Florida.
And Orwell writes that Brits sometimes eat kidneys at breakfast! :eek:
BTW, does anyone know what Orwell means by this?
I’ve never before seen it suggested that sugar and alcohol are substitutes for each other, or somehow serve the same dietary need.
The sentence after your quote explains it:
The majority of people drink sweetened teas with at least two of their daily meals, and it is therefore only natural that they should want the food itself to taste excessively sweet.
I’m not sure if I’ve seen it suggested either, but I do think they serve the same dietary need: empty calories. If a given person had several hundred high-quality calories of meat and vegetables a day, but nothing else, and a control person had several hundred high-quality calories a day and supplemented that with several hundred calories of either sugar or alcohol, I’d bet the sugar and alcohol consumers would be healthier after a few months (because it is not healthy to live on less than 1000 calories a day). So, given healthy water, watered-down kool-aid would probably be of similar nutritional value to medieval subsistence farmers who usually drank watery beer at meals and which probably thus had at least a hundred if not more needed empty calories a day.
Kidneys shouldn’t taste like that, but they have to be properly prepared (peel outer membrane, rinse thoroughly, trim, and soak in milk). Otherwise, they will taste awful.
Good beer is hardly “empty calories.” Beermaking (and wine- and cidermaking, for that matter) was a way of using up agricultural surplus that otherwise would have rotted. There’s a lot of food value in good beer; at its best, it’s like liquid bread, which makes having it for breakfast (and most other meals) entirely practical. Also, as you imply, drinking beer (or any other alcoholic beverage) was at one time much safer than drinking water (and still is, in many parts of the world).
Keep in mind too that even today, the average farmer burns a lot of calories in the course of a day, as do workers in many other traditional professions. All that alcohol would not necessarily have gone to fat and flab.
People who live in real beer cultures (e.g., Britain, Ireland, Germany) appreciate this, just like the French, Italians, and Spanish understand the virtues of good wine. Americans, whose beer is generally like piss water, have no clue as to what I’m talking about. (This is ironic, since the United States was a nation of drunkards until the coming of the railroads, which made it much easier to get agricultural surplus to market.)
So-called ‘domestic’ (name-brand) beer is that way. In the last couple of decades, though, competing beers and ales have started popping up. Samuel Adams would be one of the best examples of that. And then there are the microbreweries; it seems like every major city has a number of local ones now. IPA’s, Hefs, Bocks, and other more traditional European-style brews are commonly available now, not to mention imports.
And I have to get in my cultural plug: Guinness Extra Stout is God. 
They have to be thoroughly cooked. In fact, you have to cook the piss out of them.
I’ve had some of these; they are, of course, much better than so-called “domestic” beer.
The Czechs are another great beer-drinking nation. It seems every small town has its own brewery, and the dark beers in particular are outstanding!
The Slovaks, on the other hand, are another great wine-drinking people, with a somewhat different mentality, naturally. Could be one reason why they’re no longer one country. 
They should be cooked along with bacon, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, a bit of tomato paste, and some English mustard. Yum-O! :o
Yes, it’s not beer if you can’t eat it with a fork!
Wait, here’s a curious oversight:
What about cock-a-leekie soup? AIUI, it ranks with haggis as a national dish of Scotland.
A chicken, leek and oats/rice/whatever filler soup isn’t going to be unique to any single country, now is it? Fuck knows what Orwell is banging on about in large parts of this essay. The soup stuff is just bizarre.
Ireland is not a real beer culture at all, or at least wasn’t until about 10 years ago and the start of the craft beer boom. Now insufferable beer snobbery is mandatory.
Guinness is only ten years old??? :dubious:
It sounds to me like you haven’t been in America for about twenty years or so. America is probably the center of modern beer culture now. There’s about 3000 breweries here. Chicago itself has almost 70 now, not counting the suburbs.
Does one drink make a culture? At least in my generation Guinness has never been as popular as Budweiser, Heineken, Carlsberg etc.