Differences between American English and british English

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I won't even start on beans at the breakfast table. That's just not right. If god had intended us to start farting THAT early in the day....

When English people speak, they take great pains to speak proper because their teeth are butt ugly. They need to compensate somehow.

<<Pub Lunch, I not only DEMAND that my bacon crumble when touched like a freshly-exhumed mummy, but I drown it (and sausage!) in any maple syrup I can find>>

UUURRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

I'll never get my head around it, I just cannot see how that is nice, poor piggy’s, if they only knew what they were dying for - justice for the US PIGS (I hope that does not sound dodgy!). Any crispy bacon in my house means it has been over done and is put straight in the bin. And Syrup (and on sausages arrgggghhh- how??) Tomato sauce or daddies (brown sauce) all the way young lady.

No no, obviously you lot enjoy it this way but good luck. The differences even in our eating habits are funny. I mean, we are all people with taste buds and I dare say if so many Americans like syrup on their sausages and bacon then it probably tastes ok. But never in a month of Sundays will it catch on here - no word of a lie.

Eating in Gatwick in Gatwick?? - serves you right!! Actually you are correct; an omelette is an omelette even if it is plain, scrambled egg is only scrambled egg if it is SCRAMBLED! I'd have imagined that you would have been offered something with it (salt, pepper?). I don't know anyone that would eat it like this though, the bare minimum would be some onions chucked in there.

Jellied eels - never had them and probably never will. I have some cockney mates whose parents really do wolf them down, I have never seen anything like it (apart from Americans and the sausage/bacon/crispy/syrup debacle), in my book it is just wrong (and people actually pay for it - it looks like punishment to me). It is decreasing in popularity though.

Yes, Denny's was not so great but did have nice milkshakes! And I remember the service being brilliant (but being British that is not saying much - actually I'm not certain if that rings true really). I'm sure you did not like the food here, but I have to say I was not so keen on the food over there either. You lot just have no idea what 'Hot and Spicy' is (strange ultra ultra tangy orange gloop) is the cheddar cheese (strange orange gloop - did it have any milk in it? Surely it is only cheddar if it comes from Cheddar? – a lovely place by the way).

What’s wrong with beans in the morning? Beans in the morning, beans for lunch and beans for dinner - Uriel we have to liven up these miserable grey days somehow!!

Ok I am going to eat my Weetabix now (another curiously British staple), adieu.

<<Eating in Gatwick in Gatwick??>>
??
Oi know the difference - thats not true!!! Ok, maybe it is.

Uriel - oh please!!!...expecting a half decent meal at an airport restaurant? In the UK? Are you crazy girl???? Almost as bonkers as expecting a reasonably palatable meal at a British motorway services station. Dear sweet American lady Uriel - revise your expectations the next time you visit our shores. Geez........whatever next...

Eggs is eggs, as the saying goes. An omelette should be an easy peasy lemon squeezy thing to do.....on BBC TV every Saturday morning the delectable James Martin has two guest chefs produce a (palatable) omelette on his Saturday Kitchen show - a race to do it in the shortest time and to produce the tastiest and most pleasing to the taste buds - added ingredients a bonus. Cheese and chives so yummily scrumptiously. If your omelette magically transforms into scrambled egg you've failed big time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv_and_radio/saturdaykitchen_jamesmartin_interview.shtml

The tastiest cheese for me is one you can get at most UK supermarkets it's so full of flavour it isn't true - it's called Extra Strong Cheddar and wow! - does it have full bodied zing - it adds extra hairs to your chest. What it does for women I'm not too sure - certainly not hairier chests if there really is a God up there.

On the way down to Cornwall last year my mate and I did the old roam around most of Somerset (Glastonbury of course was a "must stop" stop) and so was nearby Cheddar - top rate pictureseque, and those Caves - so spooky. Remember how to tell the difference between those endlessly dripping calcium deposits - stalagmites and stalactites - mites grow UP and tites come DOWN - adjust some spellings to make sense.

It was in Cheddar Gorge that the Rev Augustus Toplady, curate of Cheddar, had to take refuge in a sheltering cleft in the rocks one afternoon as a very violent thunderstorm broke overhead and the thunder and lightning was so intense that he composed words in his head to allay his alarm over the storm - the rocks of the Gorge were many ages old, the cleft formed his shelter, and he was glad to hide himself in it......the words then became those of a very famous hymn...."Rockof Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee". It took a thunderstom and Cheddar Gorge to do that for that for good old Gus.

