Jim John's Teas
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Spent the weekend in Austin for an academic conference, sleeping on a horrible hotel bed and despite a solid night’s sleep last night I still feel like steam rolled scrapple.
And so, I need my best tea.
Preparation
I remember scrapple when I lived in Philly in the 1960’s as a Vista Volunteer! Odd food item! Would not like to feel like rolled scrapple! U R Funny!
I grew up in Jersey just across the river from Philly and had no idea scrapple was an unusual, regional food item until moving away from the area in the early 1990’s to go to college.
Basically, it is all the scraps which are unfit to go into sausage (!!!) ground into a mush with enormous amounts of sage and other herbs which is then typically griddle fried and eaten as a breakfast meat.
Not as odd a regional food as [pig] brain sandwiches which are popular in the Ohio River Valley — St. Louis, southern IL and IN.
Yuk! Although…being that I learned to cook soul food from the 60’s onward since my family through my marriage became interracial, I was introduced to some foods I had never seen or cooked before. I never learned to enjoy pig feet and made the mistake of cooking chitlin’s on a very hot day in Kileen Texas in 1970 which is the last time I cooked them! Everything else has been good to go. Make a mean gumbo and winner sweet potato pie! I actually liked the corn meal used in the scrapple…just not the mystery meat way back when.
I’m actually a huge advocate of “snout to tail” butchery and believe very strongly that if our culture is going to continue to eat meat, we have to go back to the not too distant past when nothing went to waste and some of the weirder bits were actually delicacies and prized selections, not “waste”. So, I’m quite proud that the Mid-Atlantic has kept this scrapple tradition alive.
Now, obviously, not everyone has to be willing to eat everything in order to justify eating meat. I seriously doubt I’ll ever have a taste for head cheese or pig’s feet.
But it is amazing how much of a dent we could put into industrial agriculture if we just stopped wasting so much food. I highly recommend the book “The Compassionate Carnivore” to anyone who recognizes the problem but does not believe that vegetarianism (or veganism) is the solution.
I agree! Long live the Offal!
Mostly I am posting that I am drinking this tea to give everyone a head’s up that Upton Teas has announced their first flush Darjeeling offerings this morning, so you may want to jump on that if you want in on that action.
I still love my own blend of tea. Go figure.
Preparation
I think the last time I did this, I put the tasting note under the pu-erh because I forgot you could just add teas to the system, including vendor name.
So here it is, “my” tea.
I put a tablespoon of each into a 16oz Beehive and then did four steepings (3 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec) and strained them off into a very, very big tea pot.
I’m already on my third cup.
I seriously considered calling this blend “Pipe Smoke and Pub Leather” but I didn’t want people to think it was a real blend by a real tea company, so I made the name obvious.
But that’s what this tastes like. You get the earthy bass notes of the shu, the sharp smoke of the lapsang, and the gently humming sweetness of the Yunnan golden to keep it from getting off the rails.
Reminds me a lot of Balkan pipe shag, actually (latakia, parique and cavandish).
