(no subject)

[jack]

Did you know, kipper is a sort of smoked haddock?

OK, you do know that. But in twenty-five years, no-one told me that. It's the sort of thing that it seems odd to run up to someone in the street and say "Hey, just in case you don't know, Haddock is a sort of smoked kipper (or vice versa)!") And yet, it would have been useful if someone had. It came up in conversation, and it suddenly clicked when I realised those two fish being discussed were the same.

(Being vegetarian, I've never known any of the details about quite a lot of sorts of meat, just enough to know I didn't eat it. I had a vague impression you didn't want to get slapped in the face with a wet one, but none at all what they were like to eat. And it never happened to come up in any book I was reading or work I was doing. Well, until yesterday; you'll be unsurprised to learn that it was a literary allusion that finally did bring it up.)

Conversely, someone (iirc) didn't know that the horse's head in the bed was from the Godfather. That, people (mainly the simpsons) really DO run up to me and tell me, despite never (yet) seeing the film. (It's near the top of my list.)

Comments

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

Um ... whilst haddock can be kippered, a kipper is traditionally herring. Smoked haddock in Scotland is best known in the forms of Arbroath Smokies or Finnan Haddie.

For the hard of herring

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get that kind of 'disconnect' with cultural references to films, especially the Princess Bride.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Mm, I know what you mean. My personal understanding of meat is limited to whatever I had the opportunity to eat before I was 11, so, not particularly varied :-)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Awww!

(not that I mean to be patronising, but it just strikes me as sweet)

[angoel.livejournal.com]

I knew that, primarily because I heard a riddle when I was young in which a fisherman described how many fish of various sorts he had caught, and you had to work out how many kippers had been brought in by his nets.

[ravingglory.livejournal.com]

Most British lit that talks about kippers assumes the reader knows what they are. Having only encountered kippers in books,I spent a bunch of time being puzzled before I learned that they are smoked fish.