British vs US: 2 kitchen questions

In My Humble Opinion
1

My in-laws were visiting from England recently, and I noticed two things. I am curious if these habits are widespread in England, peculiar to my in-laws, or common in the US, too, unbeknownst to me.

  1. Not rinsing dishes. When my British in-laws wash dishes, they don’t rinse them–just dry them off and put them away. Are British dishwashing soaps (washing up liquids, I think they are called) different from ours? Or do ours not require rinsing, either, and I just do it out of habit?

  2. Leaving packages open. This bugged me most when they put things like cheese in the refridgerator, but vegetables, cooked food, really pretty much everything at their house goes in the fridge naked. I even saw my MIL put a sliced tomato in the fridge naked. :eek: The horror! Tomatoes don’t belong in there in the first place, but without something covering it, how can it not be ruined? They also left packages of chips and pretzels, etc, sitting open to go stale. I finally figured out why they leave doors standing open (fewer bugs in England, at least where they live), but don’t they have high humidity, causing crunchy things to go stale?

OK, British and American dopers, enlighten me. Am I weird, or are my in-laws?

Disclaimer: I like lots of the differences between our cultures. These two just seem odd to me.

2

Not rinsing before dish washing is fairly common in UK. Most UK plumbing is more robust than US plumbing, so it isn’t as necessary to rinse the plates to avoid possible blockages later. The dishwasher filter will need cleaning off more often though.
The not wrapping things is weird though. Maybe they remember the scare stories about chemicals in cling film and just no longer trust any such items.

3

My understanding is that once you’re used to the tiny bit of soap left on dishes not rinsed before drying, you’re good.

But…
If you’re used to them having all of the soap rinsed off and you should use unrinsed dishes (containing tiny trace amounts of soap), you’ll likely get a case of the runs and nothing more. Hardly life threatening, but irritating none the less. Of course, once you’re used to it, no worries you won’t even notice.

I have a caregiver who comes into my home and insists on hand washing the dishes (without rinsing, thinks it’s an unnecessary waste of water) rather than use the dishwasher. I’ve tried everything to convince her to just put them in the dishwasher and not bother washing them by hand, but she thinks she’s being helpful and I don’t want to offend her. I’m quite certain it would be a wasted effort to explain to her that while her family is used to it and experiences no ill side effect it gives us all the trots.
So instead I just wait till she’s gone and put the dishes she has so carefully hand washed into the dishwasher.

Hope this helps. The problem is people who do this really don’t see that while it causes them no ill effects, others, unused to it, will have regretable side effects.

4

Interesting. To the questions:

Bippy: The rinsing I am referring to is rinising the soap off dishes that have been handwashed, not going into the dishwasher.

GorillaMan: I didn’t put the detergent in, they did. :slight_smile: There was quite a bit of suds on the dishes.

Why not refridgerate tomatoes? Words fail me. It ruins them. Get a couple of homegrown tomatoes. Sacrifice one (sob!) to the fridge. Taste them both. You will never put one in the fridge again. Other vegetables, it is just the drying out factor. Celery, carrots, etc will dry out quickly in there.

5

The not rinsing dishes is common practice - I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a soapy taste, but maybe I’m just used to it! But the not wrapping things is unusual - everything gets wrapped in cling film before it goes in the fridge.

I did not know about not putting tomatoes in the fridge though. I shall have to try your experiment!

6

Any Americans who don’t wrap or rinse? What about other nationalities? I seem to remember the Germans I knew rinsing, but I can’t remember if they wrapped or not.

7

As a Canadian reading this, I started singing (in my head) clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you." :wink:

Actually, I was born is Scotland but came to Canada (via a 3-year stop in Northern Ireland) when I was 6.

My Aunt – who also immigrated to Canada from Scotland still does not rinse dishes. Coffee at her place tastes like soap. Dishes are rinsed at my parent’s place (and mine obviously).

As for not wrapping things, I often put sliced tomatoes, chopped onions, etc. etc. in the fridge without wrapping. And sometimes, I do wrap. I guess it depends if I think the item is likely to be around for a while, or if it will likely be consumed in a day or two.

8

Darn straight, sistuh!!! Actually, I don’t refrigerate fresh sweet corn or most fruits either for the exact same reason.

9

If we’re talking homegrown ones, I never let them sit around longer than 24 hours anyway, because they immediately lose flavour!

10

I don’t have any definitive explainations for your, but the following are some certified Wild Ass Speculations.

Rinsing of dishes: Prior to the popularizations of dish detergents with high glycerin content ("…to avoid those dreaded dishpan hands"), plain soap or a very base detergent was used for washing dishes. Think of washing your dishes with Lava or that powdered crap you used to find in public bathrooms. Needless to say, it didn’t stick much and required little in the way of rinsing in comparison to Dawn or Palmolive. I remember washing dishes at my maternal grandparents–a pair of people who rejected wholesale any product that originated after 1950, to a point of actually purchasing and driving “vintage” cars long before they were hip–and the soap they used didn’t require any rinsing at all. On the other hand, it required a spectacular amount of elbow-grease to remove dried or burnt food.

