HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
Now that that's out of the way, we can move on to a very significant food item! We have reached the last new food to appear in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone!
"Hagrid made them tea and offered them stoat sandwiches, which they refused" (Sorcerer's Stone 231).
The Internet is filled with posts from people who, like me, had no idea what "stoat" is. Ready for this?
Hagrid eats these little cuties?! It turns out that stoats are that same animal who eats toast in the nursery rhyme song, "Mares eat oats and stoats eat toast" (apparently they changed it to "does eat oats" later... that's the version I always knew anyway). And Hagrid eats them!!! I am horrified.
Sandwiches filled with these weasel/ermine-like rodents used to be super popular in Britain. Cant's imagine why they fell out of favor with the masses. Apparently people nowadays sometimes call steak sandwiches with very specific ingredients "stoat sandwiches," but the secret ingredients seem to be rather inconsistent. Regardless, we will certainly not be making stoat sandwiches, because I have no desire to discover what these cute little guys taste like in order to find a vegetarian substitute.
But Happy Halloween anyway!
no pictures! can't see them!
ReplyDeleteyikes! thanks friend! is it better now?
ReplyDeleteyes yes! excellent! now i can see what a stoat is!!!
ReplyDelete1. Stoats ARE ermines. It's two words for the same animal. A stoat is what you call the summer coat, ermine is the winter coat.
ReplyDelete2. Stoats are not rodents. They are mustelids, part of the weasel family.
3. They were likely popular to eat because ermines in particular were hunted and trapped for fur, so the meat wouldn't go to waste.