Britain from A to Z: F

Food

Now I come to my favorite topic in this series: FOOD. While in Britain, we ran into some interesting food traditions that were common to the entire area and some that were unique to certain areas.

Our tour price included a breakfast every morning at each hotel we stayed at. Most mornings we had a buffet. Many of the items on the buffet were similar to what we have here in the United States. Scrambled eggs, potatoes, cooked mushrooms, toast, coffee, tea, etc. However, there were some interesting differences. For instance, what they call bacon would be called ham here. I only remember one hotel that had our version of bacon (thin sliced and cooked until crisp) and it was called fatback bacon. Another interesting difference was that essentially every breakfast buffet included baked beans and cooked tomatoes. We would call the former pork and beans; they weren’t baked with brown sugar until the sauce was thick. The cooked tomatoes were always medium-sized, cut in half, seasoned, and then cooked until soft, but not stewed. One last thing concerning breakfast is egg preparation. In the US, it is fairly common for breakfast buffets to include an omelette station. We saw none of these in Britain. Rather, they had poached egg stations. However, most of the time poached eggs were simply served on the bar without the need of a separate station.

Another common dish found throughout Britain is fish and chips. I have always considered this to be an England thing, but I learned quickly that it is prevalent throughout Scotland, England, and Wales. In fact, the best fish and chips we had on the tour was at Greyfriars Bobby Bar in Edinburgh, Scotland. The fish was always a white fish, usually cod or haddock. And, as most of you probably know, chips are really fries. Warning: I seriously doubt that the Brits would want to hear you call them French fries. (By the way, potato chips are called crisps in Britain.) What amazed me about the fish was the size. Every time we bought fish and chips, the fish was a HUGE fillet, taking up nearly the whole plate. The only place I recall seeing fillets this big in the US was up in Massachusetts many years ago. One thing I didn’t like as much was the malt vinegar for putting on the fish. It didn’t have nearly as much vinegar twang as what I’m used to in the US. So, I mostly used tartar sauce.

Whenever I think about fish and chips and England, I’m reminded of the story my uncle told me when I was a kid. He said that when he was in England during WW2, he used to eat fish and chips out of a rolled up newspaper. That’s how it was served in those days. Later, an Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips came to my home town. That was my first taste of British-style fish and chips, and I loved it. It was interesting that the paper they were served on looked like newsprint.

I can’t forget to mention the mushy peas. This was something that essentially every restaurant served with their fish and chips, although you could get them with other dishes as well. They are essentially an embellishment of what we call green peas or English peas. They’re not totally mushy as there are still solid pieces of peas in the mush. Kathy and I are not big fans of green peas, so were hesitant to try them. But lo and behold, they were great. Try ya some sometime. Unmushed peas were also generally available.

Speaking of mushy, I must tell you about the soups of Britain. We tried a number of different soups, but not one had any chucks of anything in it. In the US, I am used to getting broccoli and cheese soup with chunks of broccoli in it, vegetable soup with chunks of vegetables in it, and so forth. Well, every soup we had in Britain was chunk-less. Apparently if it’s called soup, they blend it up. In other words, if there is anything that has to be chewed in it, it’s NOT soup in Britain.

Just like in the US, bread is a staple food in Britain. One difference here is that across the pond they seem to only like bread as an appetizer or for making sandwiches. Yes, restaurants here in the US usually serve bread before the rest of the meal. But they also leave it for eating with your main course. Over yonder they like to take up any remaining bread before the main course arrives. Of course, all we had to do was ask that they leave it, and they would.

Salads were everywhere in Britain. They seemed to pop up on any sandwich plate and were available for every meal. Yet, there seemed to be a severe lack of dressings to put on them. I discovered this was generally true throughout Britain when, after many times asking “What salad dressings do you have?", I got sort of a blank stare from the server. Typically, the only thing available was something like Miracle Whip or little packets of salad cream. Fortunately, the salad cream was really good. Otherwise, I’d have been eating a lot of dry salads.

