Lemonade, jelly, and biscuits (and other foods people outside of the US have wrong)

Cafe Society
1

Just kidding.

But still, it’s odd how you can know something as one thing your whole life and then find out that someone who lives in another area always thought of it as another thing their whole life.

Take lemonade for example. Here (in the US) it’s a drink made with water, sugar and lemons. It’s lemon-flavored. It is not carbonated…it’s sort of like orange juice is to oranges and pineapple juice is to pineapples. Lemonade is to lemons.

And then there’s jelly, the stuff that comes in jars and that you spread on toast. It’s a goopy-type thing that comes in flavors like grape and strawberry and it also goes well on peanut butter sandwiches (hence the term PB&J). It’s jelly. It’s not the stuff that you refridgerate and it forms a wiggly mass that wobbles around and that you sometimes put pieces of bananas in. That’s Jel-LO.

And biscuits? You get those at KFC. They come, hot and buttery, and you bite into them…mm so good. They’re like rolls, only baked and with butter on them.
And don’t even get me started on tarts, cupcakes, muffins, chips, ranch, oreos, gatorade, or Smarties.

Hey, Canadians? Smarties are chalky things! Not chocolate things. Smarties come in long roles and are circular and they contain no choclate. I have no idea why they do in Canada, but they do. Seemed to me when I wanted the smarties here, I had to buy things called ROCKETS there. But that’s odd. Here they’re called Smarties. There, smarties are sort of like M&Ms. What gives?

All these food differences. It makes my mind boggled. What are all of these things to you?

2

The French have good lemonade and, judging from my 1 month visit to Turkey once, the Turks have great jelly. Of course, the jelly was all homemade. But, yeah, I generally agree with you.

3

Pudding. Bill Cosby would plotz if he knew what the Brits were using that word to mean.

4

I’m with you on the lemonade and the jelly, but after my trip to the UK, I’m inclined to allow the term ‘biscuit’ to be more broadly applied. Because digestives are yummy, and so are the cheese type I found in a convenience store in Edinburgh, but I didn’t write down the brand, and so shall never have to good fortune to snack upon them again. :frowning:

5

Lemonade is a clear (though there are cloudy yellow and pink versions as well) carbonated lemon flavoured fizzy pop. What you describe would be a lemon squash.

Jelly is a gelatin dessert. What you call jelly is jam.

Biscuits are cookies. KFC here did (might still do for all I know) sell American style biscuits at one time and I loved 'em. Savoury scones, I always thought.

Smarties (we have 'em here in the UK as well) are candy-coated chocolate. Like M&Ms without the ‘m’ printed on 'em. Used to come in cardboard tubes with coloured plastic caps which had letters of the alphabet printed on the inside, now come in hexagonal tubes.

We have two types of muffins here. The ones you’d probably call English muffins (though I think they are not quite the same thing) and the ones you’d just call muffins - blueberry, choc-chip and double choc-chip seem to be the most popular flavours.

Chips are what you’d call French fries. Except the really skinny ones which do tend to be called fries. Crisps are what you’d call chips.

Oreos are sold here and are foul things.

I’ve never seen Ranch here, but we do have garlic and herb dressings that taste pretty similar.

Your Milky Ways are what we’d call Mars Bars.

6

Naw, Jelly is made from fruit juice with no fruit at all in in. It’s pretty much transparent.

Jam is made from a mix of fruit juice and some of the fruit itself. Kind of chunky, depending on the fruit of course.

We also have preserves, which is mostly fruit with just a little juice. Very thick it is.

7

So what do you call cupcakes? I was talking to one friend from over there yesterday and she said they don’t have cupcakes (or rather, she’d never heard of them).

[snipping mine]

We have Milky Way and Mars Bars over here…both are pretty good.

Don’t like Oreos? :eek:
Me either. ; )

And yeah, I was made aware that most British people didn’t know what Ranch was by my (above mentioned) friend. When she said “What?”.

8

Okay, I’ll give it a go from my Brit perspective:

> tarts
These are shallow pastry cases with some sort of sweet filling (custard, lemon, strawberries). What does ‘tart’ mean to you?

> cupcakes
well, they’re like mini sponge cakes in a paper case, sometimes with some sort of fondant/butter icing on top. Also known as ‘fairy cakes’.

> muffins
Traditionally, they’re a kind of dense bread roll thing, used as a base for eggs benedict, for one thing. Then there’s this weird american import thing that’s crept in that looks more like a big fat cupcake, only without the butter icing

> chips
Deep fried potato wedges, of course. What you call fries. "Chips’ of potato, can’t see what’s so weird about that. Oh, and those really really skinny deep fried potato things are crisps, because they’re crispy.

