to as 'deprived inner city', featured frequently in the more lurid national newspapers, which correctly described it as inhabited by: 'Prostitutes, Asian Immigrants, West Indians, Irish Labourers & Students'. The order given accurately reflected students' social standing as well as our relative wealth.


You can take these things to extremes. A student friend lived largely on a diet of peanuts supplemented with discarded vegetables from the local market. His clothes were patched indefinitely with scraps of brightly coloured leather and local children were terrified of him, convinced he was a wizard. However, when he left university he had saved enough money to buy a house with cash, albeit a cheap one.


But then again, perhaps Scrote can live with animals being killed for food because he's not actually the one doing the dying?




As well as devising high-speed mincers which would grind skin, offal, cartilage and even bones to an unidentifiable and supposedly edible paste, butchers suppliers also offered additives which were advertised with "Why Sell Meat When You Can Sell Water?".


How do lips, noses and ears appeal? Or udders? Ground to a paste, they are undetectable, and perfectly legal. What did you think 'value' sausages were made of?


Actually Indonesian Soy Sauce does contain sugar but that is a different variety.



Titanium dioxide is used in the glaze on your toilet bowl, for the same reason.





Eleanor, my daughter, is a whizz with chopsticks- but then she is also the only person Scrote knows who can eat soup with a fork.




You can grow some of these in your garden from the seeds. Coriander & Fenugreek grow particularly well. Dill, Caraway and Fennel grow well but are liable to cross fertilise if close.


Some people have an allergy to gluten and cannot eat anything with a cereal flour in. Rice and Maize (Cornflour) have no gluten, but not much protein or vitamins either, nor can they make a bread.


Other ingredients can affect the bread considerably. Adding a small quantity of fat will make the bread softer and keep longer. Many herbs are strong antiseptics and curb the yeast if over-used, as do other strong flavourings. Rye flour in particular prevents bread rising.


It tastes better and is more nutritious- the speed at which wheat is ground industrially heats the flour, and this destroys the vitamins in the wheatgerm.


Cookery writers sometimes repeat the instructions of former recipes without knowing why they are there. Scrote once saw a recipe for yoghurt that told you simply to heat the milk to the correct temperature and leave it to turn into yoghurt overnight. This would probably have worked originally when milk contained a natural micro-life from which the yoghurt making strain could be selected by killing the rest with the correct heating. Unfortunately modern milk is pasteurised, and has no such wildlife, so it just went bad instead.


You can 'season' a cast-iron pan so that it does not stick by heating it very strongly with a good sprinkling of salt in it until it is smoking hot. Throw the salt away after.


You can also make vanilla sugar by keeping a vanilla pod in a sealed jar of sugar.


especially for the person who washes up.




Eggs need Black Pepper, the same way dishes with cooked tomatoes demand cheese.




Because of the shape of a lentil, the latin word for a lentil lens was borrowed in the middle-ages for want of a better word to name the new-fangled optick devices being made then, glass lenses.


The English have such wonderful names. Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are all associated with Lent, just before Easter, so there.


Scrote finds the small quantity of milk described as a 'gill' of milk on looking up his recipe book. A gill is an English measure once so universally understood that his book nowhere bothers to define it.


"It's pork an' beans 'most every day/ I'd a soon be eating prairie hay" as the cowboy song has it.




and the reason why the French claim the English put jam on their meat




(or turd-in-the-hole, as one of Scrote's brothers usually refers to it)




Not the tin, chop the tomatoes you fool.






Don't pour hot fat down the sink- Scrote's drains are plastic and it melts them and sets solid when it meets the cold water in the trap.




If you do use Mozzarella, make sure it says it is Italian Mozarella as there are some very peculiar versions made by other countries. Strange plastic sachets in supermarkets that purport to be grated mozarella cannot possibly be, since mozarella is so soft and wet that it is impossible to grate.


Kemal Attaturk also tried to stop the widespread Islamic practice of women being veiled. At first this was ignored until he rather cunningly decreed that prostitutes had to wear the veil by law- at which point decent turkish women promptly stopped wearing the veil to avoid appearing to be prostitutes.


Macrobiotics theory asserts that brown rice is the most perfect food because it is supposed to have equal amounts of the complementary principles of Yin and Yang. Unfortunately it doesn't have much protein or vitamins, so overly devout practitioners tend to be easily identifiable because of their malnutrition.


the most disgusting-smelling ingredient in the known universe is of course Mowtai, which is a chinese liquor made from snake bile or some-such. It is sold in sold in porcelain bottles, presumably because nothing else will do.


Scrote likes mutton, which he thinks tastes much better.





All Scrotes love mangled words, wordplays and especially Spoonerisms. The Reverend William Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford University from 1903 to 1924, routinely transposed the initial consonants of words, giving his name to wordplays of this kind. Scrote once referred to someone, in his presence, as a "shining wit" and then added "with apologies to the Reverend Spooner" (work it out). When he was younger Scrote often visited a pub called the Boar's Head for no other reason than to be able to mis-pronounce his destination.


literally, in french, 'out of, or away from, the [main] works'





reputedly made from old donkeys