Cream cheese and BBQ crisps are availbale here (UK).
I was in a store getting my lunch, and what should I notice but Oreos, with “Worlds Greatest Biscuit” emblazened across the packet. So there. No cookies here 
I’m looking for confirmation from some of the older dopers out there. I seem to recall that once upon a time, Twinkies were quite good - less artificial tasting. [geezer mode] When I was a kid, the sponge cake was more delicate and the filling was more like real cream.[/geezer mode]
So, it that a false memory? Or have my taste become so much more discriminating? I really remember them being a treat when I was a kid, but when I got some many years later, it tasted like a bad generic imitation of the Twinkie I knew and loved…
Or perhaps it was all a dream…
Feel free to laugh, but I must ask about Birch Beer - would this be some product made from the sap of birch trees? (I’m thinking along the lines of Maple syrup here (although not condensed), please forgive me if I’m way off)
I’ve heard of Birch sap wine in the UK, but I’ve never tried it (I’d like to) and as far as I’m aware, it’s a home-made thing, not a commercial product.
No laughter here, Mangetout. Birch beer is a soft drink flavored with an extract made from the bark (IIRC) of the birch tree. There are a couple of varieties available in most stores, with Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer being the most common brand.
Most of the commercial brands are OK, but nothing beats real birch beer (no artificial flavors) from an iced keg or a roadside stand. It’s a church picnic staple in southeastern and southcentral Pennsylvania.
Regarding Twinkies, you poor benighted fools don’t know what you’re missing. Having grown up in Philadelphia with a neighbor who worked for Tastykake and brought us freebies all the time, I have nothing but pity for you people who think a Twinkie or HoHo is the ne plus ultra of the snack pastry world. Twinkies and their artificially-flavored, shortening-filled ilk aren’t fit to share shelf space with the little bit of heaven that is the Tastykake product line.
And don’t get me started on Hershey’s vs. European chocolate. I guess it’s a culture thing; I like European chocolate (and Hershey’s Symphony bars are a pretty decent facsimilie) but for me, real chocolate tastes like a Hershey bar.
Yer pal,
Zappo
Being from Wisconsin, the land of cheeseheads, I must ask…
Do you have cottage cheese? Curds in whey, I think. I’ve heard this was something that visiting Europeans tried and found absolutely disgusting.
Cheese curds? Unpressed cheese. A local delicacy here, best when they’re squeeky, and something other Americans don’t even understand.
And the ultimate… deepfried cheese curds, because there aren’t enough calories in cheese by itself.
Broadening my own horizons, I just tried Pims. Cucumber in a cocktail??? Interesting.
I KNOW! My dad and I always had arguments about what Turkish Delight is. I thought it would be a gooey caramel covered in powdered sugar. Boy, was I ever wrong. I found some in Canada and promptly bought a bar. It was probably one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever put into my mouth. For those of you who don’t know, Turkish Delight is chocolate filled with a nasty, sticky, messy, cherry-flavored (flavoured?) goo. Absolutely horrific, especially considering what I was expecting.
I was in London last week, and I found several things to be quite delish.
- Mars drink - Chocolate milk with an additional caramel flavor. Scrump!
- Wispa bar - Cadbury chocolate with a bunch of air.
- Crunchie bar - Some sort of honeycomb with chocolate around it.
I bought one of every Cadbury bar I could find and brought them home for my fam. They have been enjoying them thoroughly. I think Cadbury is much better than Hershey’s.
And I really wish they sold Aero bars over here!
There was a McDonalds right by my hotel, so I decided to try a Cadbury’s Caramel McFlurry. For 99p, I got a half-filled tiny, tiny cup. Sure, it was good, but what a gyp!
Personally I have found many American products far superior to UK ones, ask for orange juice in a UK bar and you get some orange coloured chemical or a teeny tiny bottle of something costing way too much and almost but not quite resmbles fresh orange.