A cheese calling itself Cheddar does not necessarily come from Cheddar itself...there are Cheddars seeing the first light of day all over the UK I reckon. Stilton does not have to come from the village in Cambridgeshire where it, too, came into being. The same goes for all the double and single Gloucesters, Red Leicesters, Cheshires, Lancashires, Wensleydales, Cornish Blue, Shropshire Blue etc etc.

All our Scottish cheeses though DO come from Scotland alone. :-) No way would we allow any cheese calling itself Scottish to be made outside of our borders. It may seem strange though that one of our nicest cheese is known as a Brie.

I'm not familiar with Gatwick Airport - only been to Heathrow. Edinburgh airport is my local one - it's within descent/ascent decibel range of where I live. Actually it's eating facilities are pretty good.......never had an omelette there though. Without some kind of fillings and herbal enhancements they can be a wee bit bland.

http://www.cheddarsomerset.co.uk/History/Cheddar%20Cheese.htm

http://www.cheddarcaves.co.uk

The only thing I would eat at an airport is a bag of chips. I was at the Sacramento airport a few months ago and the cheapest bottle of water I could find was $4.50! I can't imagine what an omlette would have cost, even if it was just egg subsitute fried in a pan.

As for cheese, I LOVE it. Absolutely and positively, with the only exception being American cheese (ironic isn't).

It wasn't my idea to eat at the airport -- but I was hungry and that's where I was. And my Dad paid for it.

Other than that, I have to say that I had excellent food in England. Did learn another dialectical difference in a restaurant -- if I say "water" in a restaurant I have to repeat myself and add in the T, or the waitress will just stare at me blankly, and "prawns", which to me are only the big-ass honkin' shrimp, appear in the UK to cover all manner of shrimp all the way down to itty-bitty baby shrimp no bigger than the end of my pinky -- which was what was nestled on my plate when I ordered them. Here I was, expecting mammoth tiger prawns, and instead I got ... bait.

You know, I grew up on orange Cheddar cheese and I find nothing strange about it -- it's the same color as colby, also good -- but everyone else in the world finds orange Cheddar Just Not Right. (We also have white Cheddar, if it makes you happier.)

I too like the extra sharp version, Damian. Double Gloucester is also wonderful, as is Dubliner. (I always visit the foreign cheese bin at my local supermarket!) Never heard of any Scottish cheeses, though -- or maybe I just don't associate the names with the country.

Wisconsin is the part of the US famous for making cheese. I don't think they've really invented any of their own, but they make other people's.

Pub Lunch, I don't know what part of the US you were in, but come on down to New Mexico some day and we'll show you hot & spicy. We know all about it!

Beans in the morning is Just Wrong, PL. Well, lemme qualify that -- I hate beans altogether, and I'm not a morning person, so being confronted with 'em first thing isn't likely to get me off to a good start. HOWEVER, I had a Mexican friend who spent a year in Greece (he had a girlfriend there), and he said he pined for frijoles while there -- so much that he would order "British breakfasts" off the menu just to get near some! I don't think your beans are probably cooked anything like Mexican beans, but it was the closest he could get.

Pub Lunch,
I put HP sauce on my fry-up. I like it better than Daddies. It's probably the best thing to have ever come out of Parliament.

I like my fried egg sunny side up. (What is "over-easy"?)

If there's no HP, I go for "Tomarto Ketchup".

Nuffin wrong weetabix, mate. Id rahver ave thaat thaan syrup-coated bangers anyday.

Speakin of which Im avin bangers 'n' mash wiv onion gravy later mmm.

In "over easy" the egg is flipped once during cooking, but gently, so that the yolk doesn't break.

>>Wisconsin is the part of the US famous for making cheese. I don't think they've really invented any of their own, but they make other people's.<<

There is Colby cheese, which was created in and named after the town of Colby in Wisconsin.

