After years of making Indian curries, I always fry or sauté spices at the beginning of a recipe. I had read in The Cooking of India by Santha Rama Rau that the most important part of using spices is that they not “catch in the throat.” The way to prevent that is to fry them in hot ghee or oil, or else to toast them as in garam masala. But you never use raw spices. Now even when making something non-Indian where the only spice is black pepper, I always add it while sautéing onions or the like.
About half of my grocery shopping is done at India Market, so there’s that.
Good one! I certainly know that from Indian cooking, but now you mention it, I was shown the frying of pepper in fat at the beginning of a recipe by an Italian cook. I’d totally forgotten about that.
It’s always struck me - well, for as long as I’ve paid any attention to the idea - that while the English are renowned (internationally and among themselves) as lovers of tea, it’s more the case that they’re prodigious consumers of - at best - pretty mediocre tea. Quite often truly execrable tea.
I do really love tea, so I find myself turning down most offers of a brew. Which as an Englishman is quite a lot of offers…
Hah! My wife got into the mayo and fries habit on her study-abroad (Italy, with trips to Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, among other places), and I got into the vinegar & fries habit on mine (England).
Nutella or chocolate on waffles and pancakes is sort of a combined Franco-American-Belgian thing we do (I’ve had nutella on crepes in France, and both chocolate and nutella on waffles in Belgium).
I’m not even going to go into Mexican stuff; here in Texas, there are a LOT of blurry lines- is having tamales on Xmas a Texas thing or a Mexican thing, for example?
Probably half the time, I’m eating with chop sticks or a fork and spoon, like they do in SEAsia. When I have Indian curry I wanna eat with my hands! I wasH my rice, twice. And I put chilli sauce on my eggs.
I’ve put chilli sauce on my eggs today, aye. And I thought myself to use chopsticks - because I wanted to know - by routinely eating chips with them and dunking them (the chips) in my mushy peas and brown sauce to practice control. Still do it 25+ years later. Not foreign, really. Just a bit odd.
Nutella also makes a great cake frosting. :o
I had always drunk coffee with cream and sugar until I was in grad school and studying in Moscow. Now I normally drink it black and strong with NO sugar. Loading black coffee with sugar is a Russian habit I could never acquire. Standing in line waiting for a coffee, I’d watch my fellow students dump five or six spoons full into each tiny cup. Yeccch! :mad: If you’re buying a coffee from a snack bar, you have to warn the vendor NOT to put sugar into it because they normally do so without asking if you want it.
Strangely, McDonald’s didn’t offer coffee when they opened their first restaurant on Pushkin Square in January 1990. They didn’t put it on the menu until they opened the second one on the Arbat in February 1994.
As far as I’m concerned, coffee with cream and coffee with milk are two completely different beasts. You have to heat the milk like the French and Italians do in order to make adding it worthwhile, and they have to be in a ratio of 1 : 1.
In Canada, BTW, you order a Double-Double if you want coffee with extra cream and sugar. I’d never heard this before I moved to Toronto.
Sauerkraut isn’t really uncommon in the US, but I didn’t really start eating it until I visited Germany.
I also developed a taste for German style mustards, and started seeking out Löwensenf sweet Bavarian style and more recently Löwensenf extra hot to put on my bratwurst (along with the sauerkraut). Nowadays it’s readily available on Amazon, but I used to have to seek it out in specialty stores.
With cream isn’t really a thing particularly in the UK, but milk’s pretty standard. I think of milk but no sugar as almost a mistake, like somebody didn’t get it but persevered, and nobody would admit the Emperor was naked: there’s a gaping hole in the flavour profile. I routinely drink mine black and powerful, but also like it sweetened with, as you say, hot milk of some type. Neither or both. Just milk is be like making coffee ice cream without sugar. Precious few people agree, mind you.
When I was in Peru, I discovered that they serve tea with no milk (good start, for me), but with an avalanche of sugar. Asking for it without is as crazy as asking for it without water or tea: it was one of the three non-negotiable fundamentals of tea.
Are there people who put cream in tea? I always use milk. Cream doesn’t taste right.
Coffee calls for cream, though, if I’m not having it black. I’m one of the few people I know who will vary between black coffee and coffee with cream. Most people around me stick to one of those.
I’ve only encountered cream in tea once. The German exchange family I mentioned a few posts back had tea and cake every afternoon (and they questioned my adherence to a national stereotype?!), with whipped cream to accompany the cake. The mother would spoon cream into her tea along with the milk.
I use cream on occasion, when I’m out of milk. It doesn’t taste bad, just different. Very rich.
The milk I nornally use, BTW, is evaporated. If I have no choice, I’ll use condensed, but it really is much too sweet to have regularly.
My ex and her husband have a lovely samovar in their home. (At least, they did before last hurricane season; they were mad enough to set up house in the Bahamas. 
) IIRC, they had to pay a tax to bring it with them out of Russia.
I use anything from whole milk through cream, as long as I know what it is beforehand so I can adjust the quantity so it is not too creamy. But these days I only use it if the tea is likely to be too hot to immediately drink in order to cool it down, or too strong to taste good by itself (not necessarily bad, just pre-brewed stronger than I like it.)
Normally, I drink black tea straight but brewed to only 60%-80% as strong as I presume everyone else brews it. I actually prefer the flavor when it is slightly weaker than even that, but then it doesn’t do anything for me caffeine-wise.
This sounds like the greatest thing ever. I think the closest thing I’ve ever had/seen in the US would be some type of omelette with home fries or hashbrowns included with a bunch of other stuff. Right now i’m tempted to make some fries and throw a couple eggs in.
Excellent! As the chips have already been deep fried, you can put them straight into the frying pan and their fat will render out as you toss them around. The eggs were only ever seasoned with salt, and it’s a simple as that.
It would sometimes be offered topped with a simple salad of shredded cabbage, tomato and assorted other bits, and there were usually bottles of ketchup and hot sauce to dress it with. A popular addition was a couple of mishkaki for a hundred shillings apiece: little kebabs of marinated miscellaneous meat (usually goat, as far as I could tell) on old bicycle spokes, cooked over charcoal (which also served as the heat source for the frying pan). Cold bottle of “Stoney Tangawizi” (ginger beer): a meal fit for royalty.
Can I get eggs, chips, and Spam? :o
Careful. You know what happens to spammers on the Dope…