US ice-cream in the main is way better than the crap we have such as Lyons Maid, Walls etc.
You might be inerested to know that one certain Ms Thatcher in her pre-politician days working as a food chemist worked on ways of getting more air into our ice-cream since it is generally sold in volume rather than by weight.
Look at US import ice-cream and read the weight and then compare with the aforementioned UK ice-cream and the volume is easily twice that of the US stuff.
Having been to the US I notice that pizzas, burgers, sandwiches in fact just about all food is way bigger portions than our miserable little nibbles that we get 
We have honourable exceptions to the ice-cream horrors but mostly they are not the big selling brands.
Our chocolate is better, I think, especially the specialist ones such as Thorntons, Whittakers and the like, kind of more chocolatey.
US sweets, or candy as you call it, seems over sweet - artificially so, do you have a lot of sacharrine and the like in it?
I also love the US variety of food, the delis the Mexicans all sorts, unfortunately up in the north of the UK we have only just managed to get hot and cold running coal in Yorkshire and unlike London we are a little (few decades) behind the times.
Yes, it’s quite common, I like cottage cheese with sliced tomatoes on a slice of rye bread, or mised into scrabled eggs (after cooking)
I am a diet Coke FIEND. When Mr. Sunshine and I were in Europe for 5 weeks, I couldn’t get diet Coke anywhere but London. The whole rest of Europe served me a horrible concoction called “Coke Light”, which is sort of similar to Pepsi One, and which I detested. (Plus they served it warm and only gave me one ice cube when I asked! 
)
I was jonesing for a real diet Coke so bad by the time we got back to London…that “Coke Light” crap was definitely no substitute for the real thing.
As for other food differences, we stayed with my husband’s aunt & uncle while in London, and every day she made a HUGE, GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS breakfast. Complete with kidneys. (ick!) Is that common or is it just my hubby’s family?
Noooooo!
You’re mistaken; there’s a product called Fry’s Turkish (I don’t think they call it turkish delight anymore. There are a number of similar things also available, but real/traditional Turkish delight (that you would get if you visited turkey) is never coated with chocolate; it isn’t to everyone’s taste; it’s simply water, sugar, corn starch (cornflour) and a flavouring (which might be lemon or rosewater) boiled up together until it forms a jelly, then set, cut into cubes and dusted with loads of icing sugar. It’s a world apart from the chocolate covered stuff.
I like it, but it’s incredibly sweet and best enjoyed alongside turkish coffee (very small cup of unbelievably strong bitter coffee - much stronger than espresso)
The ‘full English’ breakfast is quite common, there are many interpretations, but it doesn’t often include kidneys; it’s more likely to have Black Pudding (blood sausage) though. For myself, a big fryup for breakfast is a treat that I would only want once in quite a while.
Personally, I’d never eat kidneys on their own (when they hit the frying pan, your nose reminds you exactly what kidneys are), but they are nice in a steak and kidney pie or some such.
Food stuff here in the U.S. that really embarasses me: Everyone I know drinking “lite” or “light” beer.
I don’t get it. I am a die hard American, but this is just stupid: You go to a bar/pub and drink a lite beer from a bottle. Someone explain this. No- Nevermind - it’s the advertising…I know.
Hello, Mcfly…if you go to a pub, please get a real beer on tap.
Please tell me that in England and elsewhere men are not embarassing themselves by drinking lite beers from bottles in pubs.
Lite Beer? Blah!
Bottle? Blah!!!
Twigletts are something I love from England.
and Marmite, spread thinkly on toast.
mmmmmmmmm.
:eek: :eek:
Mangetout, I you think that those frozen things McDonald’s sells are anything close to real American milk shakes, you have not yet experienced dairy heaven.
Comparing a McDonald’s Shake to a milk shake is like comparing uhhh, something really bad to something really good. A real milk shake is even hard to find over here these days. Steak N Shake and other pricey retro-style places still do it right.