I reckon I did Britain's motorway service stations a grave injustice - on second thoughts. The food is not as unpalatable as I made out and the coffee is not really concocted out of the mud scraped up in their back gardens (back yards to you guys in America), liquefied, passed through a filter and then mixed in with a teaspoon or two of Tesco's own brand granules and then processed through their tassimo units and then sloshed into cardboard mugs - and still looking like liquid mud. That was very rude of me. The coffee is not bad really - in fact it can be really good. And as I say the food can be really tasty, as this bloke says in the link below. His gripe (and mine) is that it's all so bloody expensive. But the UK IS bloody expensive - and London is such that you surely need the London weightings - extra money added to your salaries to meet the cost of living there. I would never have managed without the London allowances when I worked down there last year......you almost need to take out a mortgage to have a good night out. :-) Thank goodness they have those Oyster cards for travelling on the tubes.......a godsend in a city with such amazingly expensive public transport.....how I appreciate our great, cheap (by comparison) public transport in this city. You can have a fantastic night out here at a fraction of the cost in London.

www.weeklygripe.co.uk/a64.asp

Scottish cheeses - here's a link.

http://www.taste-of-scotland.com/cheese.html

I love Colby, Travis! I had no idea is was really a Wisconsin native.

Monterrey Jack was first developed in California, from a Mexican prototype. If you crumble Colby and Jack, mix the crumbles, and press them together, you get Co-Jack -- the ultimate sandwich cheese, for my money. (Also makes great quesadillas, because both melt without separating off the oil, like Cheddar does. There is also a Mexican cheese caslled quesadilla, that is specifically made for that purpose. And have I mentioned my fondness of Mexican Asadero? Food of the gods!)

Well, I looked though the list of Scottish cheeses on your site, Damian, and I know I haven't seen any of those in my local store. However, I do have a question -- many were described as "a cheddar". Now to me, Cheddar is Cheddar is Cheddar is Cheddar. I was at the store last night and I saw Wensleydale Cheddar and some other "kinds" of Cheddar, and I didn't bother, because I assume they will all taste like ... plain ol' Cheddar. And why pay three times as much. But, is that a misapprehension on my part? Are there appreciable differences between one place's Cheddar and another's?

And what the hell is a "tassimo unit"? I'm assuming the root word must mean "cup", as in "tasse" or "demi-tasse" or "tazo".

Oh, and I should mention that I did see something called "Pub Cheese" last night, but it really looked sort of like Cheez Whiz in a tub, so I passed on that....

A tassimo is a coffee making machine - quick and easy. I reckon the name may well have have derived from the French "la tasse".

http://www.tassimo.co.uk/tassimo/page?PagecRef=1

As for Cheddar - I'm no all that well up on where it's made nowadays - all over the shop I would guess - the same sort of cheese - same ingredients and all that kind of stuff made made where ever there are cheese making plants - mostly in dairy producing areas - here in Scotland the country of Ayrshire is tops for that - all those lovely wee moo cows around there. It's just that the Somerset town of Cheddar gave its name to the cheese that was "born" there.

I suppose Wensleydale is no longer made only in that part of Yorkshire, and I know that the tasty white crumbly cheeses of Cheshire and Lancashire are made in other rurual areas as well.

Stilton cheese - the UK's favourite highly flavoured blue veined cheese - is strictly confined to three counties of England for its making - Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Those areas hold the legal rights for sole production of this super cheese. The pretty little village of Stilton, in Cambridgeshire, holds the honour of "inventing" and producing the first Stilton cheese back in God knows when - the 16th century I think.

British cheeses are greatly different from Continental cheeses - mostly in texture. Many of the Contintal varieties are either creamy or rubbery in texture - from Brie to Edam, and some Swiss cheeses are full of holes! :-) Tasty though.....the cheese I mean, not the holes.

www.stiltoncheese.com/index.cfm

www.stilton.org

Do you guys know what a Welsh rarebit is? Or Welsh rabbit as some people call it. A British fave for a quick and easy snack. Take a thick slice of bread (preferably wholemeal). Toast it lightly on one side. Thinly butter the untoasted side and then cover with layers of cheese - I like Cheddar or Double Gloucester - thinly sliced tomatoes (optional but I like it with tomatoes), thin slivers of onions. Season to taste. Add some chives if you like or herbs of choice. Place under the grill and cook until the cheese bubbles and just begins to brown slightly - make sure any uncovered bits of bread don't burn. Whip it away from the grill and pour a little HP sauce on it and scoff. It's great. Welsh rarebit (or rabbit, if you like).

I'm not sure what a vegetarian Welsh rarebit is but here's a reciope for that:

http://www.cookuk.co.uk/vegetarian/WelshRarebitRecipe.htm

My mate in Wales (Andrew) says that the Welsh for cheese is "caws" - prounced not as "cores" as you would think - it's said like "couse" - as in "house" in English.

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