It’s a chilly, rainy, gray afternoon, and I can’t be bothered to walk a mile to the supermarket. This is very unfortunate, because all I’ve got in my room is a can of baked beans and some dry pasta. And since I don’t have a can opener, it’s pretty much me munching on the plastic pasta wrapper, because I think eating raw pasta is bad for you.
But what’s a girl stranded on an island (an island called the United Kingdom) to do? Just what every masochistic, hungry stranded person does: think about food until it’s time to go to the cafeteria.
But before you pass judgment on the quality of British food, allow me to tell you it’s not THAT bad. Sometimes it’s downright tasty! And odd. Tasty and odd.
Let’s take the Traditional English Breakfast, which consists of eggs, hash browns, bangers (Sausage. I know, I know. Dirty!), mushrooms, baked beans on toast and SpaghettiOs. But the weird thing is, they just call it spaghetti, not SpaghettiOs!
Moving on to lunch and miscellaneous food products. Sunday dinner is served at lunchtime and consists of vegetables and roast beef with brown sauce or applesauce on top. Brown sauce is a bit like Worcestershire sauce and not as revolting as its dark brown condiment cohort, Marmite. For the more stingy, but equally hungry, there’s always prepackaged sandwiches.
God bless the prepackaged sandwiches with their large variety of sandwich fillings, even though I don’t like cress.
Tea and crumpets. Because of my aversion to hot drinks that don’t taste like hot chocolate, I haven’t had the pleasure of partaking in the biggest British stereotyped beverage, but the crumpets are strangely reminiscent of Eggo waffles. Teatime for me is usually Fanta and digestive biscuits, or “cookies.”
What’s for dinner? One of the many forms of the ever-present chips, accompanied by fish. That’s right. Chips are fries, and crisps are potato chips. Don’t even get me started on the spotted dick. I have built up my pie tolerance at dinner. A high threshold for pie is necessary in England, as the mincemeat, chicken and mushroom and shepherd’s pies are more common than cheeseburgers or pizza. My favorite acquired taste is mushy peas, which are exactly what you think they are. Someone was tired of mashed potatoes and made peas into the potato’s bright green doppelganger.
Dessert is called pudding. Unless it’s Yorkshire pudding, in which case it’s a pastry you can eat with roast beef. Jell-O is jelly and jelly is jam. My pudding is anything from the Cadbury vending machine, which I am thinking about sneaking onto the plane back to America.
Yay! One of my neighbors has heard the thunderous stomach growls emanating from my room and has brought me a box of Frosties. Frosties are the subject of many a British v. American debate, because I have shown them Internet proof that it’s really called Frosted Flakes. But either way, they’re still Grrreat!