The whole three yards

[desperance]

I was musing just now, wondering if I could name three comestibles that were sold by the yard. As it turned out, I couldn't. Not offhand. There is the famous yard of ale, of course, and also the Cumberland sausage (about which the wikipedia entry is tediously inaccurate, with its 50cm folly; my favourite supplier used to have two thumbtacks in his counter as a measure for selling the uncut sausage, and they were one full yard apart).

And that's where I dry up. I have not googled, but there must be more. One could buy a yard of many foodstuffs, of course - many fish are big enough to sell by the yard - but no one does. Chinese yard long beans don't count, because (a) they're not a yard long and (b) they're not sold by length anyway. Nor of course is spaghetti.

C'mon. Point up my idiocy: what am I forgetting? It's Sunday, you've got nothing better to do. Me, I'm editing my novel while the Cumberland sausage cooks...

Comments

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

There's a pizza place in North London that sells rectangular pizza by the yard and half yard.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

They weren't answering their phone last time we tried to order one. Not that that invalidates your point at all, just that I fancied one of their pizze, and was thwarted.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Indeed: thwarted, but not invalidated. Excellent.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

There's one in Battersea/Clapham too.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Umm... edible rice paper? (Although it's probably metric these days.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Edible ticker-tape. First you fling it, then you feast.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Ooh - that was my first thought too.

Do you think you can get it in A4 and A3?

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

Anaconda is the obvious one, or going back to the sixties there was that time the traditional yard of ale was replaced by the yard of LSD. Happy days.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course: I should've thought of snake. I believe that absolutely. "I'll have, oh, this much" - how else are you going to sell it?

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Any excuse to stop productive effort and wander off to the online OED.

This cites John Taylor the Water Poet in 1617: 'I bought..a yard and halfe of pudding for fiue pence' (from Three Weekes, three daies, and three houres Observations and Trauel, from London to Hamburgh). Where did he buy this, I wonder? Quick check on my shelves (no, I don't have the original, no such luck, but I do have modern facsimile of his 1630 collected works). Taylor was in the town of Minden in Germany: 'On the morrow I walked to see the Towne, where I bought thirty sixe cheeses for eight pence, and a yard and a half of pudding for fiue pence, which I brought into England for rarities.'

OED also cites Scott in 1825 in his novel The Betrothed: 'Sir Cook, let me have half a yard or so of broiled beef.' (chap vii). Trouble is, Scott being the kind of writer he is, you cannot easily know whether this is a fake archaism, or something he has found in an old book, or an authentic usage of his own time and place.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yay! I wanna buy my pudding by the yard...

Thanks for this, it's fabulous. What do you suppose was in the pudding? I'm presuming rolled-up suet pudding of some description, but I could be wildly wrong...

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Reckon you are right. Gervase Markham's English Housewife of 1615 includes recipes for a number of different sorts of pudding. Suet ('swine' or beef) is a major ingredient in all of them. They are not rolled (at least, assuming I have understood what you mean by that) but stuffed sausage-fashion into animal entrails before boiling (hence the measuring by length, of course).

Markham gives recipes for white pudding (with cream and oatmeal); bread pudding (with bread crumbs and eggs); hog's liver pudding (much like preceding, with the addition of the shredded and pounded up liver; boiled, and afterwards gently grilled just before serving); rice pudding (rice, cream, eggs); blood pudding (made with herbs and cream).

All his recipes, except the one for blood pudding, contain spices and sugar. Some contain dried fruit (dates, currants).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

White and black puddings, of course, are still around. As, of course, is the tradition of male chefs telling housewives what they should be cooking...

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Don't think Markham was even a chef - just a hack writer (king of the Jacobean how-to writers) who hit on an idea for a very successful book (at least 17 editions before 1700). My impression is that he went round asking all the women he knew for recipes...

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

ISTR that tripe used to be sold by the yard too...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...and of course intestines for sausage-casings certainly are. The list grows...

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

Liquorice bootlaces anybody?

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

Fruit leather.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Eek! Really? Or are you making that up? I can see the advantage of a jacket you can eat at need, but...

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

Big sheets of dried apricots on a roll. Or other fruit, I suppose, but apricot leather first comes to mind.
Google can find you instructions to make some.
I have never heard of fruit leather being used to make clothes.

The beloved says he has eaten some fruit leather bought at Sainsbury's. But that was probably chopped in smaller pieces.