And an equally wonderfull sense of humor.
Thanks
Really? I’ve always thought of bread pudding as a traditional Southern dish. My grandma, who spent all of her life in rural North Carolina, made killer bread pudding. (Of course, that doesn’t mean the dish wasn’t originally British.) I thought the trendiness of bread pudding was just another example of making Southern cooking all high-falutin.
And, yes, cake with cream rules.
Brynda, Eton mess is chopped strawberries, cream, sugar and meringues mushed up together to form a “mess”.
it’s yummy. and looks good served in glasses or cups.
perfect picnic dessert.
it’s a bit posh, being named after Eton and all.
hence my champagne and Henley comment.
Meringe in the Southern USA is a baked foaming topping to pastry, for example chocolate pie made from egg whites. What are “meringues”?
You can get the British to eat everything if you toss it in curry or fry it up in a pastry. They’re so easy.
Whisked egg whites with sugar, baked in a cool oven until crisp. Add cream (clotted, natch) for fun and games.
BTW
Hmm… I spent a few weeks in England back in '94, and wihle teh scones with clotted cream were to die for, I didn’t eat anything else there worth remembering. Being vegetarian didn’t help, I’m sure.
As for fish and chips, I agree that it’s got nothing on catfish and hushpuppies. Best thing of all, though, is to douse your fried catfish in a vinegary hot sauce. Beats the pants off malt vinegar, and is the essence of Southern.
Daniel
Thanks, Tapioca.
Is there anyone who knows about trifle? Allegedly, you mix pieces of cake, whipped cream, fruit and rum in a see through bowl and mix everything up? Sounds delicious but nauseating.
It’s not all mixed up, it’s layered. Cake and fruity stuff at the bottom, confectioners custardy gunk in the middle, and cream on top.
I don’t trifle with the trifle; however I do dabble in a slice of Manchester Tart from time to time, ooer…
It’s a little more structured than that. There are several variations on the basic theme but it goes much like this:
-
Begin with pieces of sponge cake. It can be stale sponge cake without harm, as the other ingredients will moisten it. You have several choices: spread the pieces with jam, or soak them in sherry or rum or similar (whatever goes with the other ingredients you’re about to use). These go in the bottom of the glass bowl (say 3-4 pints capacity).
-
Add a pint of fruit jelly and some tinned fruit to taste. Note: jelly, Brit-side, is a dessert made from fruit-flavoured gelatine dissolved in boiling water and cooled. It’s not like that stuff you put in your peanut-butter sandwiches, although we do have that kind of jelly too - it’s less common than whole-fruit jam with us, but (for instance) crabapples are more commonly made into jelly than not. Allow the jelly to set - or you can skip it and proceed to the next layer, especially if you used jam at step 1.
-
Add a pint of custard or blancmange. (If you don’t have blancmange, I’d better explain that it’s a dessert made with sugar, cornflour (do you guys call this “corn starch”?) and boiling milk. You need enough cornflour to ensure that the mixture will set when cool - two or three tablespoons to the pint of milk. Better practice this separately. This side of the Pond, we have several flavours of blancmange on the shelves. I suppose you could use milk-shake syrup for flavouring.) Once again, allow this layer to set.
-
Whip half a pint to a pint of cream until it’s not quite thick enough to set at room temperature. Slather this over the top of your set blancmange. Chill.
-
Sprinkle with coloured sugar strands or hundreds-and-thousands or silver balls or whatever you might sprinkle on top of an ice-cream sundae. Chocolate shavings might be good, depending what else you’ve used.
Serve in large spoonfuls, making sure each serving includes all the layers. Colourful and tasty
Boldface Type, you don’t list your location, but I think that “ooer” gives you away. I’m from Halifax, near Leeds, myself.
I thought we gave you the use of some naval bases in exchange (all our bases are belong to US) for those rustbuckets!
Actually we found a very good use for one of those WW1-surplus clankers…
[geek mode=WW2 status = on] Operation Chariot, in 1942, was an early Combined Operations assault on the Atlantic port of St Nazaire - not that we had anything against the French, but we needed to decommission the dock there originally designed for the Normandie liner, but at that time the only Atlantic dock big enough to accommodate the super-battleship Tirpitz. So we assembled a strike force of crack engineers and stuck some of them aboard one of those American four-pipers, the Campbeltown, cosmetically re-engineered to look like a German ship, and crammed it full of explosives with a time-fuse.
We then went steaming into St Nazaire one night after a preliminary air-raid to get all the searchlights pointing upwards, with the rest of the engineers stuffed into a couple of dozen motor launches. These were wooden-skinned petrol-engined motorboats. The engineers would have been as safe if the Campbeltown had been towing them behind her in a hydrogen-filled blimp.
The Campbeltown was duly ran aground over the dock gates, the engineers disembarked, as many of the motor launches that could make it to shore dropped their contingents off, and some furious fighting and demolition work ensued. The long and short of it was that the dockyard was put out of action, and next day the Campbeltown blew up and wrecked the Normandie dock as per specification. (It blew up much later than expected. One theory is that the automatic timer failed, and some member of the task force who hadn’t been rounded up by the Germans managed to slip aboard and set it off by hand.)
Casualties were heavy, but the aim of depriving the Tirpitz of an important base was achieved, and a number of Victoria Crosses were handed out.
[/geek]
Cool.
Malacandra, thanks for your detailed instructions. I think our word for the blancmange is pudding, which also comes in lots of flavors. I understand for Brits, pudding is a general term for a sweet dessert at the end of the meal. Pudding for Americans is that thick milk based custard that comes in lots of flavors. Your version of trifle sounds yummy!
Boldface Type, thanks for your comments as well.
Malacandra, thanks for your differentiation between jelly and jam.
.
I now understand why a lot of british people don’t understand why we americans love “peanut butter and jelly sammiches”. I wouldn’t like them either if I substituted strawberry jello for strawberry jelly. Ugh.
In the US, pudding is milk, sugar, and cornstarch. Jelly is fruit juice thickened with pectin. Jam is crushed fruit thickened with pectin. Jello is gelatin (rendered protein from bones, skin, and hooves) flavored with sugar and fruit flavorings.
We’ve watched enough US sitcoms and teen movies to know what it actually means. The problem is people still don’t like it. Personally I do, but only with proper American grape jelly like Smuckers, spread really thick. Unfortunately, that’s hard to get hold of this side of the pond.
During the WWII, my Granddad got hold of an American food parcel and found a tube of “peanut butter”. Never having heard of it before, he assumed it was a clever butter substitute, so spread it on bread and put ham and cheese (or something) on it. He’s never eaten it since.
Rumbled! You are quite correct. As you imply, I am indeed a Lithuanian llama farmer currently organising the social events calendar in a lettuce-fetishists commune in Guam.
However, my sister lives in Leeds, which is a bit more exotic.
Anyway, all this talk of trifle when the One True Path is HP Sauce…
This isn’t going to get back to that vegemite stuff, is it?
I think mean Marmite. Vegemite is Antipodean.