{"id":18370,"date":"2017-07-09T23:15:37","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T05:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=18370"},"modified":"2017-07-09T23:15:37","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T05:15:37","slug":"wary-scotsman-passes-testicle-test-with-flying-colors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/07\/wary-scotsman-passes-testicle-test-with-flying-colors\/","title":{"rendered":"Wary Scotsman passes ‘testicle test’ with flying colors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Oysters\"<\/a>

Brighty<\/p>

No stranger to exotic cuisine, Roger Kettle was nevertheless perplexed on his first encounter with Rocky Mountain Oysters.<\/p><\/div>\n

As the only foreigner at the table, I was becoming increasingly aware of the semi-suppressed sniggering that was going on among my fellow diners. We were in a Billings restaurant and, in front of me, was a plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters, a dish that had been highly recommended to me by the assembled company.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never heard of it, but even in my ignorance I suspected that there was more than a hint of the euphemistic in the title. Nothing I could see on the plate looked like seafood. Nothing I could see on the plate looked like it had bobbed around on the beds of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, and it was hard to imagine this stuff producing anything even remotely similar to a pearl.<\/p>\n

What I was staring at was brown and lumpy, covered in a gravy that was, well, brown and lumpy. It\u2019s difficult to describe the aroma but \u201coceanic\u201d certainly isn\u2019t the first adjective that springs to mind. However, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was sure I\u2019d read about FRESHWATER oysters. Had these delicacies been plucked from the clear, fast-running streams of Montana\u2019s Rocky Mountains?<\/p>\n

Perhaps, going back centuries, they had been a valued source of protein for the Sioux and Crow tribes of the region. Maybe early pioneers on their way to Oregon had supplemented their dwindling supplies with these delicious morsels.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re bull\u2019s balls,\u201d said a voice from across the table.<\/p>\n

\u201cAw, you shouldn\u2019t have told him!\u201d said another.<\/p>\n

So that was it. I was being offered bovine testicles. I was being put to the \u201cBovine Testicle Test.\u201d With all due modesty\u2014and perhaps to the disappointment of some of my hosts\u2014I sailed through it effortlessly, polishing off the plate in minutes.<\/p>\n

You see, I\u2019m Scottish, and our national dish is haggis. If you can eat the minced heart, lungs and liver of a sheep, mixed in with oatmeal and onions and then encompassed in the same animal\u2019s stomach lining before cooking, you can certainly handle the odd bull gonad.<\/p>\n

As a rule, I would say it\u2019s a good thing to sample the cuisine of any country you happen to be visiting, but I\u2019ve had a few, shall we say, interesting experiences on my many trips to Montana. On one occasion, I was offered a pizza that had some kind of cactus topping.<\/p>\n

Look, it\u2019s not my place to lecture you about stuff like this but have you actually looked at this ingredient? It has spikes all over it! This is nature\u2019s way of saying, \u201cGo away. I am not remotely edible.\u201d I really think that large, heavily armed plants should be avoided as a source of food. I have no idea what it tastes like because I refused to eat it. Sheep\u2019s lungs are one thing, but you have to draw the line somewhere.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also noticed that Montanans have a fondness for something called \u201cjerky.\u201d As far as I can gather, this product involves taking a strip of a perfectly good meat like beef and then drying it until every element of succulence and flavor has been removed. Then, to make it palatable, a few spices and a lot of sugar are added. The end result is like chewing on a leather belt that\u2019s been dipped in molasses.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>And now a confession\u2014I love the stuff. So much so that I asked a friend in Billings to mail some to me in Scotland. This turned out to be a problem. I received a letter from UK Customs to say that my package had been impounded because, at that time, importing jerky was illegal or dangerous or something.<\/p>\n

And yet the \u201cJerry Springer Show\u201d had been allowed to enter our country and was widely available on several of our TV stations. I struggle with the logic involved.<\/p>\n

My first experience of a Montana breakfast was both pleasant and puzzling. I was staying at the old Northern Hotel in Billings and had ordered scrambled eggs, bacon and hash browns to be delivered to my room. (By the way, on a later occasion, I once ordered \u201chash brownies\u201d by mistake. The rest of that day is a blur).<\/p>\n

Anyway, the breakfast was delicious. It seemed a bit strange to me the way your bacon shatters into a thousand pieces when you stick a fork in it, but it was delicious. The puzzling element was the red thing on the plate. I poked it a few times with my knife before establishing that it was, indeed, a strawberry. Bacon, eggs and a strawberry. You\u2019ll have to explain that one to me.<\/p>\n

During that visit to Billings, I also had probably the most expensive coffee in the history of the world. I arrived back in the hotel one afternoon and decided that I would make use of the in-room percolator. I\u2019m really not much of a coffee drinker and, at home, I stick to the instant variety\u2014a teaspoon of granules in a mug, topped up with boiling water from the kettle.<\/p>\n

It quickly dawned on me that I had no idea how to work a percolator and there didn\u2019t appear to be any instructions. I did what any man would do in a similar situation. I phoned my wife, 5,000 miles away in Scotland. Mary talked me through the process and, with huge satisfaction, I was soon enjoying a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

I was very proud. This pride lasted until I got my hotel bill and realized that the phone call had cost me $42. If I\u2019d contacted room service and asked for some coffee, it would have cost around $5. This was probably not my finest intellectual moment.<\/p>\n

My criticism of Montana cuisine is both mild and written with nostalgic fondness. Scotland has a horrendous and wholly justified reputation for creating culinary abominations. In our Fish \u2019n\u2019 Chip shops, it is possible to purchase chocolate bars that have been coated in batter and then deep-fried in beef lard. If you don\u2019t believe me, just Google \u201cScottish deep-fried Mars bars.\u201d It\u2019s almost as though we were trying to come up with a bite-sized heart attack.<\/p>\n

Anyway, all this talk has given me a brilliant idea. If you see someone standing on a corner in downtown Billings, holding a sign that reads \u201cHaggis Jerky,\u201d get your dollars out. It\u2019ll be me.<\/p>\n

Roger\u00a0Kettle\u00a0lives in Newport-on-Tay, Scotland, near St. Andrews. He has been a comic strip writer for more than 35 years. He has two long-running strips in the U.K., \u201cBeau Peep<\/a>,\u201d a Foreign Legion spoof, and \u201cA Man Called Horace<\/a>,\u201d a Western spoof based on Dorothy M. Johnson\u2019s short story \u201cA Man Called Horse,\u201d later made into a movie. Kettle\u00a0also wrote \u201cAndy Capp\u201d for 11 years after the death of creator Reg Smythe. He has used Billings as a base of operations to explore the American West on several vacation trips.<\/em>\u00a0He also wrote\u00a0one of our favorite installments<\/a>\u00a0in the Last Best News series Lay of the Land.<\/em><\/p>\n

The accompanying illustration is by Steve Bright, or Brighty, as he signs his work. He is one of Britain\u2019s top cartoonists. Feast your peepers on his work at his website,\u00a0http:\/\/www.brighty-art.co.uk\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the only foreigner at the table, I was becoming increasingly aware of the semi-suppressed sniggering that was going on among my fellow diners. We were in a Billings restaurant and, in front of me, was a plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters, a dish that had been highly recommended to me by the assembled company. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":18371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[6024,6023,6025,6022],"class_list":["post-18370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversions","category-montana","tag-beef-jerky","tag-haggis","tag-jerry-springer","tag-rocky-mountain-oysters","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18370"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18376,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18370\/revisions\/18376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}