Now, back to the real thread.
Cadbury-loving Americans: take a very close look at your Cadbury’s wrapper, and see who actually manufactures your elixer. It’s [drumroll]
Hershey’s.
I haven’t been to Britain yet so I haven’t compared with the original. I do, generally, prefer Cadbury’s Dairy Milk to Hershey’s, and I’m especially fond of both Caramello and Fruit & Nut. For semi-sweet, though, Hershey’s Special is quite good - Cook’s Illustrated recently taste-tested several brands for use in a chocolate custard pie, and the Hershey’s came second only to the uber-gourmet Callebaut, and ahead of several other (unnamed) European brands (I assume they included Suchard, Valhrona, etc.).
May I rush to the defense of Turkish Delight? Those of us from the Pacific Northwest love our Aplets and Cotlets, which indeed are equivalent - the company even sells what it calls “Old Country Locoum” in flavors like orangewater and pistachio, which are a revelation. The irony is that the founders were Armenians who’d managed to get out of Turkey during the genocide, and settled in eastern Washington.
On shakes: do your shakes come in malted varieties? This is the One True Path to Dairy Enlightenment. Y’see, you have to add a spoonful or so of malt powder to the mix, which provides a wonderful balance to the chocolate (cholocate being the only acceptable flavor of Milk Shakes.) Heaven.
Now, Mangetout, you asked about breakfast cereal, which strongly suggest that your nation is abandoning the grossest, vilest, slimiest breakfast invention: The Kipper. My uncle, a U.S. Navy officer in the early 1970s, had the great good luck of being assigned to the Atlantic Fleet (not bad during Vietnam, eh?). He served a terribly vital role as some sort of low-level liaison between the USN and Her Majesty’s Fleet, a position that required him, one fine morning, to breakfast with a high admiral. That meant rising at some ungodly hour, putting on dress uniform, and (in his words) “…being confronted not merely with fish, but…dead fish. Really dead fish. Embalmed in oil. Panfried, so that the smell stayed in my uniform for hours.” I mean, what, you’re surrounded by frigging water, so if you absolutely must have fish before noon – an unspeakably bad idea to begin with – can’t you people find any fresh? (Oh, and may I ask how the hell many weeks they let it sit on the dock before it gets to the cannery?) Or are you too hung over to manage to do more than empty a can? And in which case, won’t it just make you barf anyway?
Maybe that’s the point.
I’m vehement about it because my father briefly had an English girlfriend (actually, she wasn’t English - she was more-than-English: Colonial.). I smelled kippers in her house one morning and since I wasn’t the one dating her I made excuses to run outside. And barfed out of her line of sight.
So please, don’t make fun of anything we eat over here:D.
Now on to pizza. I’ve been living here in NYC for ten years, and I would say there are only a few places where it’s really worth it: John’s on Bleecker, Patsy’s in East Harlem, Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. See, what makes thin-crust pizza terrific is the oven: it’s gotta be brick, to char the crust, and shaped so the smoke backs up on the pizza just a bit. And the crust has to be feather-light, which means that at John’s they don’t sell slices. By definition, really great pizza doesn’t hold up to sitting out for hours, doled out a slice at a time.
Now, what are the street foods where you live? I mean the stuff sold from carts. Here in New York, there’s almost everything, especially on Broadway near Wall Street - the ubiquitous hot dogs (roasted, never boiled, with mustard or ketchup only), Italian sausage, kebab, soft pretzels (with mustard), soup, honey roasted nuts, bagels/donuts and coffee, whole fruit (lots of Middle Eastern vendors), oh my. Used to be there was even a cart doing some sort of vegetarian Macrobiotic cooking.
Oh, and please send Curly Wurlies. There was a similar think called Marathon Bar when I was a kid, but it’s been gone for years. And somebody tell the Mars corporation to get their names straight, for some reason the products you know as “Mars” and “Milky Way” aren’t the same as the ones we know by the same damn names. (here, chocolate over chocolate nougat = Three Musketeers, chocolate over carmel and chocolate nougat = Milky Way, chocolate over carmel, chocolate nougat and almonds = Mars).
(Just ran to the fridge for some Hershey’s Special. Mmmmm.)
