If memory serves, I spied these on our second stop at The Butcher's Quarter in Manchester. They were next to the door and hidden away from my attention which was immediately drawn to the well-stocked display cases.
With a name like The Shropshire Scratching Company, I felt like a bit of an aristocrat snacking on these things. There's just something deightfully formal and non-punny about the name.
I knew there was something different about these scratchings, that they weren't the same as American pork rinds, upon picking up the bag. They had heft to them and, to paraphrase Professor Farnsworth, each 100g bag weighed over 1kg.
Just look at them! They are not these puffy, air-filled crispy things that I was used to here in the States. These are solid, hefty mini-slabs - more akin to the crackling of gas stations across the South. My samples were light brown with lots of dark spots on them. A white dust had been evenly applied. They smelled of pork fat along with a mild vinegar zip.
Biting into one of these, there's an initial crunch and then, once you're past that, there's a creamy, fatty inside. Kind of like a porcine version of a Tootsie Roll Pop. The salt level was fine while the tanginess was fair to middling. The ingredients list has no mention of vinegar, cider or otherwise, and the tangy zip here appears to be the product of Acid E330 which the interwebs say is citric acid. How do they get away with putting "cider vinegar" on the bag?
These were tasty even if mild on the acidic zip and it was neat to sample the culinary ways of a foreign country.
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