As far as specialty dishes in the different countries, the first we encountered was haggis and black pudding in Scotland. These were actually on the breakfast bar our first morning in Glasgow, Scotland. Haggis is made from sheep guts and ... ‘nuff said. Sheep guts are enough to turn me off regardless of what else is in it. That being said, I tasted it and it wasn’t too bad. Yet, it wasn’t good enough to get me over the sheep guts hurdle. Our son, Andrew, loved it. He ate it just about any time he had the opportunity. But, that’s Andrew. He’s not only weird, but he loves weird foods and drinks.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think that black pudding would be good. I mean who doesn’t like dark chocolate in a pudding. Well, you’d be wrong. Another name for black pudding is blood pudding. And, yes, it is actually made from real blood. I don’t mind a bit of blood coming out of my medium steak, but for a dish to have blood as its main ingredient grosses me out. That being said, I tasted it and it was essentially tasteless. That was definitely not enough to get me over the animal blood hurdle. Yet, our weird son loved it. He even got it on his pizza in Edinburgh. Sometimes I think he needs to host that Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods America”. Hey, come to think of it, isn’t the current host named Andrew? Maybe our son could start a new series called “Bizarre Foods Britain”.

Two unique dishes we tried related to Wales were leek and potato soup and Welsh rarebit, although the latter we actually had in York, England. We had the soup at a Welsh banquet at Cardiff Castle in Cardiff, Wales. As mentioned earlier, it was chunk-less, having been blended to a thick liquid. Yet, it was so good we have since made it here at home.

When I hear the words “Welsh rarebit”, I always think of the episode of “Gomer Pyle” where Gomer starts sleepwalking after consuming large amounts of Welsh rarebit. The name belies its simplicity. It’s actually a form of cheese toast. In fact, the actual Welsh term for it is caws pobi, meaning baked cheese.

I don’t know how common this is in England, but in Oxford I purchased a roast beef sandwich at a large indoor market. It consisted of a huge thick roll with lots of lettuce, tomato, and other salad-like compounds. Buried under all of this was one lousy thin slice of beef. I couldn’t really even taste it. After returning to the states, I was watching Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. He was talking about England with one of his guests. He told a story about getting a ham sandwich in England and it only having one lousy thin slice of ham on it. I guessed from this that one slice meat sandwiches are prevalent in England, if not all of Britain.

It pains me to think that I will never be able to sample all the different cheeses that exist in the world. There seems to be as many cheeses as there are people in the world. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of cheese. Oh, there are some that I don’t like, but there are a lot that I do. It seems that just about every place in the world has its own custom cheeses. Britain is no different. At one point on the tour, one fellow on the bus from New York bought some Wensleydale cheese with ginger embedded in it and shared it with anyone wanting a piece. This was good stuff. Later in the tour I decided to do the same thing and bought some Snowdonia white cheddar cheese with cranberries and shared it. Interestingly, while shopping at our local Publix tonight, I discovered they had some of the Wensleydale cheeses. I bought the one with cranberries. Yum!

There were more specialty foods in Britain than we either cared to try or had an opportunity to buy. You’ll hear of things like Toad-in-the-Hole, Pasties, Ploughman’s Lunch, Shepherds’ Pie, Neeps and tatties, Cullen skink, Stovies, Cockles, Cawl, Lobscows, Kendal Mint Cake, and more. So, you’ll find there is no lack of new things for you to try should you visit.

Well, this post has already grown too long and I’ve not even gotten to drinks. I’ll cover those in another post.

Britain from A to Z: C

Countryside

While riding along on our tour bus in Scotland, England, and Wales, I couldn’t help but notice how similar the countryside was to many areas in the United States. Crop farming, animal farming, flat land, rolling hills, and mountainous areas. Grass, trees, shrubs, flowers, and rock. All pretty common stuff. However, there were a few things that were different; as least different as far as my experiences go.

One thing was the amount of sheep. It seemed that 70% of the rural land we saw was devoted to sheep grazing. In fact, one place we stopped at didn’t even have the sheep contained. They just wandered wherever they pleased. If they were in the road, they had the right-of-way. Perhaps there are areas of the US like that, but I don’t recall ever seeing them. The next most popular use of the land I saw was probably split between cattle grazing and growing crops. In the US, these seem to be the top two uses.

In the US, farms make extensive use of fences. They divide people’s properties as well as keep animals off the roads. There were a lot of fences in Britain also, but it seemed as if the great majority of them were stone fences. There were miles and miles of stone fences covering the land, even up on steep hills and mountains. I guess this resulted from how plentiful rock was. In many of these areas, there was much more rock on the hills and mountains than there were trees. I guess that is why many of the towns also used stone for buildings rather than wood.