Leaving stuff out: Same grandparents as above didn’t buy a “mechanical icebox” until it became essentially impossible to buy blocks of ice for an ice cabinet. As a result, they had very…conservative habits with regard to opening and using the refrigerator. Fresh fruits and vegetables were purchased in daily quantities if they didn’t come from the garden or last season’s canning, and so required no refrigeration. You’ll also find that many foods we commonly refrigerate do not require immediate refrigeration, especially if you plan to eat them soon. Hard cheeses, for instance, and eggs can survive for days at room temperature without ill effect. Uncured meat, of course, needs to be refrigerated to prevent bacterial growth, and most soft dairy products tend to spoil without cooling, but I’d wager that at least half the stuff in your fridge doesn’t require refrigeration.

Leaving stuff uncovered in fridge: In the days before Ziploc bags, Tupperware, and Saran Wrap, you just wrapped your meat in wax paper and tossed cheese onto a plate and let it go.

From what I’ve seen, most Europeans raised in the pre-1980 period tend to have enjoyed a standard of living that had fewer of the modern conveniences than that in the United States; that is to say, amenities were less available or more costly than on the west of the pond. Of an Welsh-English couple I knew a few years ago, for instance, one didn’t have a television in their house at all until the early Seventies, and the other was sans refrigeration for the first few years of his life (early-mid Sixties) and then when they did have one it was just roomy enough for eggs, milk, a small ham, and a few pints of beer. It wasn’t a big hindrince, as breakfast and lunch was some form of Bovril on bread, and stay-at-home mom usually made dinner fresh.

I’d guess that your in-laws are probably from that generation where habits based on those limitations were formed, and owing to the retardation of consumerism in Europe as a result of reconstruction following WWII that mentality probably exsisted somewhat longer than in the US.

Tomatoes in the fridge, though…I have to agree; that’s just wrong.

Stranger

11

My mother would kill me if I had ever put a dish in the drainer with suds still on it. I learned young and I learned well. It leaves a horrible film on your dishes and makes your glasses all streaky.

My grandmother NEVER uses twisties or clothes pins for bags of chips, pretzels, etc (she does wrap food, though), and we always tease her about it. Ugh, stale cookies and chips.

Another problem with not wrapping food up in the fridge is that it’ll lose its flavor, even if it won’t go bad.

12

Sorry I missunderstood 1 completely.
I haven’t heard of anyone not rinsing off plates etc. after hand washing them with washing up liquid. The idea of not doing that seems awful. Even if you have a single sink, you would fill a washing up bowl with the soapy water, and then run fresh water into the sink for rinseing off.
Who would want all there food tasting of Fairy Liquid?

13

But it doesn’t! Unless we’ve got millions of people who don’t notice the taste, I’m fairly sure it just all runs off.

14

Well, I saw me some suds, so it didn’t all run off, but on the other hand, I didn’t taste anything. I didn’t have any of the unfortunate effects elbows described, either, thank goodness.

Interesting WASs, Stranger. My in-laws are a pivotal 10 years older than I am–they are mid-50s, which would have made them post-war babies. Both were raised in working-class families, too. My MIL told me about sleeping in an unheated attic, which leads me to believe that they had a lower standard of living than I was raised with. (Poor phrasing, but you get the drift)

15

All this makes me wonder if I’m wasting water by rinsing my dishes? Glasses, OTOH, must be rinsed, for a glass of water that tastes of soap is verily an abomination before God.

16

On a visit to my mom’s sister in Ohio, I was shocked to find she left meat and cheese semi-wrapped in the original wrappers, once opened. half-onions and half-peppers were put back, naked, in the crisper drawer. I didn’t catch her serving spoiled food, but the cheese tasted like onion. That’s not a terrible thing, I guess, but I feel each food should taste like itself. If she had fudge or peach pie in there, it would have been oniony, too.

In my refrigerator, fresh veggies are in a plastic bag, or, if started, in a Tupper-like thing. Meat, once opened, is resealed in a plastic or pyrex thing. Leftover cooked food is in a sealed pyrex dish. When I freeze meat, it’s double-sealed to ward off freezer burn. My frozen Hungarian peppers and glazed onions are in zipbags inside zipbags, to prevent taste exchange.

I once had a flour weevil invasion. It’s very discouraging to have to throw out all your flours, Bisquick, cornmeal, crackers and such. All that stuff is in sealed containers now, and even when I get the occasional few ants, I know they can’t find anything to eat.

17

Count me as a Brit who rinses. I’ve friends that don’t, though. And some things get covered in the fridge and others don’t: basically if it needs to be sealed it gets sealed; otherwise it doesn’t.

18

I’m not convinced many Brits don’t rinse their dishes. All my family did, and they are mostly no-nonsense Lancastrians who wouldn’t waste water if it weren’t necessary.
It is something I would associate with batchelors who aren’t house trained :wink:

19

I didn’t rinse long before I reached that enlightened state :smiley:

20

Well, I’ve been British all my life and I’ve yet to meet a British person who habitually rinses their dishes.