First you order the shake. Then they hand-scoop hard ice cream into a metal container. They then add milk and flavoring (such as chocolate syrup or real stawberries). They then mix it using an electric spindle device controlled by a foot pedal. Then the shake is poured into a glass glass and topped with a cherry and some whipped cream. I some places there will still be a few inches left in the metal container, and they give that to you also.
It should be thick enough that the straw collapses if you try to drink it quickly.
The climate difference almost certainly plays a pivotal role in this. One of my most treasured pictures from Oxford is a photograph of a sign being used to sell the Oxford Mail with the bold headline “82 Degrees and the Heat Takes Its Toll.” Everyone around here finds that very amusing. The high temperature here on Saturday was only 83, and everyone was commenting about what a nice, temperate day it was for July. I’ll have to admit that 82 in Oxford felt hotter than 83 does here, though, because there wasn’t air conditioning (and cold drinks!) everywhere like we have here. (Even the natives who were used to room temperature soft drinks found them less than charming when they’d been left out all day on a sidewalk display at 82 degrees.)
OK, that’s the difference. Had his shake been chocolate flavored, I think we could have lived with it ---- essentially his chocolate shake would just have been what we would normally call chocolate milk. (That so many of us here have been confusing with milk chocolate…) But his shake was banana, so it just had this horrid artificial flavoring that gave it such an unnatural yellow glow, so far divorced from the ice cream, milk, and banana concoction he was expecting.
Really? I was quite impressed by the ice cream we were served at St. Benet’s — that’s why we were all lulled into a false sense of security when the evil Jane served us ice cream with gooseberries on top. But I think they referred to what we were given as “Italian ice cream.” I take it this is different from the standard fare?
Incidentally, my trip to Oxford solved another mystery for me. When my Mom had brought home some confections from her first trip to England, one of them had some silly little jokes on the candy wrappers (sort of like we typically see on a Cracker Jacks prize wrapper here in the US.) One of the wrappers had this little gem: “If bricks make walls, what do walls make? Ice Cream!” We all found that joke to be the most baffling thing in the world. A great light came on over my head when I finally got over there, and saw the Wall’s ice cream signs everywhere.
Yeah, that’s the stuff I got. My Mom had consulted with her friends in Stafford about what kind to get. They said “Really? Are you sure she really wants that? It’s not very good, you know,” and told her that it was really an acquired taste. She brought home a brand that was packaged in a beautiful little purple, octagonally-shaped box. It was rosewater flavored, just as you mentioned. It looked so pretty in its lovely box, but it was just a yucky old powdered-sugar covered jelly.
(Edmund, you were obviously a very sick, sick boy…)
As a lifelong southerner I understand that the UK call cookies biscuits but what do you call biscuits as we know them in the south?
DarbyV:
I don’t think Southern-style bicuits are eaten in the UK. However, the ingredients for scones are almost identical to the ingredients for biscuits, with the addition of sugar and fruit.
I’m not familiar with Southern-style biscuits at all, but plain scones (we often make them without the fruit) sound similar then.
Incidentally, there are certain types of biscuit that are referred to as ‘cookies’ - these are usually the crumbly ones with chocolate chips and/or nuts in that are made with a dollop of mixture that is a cake-batter consistency, as opposed to a dough that is rolled out and cut with a circular cutter.
I quite often do this sort of thing myself in the foodprocessor at home; anyway, aside from the McD’s, there are a few little cafes round my way that make good ‘real’ shakes, but I don’t think they’re as thick as the sort you get over there.
One thing I’ve only seen occasionally over here, but heard mentioned a fair bit by Americans is rootbeer - McD’s in the UK used to sell it, but I think it got dropped due to lack of popularity, shame; I quite liked it.
We have Dandelion and Burdock (sounds awful doesn’t it?) which I think is sort of similar, even though the ingredients are probably not the same - is this available over there?
And of course ginger beer, but that seems to be available the world over - I like the sort that makes your eyes water.