One final observation. The roadsides appeared to be lined with hedges much more than here in the US. I can’t tell you how many times I would raise my camera to snap a photo and before I could push the shutter button a hedge appeared and blocked my view. I learned quickly that I had to look ahead for potential photo opportunities, ready my camera, and snap just as soon as I could to avoid those hedges. But such are the challenges of a photo enthusiast.

Scotland Countryside

Atlas Shrugged Part II – The Movie

I just went to see the second of a planned three-part movie based on Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.” I was greatly impressed. The acting was great, and the message was clear. It’s definitely worth a visit to the movie theater to see this. It wouldn’t hurt to see Part I beforehand, but it’s not absolutely necessary.

When I heard that all the actors in Part II would be different from those in Part I, I was a bit dismayed. I thought the actors in the first movie did a superb job given the budget and time constraints and feared the new actors would not do as well. However, I understood that the low budget of the first movie and the possibility that it would not earn enough money to produce the second one resulted in the producers not being able to negotiate future options for the actors. This meant that if the original actors had moved on to other projects, new actors would have to be contracted. This is what happened. However, my concerns were soon allayed. The second group of actors was also superb. Actually, there were more actors I recognized from other shows and movies in Part II than in Part I.

For those of you not familiar with “Atlas Shrugged,” the premise is that the American government is putting more and more pressure on businesses to conform to a number of laws and mandates. Because of this, the creative people of the country are one by one disappearing, leaving their floundering businesses behind. In essence, the men and women of the mind, those that make the motor of the world run, are going on strike. We often hear of workers for various businesses going on strike to protest what they perceive as unfair treatment by their employers. Well, in this movie, it’s the employers who are striking by withdrawing themselves, along with their talents, totally from the world. They are tired of being the ones that work tirelessly to create products that benefit all of mankind only to have their businesses raided by the government and their wealth confiscated. They feel that to comply with the government’s mandates only implies that they sanction those mandates. So, rather than comply, they in essence say, “Adios. Take my business and run it the best you can without me.”

I, for one, realize that people who are able to move the world in a massive way are few and far between. It requires a lot of guts to put your money and reputation on the line in order to create something of value. Think of people like Edison, Ford, Gates, Jobs, and so on. These are people who gave it their all to produce products that would transform the world. They didn’t force anyone to support them, but rather had a vision of producing products that the people of the world would want so much they would voluntarily part with their money to obtain them. Yet, there are those who claim that a large part of the money they obtained by voluntary trade should be paid back to society in some form or fashion. By some twisted logic, they believe that the products they produced were not sufficient payment regardless of how much benefit those products conveyed to the world. They believe that those who are successful either did something wrong or they just simply have a duty to share their success with those who are less successful.

Ayn Rand understood what happens to a country where government attempts to equalize wealth by force. She was a young girl living in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. To escape the madness, she immigrated to the United States. However, to her dismay, she soon saw that the US was moving in the same direction that Russia had, albeit at a slower pace rather than through revolutionary means. Over time she developed her philosophy of freedom and began writing justifications for it via fictional novels and non-fictional articles and books. She truly understood what makes the motor of the world work, and she desired to warn Americans that they were going down the wrong path. Let’s face it. There are many talented people in the world, but only a fraction of them have the brains and the brawn and the wherewithal to pull together a multitude of resources and jump through all the hoops necessary to bring a successful product to the marketplace. We need to be applauding these people and encouraging more of this behavior by letting them keep the fruits of their labor, not discouraging them with over-regulation and heavy taxes. After all, the more successful they become, the more help they will need, and thus the more people they will hire. This type of growth is the real engine of job creation.

Even though Atlas Shrugged, the novel, is now 55 years old, its warning still rings loud and clear. Let’s stop punishing the producers and rewarding the looters. Let’s see how bright our nation can shine when the entrepreneurial spirit is totally unleashed. This is the message of true hope and change.

US vs Canada on Healthcare

It's hard to believe it has been over a month since my last post. Time sure slips away, especially around the holidays.

I have written recently about different perspectives on Canadian healthcare. Well, a few days ago I ran across an article that summarizes a 2007 study comparing American and Canadian healthcare. The original paper was a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S. The summary I read can be found in a recent Laissez Faire book catalog. See page 12.