Groats

In the course of a recent visit to Tavistock, we came across a butcher who made his own white puddings, J&S Downing. And, rather to my surprise, they also made the website at reference 2.

We were given the choice of groats or rusk for our white pudding, with groats being their name for pearl barley, and we settled for groats.

Not like our usual white pudding at all, the white pudding made in a factory by Slomers, the estuary people of Belvedere. Their pudding, which we like well, comes in a stout, clear plastic tube, removed before cooking, is quite firm enough to slice and fry and is noticed in that form at reference 1. This pudding came in something much more organic, possibly something from the inside of a pig, was much more crumbly and would not have taken to being sliced crosswise at all well.

Having puzzled a little, I settled for slicing lengthwise in half and grilling, which, in the event, worked well, although the halves did need to be handled carefully. Served, as ever, with boiled potatoes and boiled crinkly cabbage. Which all went down very well, with the spice of the pudding nicely complementing the plain of the vegetable, all the better for having been on a diet of pub grub for the last week, grub which rarely comes with cabbage, or indeed anything that one would recognise as a green vegetable at all - although I should add in fairness that frozen peas do warm up quite well these days. Much better than I remember.

I am also pleased to be able to record that on this occasion memory still served, and the word 'groats' does indeed have two meanings, learned, I think, when very young, in the course of primary school lessons about English history. OED confirms that the groat was a coin, nominally one eighth of an ounce of silver, while groats was a generic word for grains of all sorts; oats, wheat, barley or maize. And regarding this last, groats is a very old word, with first recorded uses getting on for a thousand years ago, so the maize meaning must have been tacked on later, needing first to have been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic. The two meanings together score just about two columns, so two thirds of a large page in small print.

PS: note that John O'Groats is only distantly related, being named for a Dutchman by the name of Jan de Groot who once operated a ferry between the place now of that name and the Orkneys.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/second-communion.html.

Reference 2: http://www.jandsdowningbutcherstavistock.co.uk/.