> ranch
Lord only knows. A dressing? We have lots of dressings, but not many ranches, obviously.

> oreos
A weird-tasting US version of a biscuit. OUR version of a biscuit.

> gatorade
What’s this then? Is it an orangey enery drink? We have an orangey energy drink called Lucazade, is it anything like that?

> Smarties
Well, clearly, Smarties is a brand name for a sugar-coated chocolate, like your (inferior) M&Ms. What else could they be?? No, don’t burst my bubble, we were all brought up on Smarties.

Question: what’s your Mars Bar like? Because OURS is a chocolate coated bar of soft nougat and caramel, whereas Milky Way is just the chocolate coated soft nougat.

9

Fairy cakes, if my son’s book is correct.

10

Yes Yoda, jam this is.

11

… and ‘Marmalade’ is a street walker in New Orleans… :smiley:

12

I think that term will always strike me as amazingly strange. It would be like stopping at the Texaco on the way home to fill up with explosives or topping off my cereal bowl with lactative.

13

US Mars bar (no longer made): plain nougat, almonds, caramel and milk chocolate. Been replaed with the Snickers Almond (a normal Snickers consists of peanut butter nougat topped with roasted peanuts and caramel, covered with milk chocolate. I guess it used to be called the “Marathon” in the UK. The Almond variety replaces the epanuts with almonds, I think).

I found a comparison of various candy bar types on line:

USA................. contents ..................UK/Canada

Mars .........almond, caramel, nougat...........none
Milky Way.........nougat, caramel...............Mars
3 Musketeers ......fluffy nougat ...............Milky Way
Marathon ........long caramel braid ............Curly Wurly
Snickers......peanuts, caramel, nougat..........Marathon
14

Holland:

** Lemonade **Fruity, sugary clear syrup, can be any taste, to be diluted with water at home. Most popular taste is orange, forest fruit, strawberry, lemon. Very popular in our former colony Surinam was syrup in almond taste. From the indonesian cuisine, but not commonly used, is susu: rose lemonade.

Jelly: Fruity more or less solid stuff with chuncks of fruit. Most popular condiment to put on bread here. Typical Dutch bread has butter and jelly. No peanut butter, that is just weird. The best sold tastes are strawberry, apricot, forest fruit, cherry, and a wgole buch of others. No grape jelly though, that is just weird. :slight_smile: The selection of jelly usually takes up a considerable lot of shelf space here.
Also popular is appelstroop, condensed apple juice, with a very strong taste. Very healthy stuff.

Jel-LO. Foodies have faintly heard of it. No-one eats it.

Biscuits: This. Dry light cruncy bread replacements.

Cupcakes, muffins: we call these the same thing. They have become more popular in the last ten years, but we don’t have a tradition in them yet.

Chips: foil bags with light crisp deep fried potato chips. Hugely popular here. To be eaten without a dressing.
Also deeply popular, since 1900, are french fries, which we indeed “f*ing drown in mayonaise”. We don’t eat mayonaise on bread.

Ranch, oreos, gatorade: all brand names, unknown and unavailable here.

Smarties. From your description, we have the same stuff the Canadians have.

Yes, cool stuff. A guided visit to a supermarket is my favourite part of any holiday abroad.

15

People don’t like oreos?! How? I’ve never known anybody that could stop eating them before the cookie was gone or they got sick. If I was wearing pants I’d be heading to the store to buy some right now.

16

Ranch is a brand name? Since when?

17

I’m familiar with ranch dressing, a bit surprised that others haven’t heard of it. I could have sworn you can get it in UK supermarkets.

Snickers is called Snickers here too, hasn’t been Marathon for years.

18

Trust me, your Smarties make our U.S. Smarties taste like vomit. Which isn’t that hard, because they pretty much taste like vomit anyway. Here they’re this chalky, “fruit” flavored coin-sized disc of sugar, a true abomination.

19

What did they call them?

Joe

20

To be fair, though, most Americans use these terms interchangeably. If I make a sandwich with peanut butter and strawberry jam, it’s still a “peanut butter and jelly”. “Preserves”, in practice, is mostly just used for homemade spreads, or at least made from fruits that are less common in the stores.

And just so there’s no confusion, ranch is a salad dressing made with buttermilk (which may or may not be the same stuff you call “buttermilk”; I’m not certain) as the acidic component, instead of vinegar. It was originally made by one particular company, but you can buy many different brands of it now.

Gatorade, meanwhile, isn’t what’s usually called an “energy drink” nowadays (those contain caffeine or other stimulants), but a “sports drink”. It’s intended to replace the fluid and electrolytes you lose while sweating, and unless you’re getting a lot of exercise, it tastes terrible. It was invented at the University of Florida to give their football teams (the Gators) a bit of an edge, hence the name.