Delia’s core audience? They probably do, you know.
I hate that ad.
There is among some groups here, too. I imagine there may have been a hunting season in California. I never heard about it when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I don’t know anyone who hunts (or if they do, they haven’t told me about it).
That’s true in the US, too. 20 years ago, only Italians and serious foodies would have known what pesto was. Now, of course, most people do. I’m not sure my parents (in their 60s and, if not the least adventurous eaters in North America, in the top 10 or so) or Mr. Neville’s grandparents would know what it is.
I haven’t heard of anyone combining pesto and tortillas in one dish, but now that I think of it, that sounds kind of good… Maybe I’ll try it after Passover.
Actually, there are still several American Football leagues in Europe. The NFL just doesn’t have one anymore.
http://www.european-league.com/
I’ll throw in honey mustard. I’d never even heard of it until we went to an Applebees’ during our first week in the States.
I don’t believe it. Why do you think we’re called the North Coast? There’s nothing up there but polar bears and igloos.
But speaking of American-style Chinese food . . . I had always believed that you can’t get a bad meal in Paris. On one of my visits, I suddenly had a craving for Chinese food. I found a restaurant that looked like a cross between authentic Chinese and American Chinese. It turned out to be neither. It was French Chinese, and some of the most vile concoctions I’ve ever eaten. At least the portions were tiny, so the suffering was short.
I’m a US person and to me “real” bacon should be 99.3% fat and .7% meat. Anything else is just ham. I do love ham but it’s not “bacon” 
Out of curiosity (and slightly off-topic), do British school children read any American literature as part of their education? Here in the US, we tend to read a lot of British literature (into which Irish literature is also usually lumped) as part of school. In my high school, there was a year (I think it was 12th grade, which is the final year of high school) in which the English class was devoted to nothing but British literature, and I don’t think that’s at all unusual as far as US schools go. We started out with some of the Canterbury Tales and worked our way up to people like Joyce and the WWI poets. Don’t think we got much past the early part of the 20th century. It was the sort of class in which we read a lot of poetry and short stories, because novels take too much time when you’re covering that broad of a spectrum, but we did read a few longer works.
So I’m just curious if there are kids sitting in schools in the UK who are reading people like Poe or Sherwood Anderson?
Anyway, my contribution to the topic is American comic books. The top name characters in superhero comics (like Batman or Spiderman) may be well known outside the US, and movies or whatever based on them may be internationally popular. But my impression is that the actual comics don’t do well outside America with the possible exceptions of Canada and the UK.
I don’t know about state schools, but at my private schools we did The Catcher in the Rye, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that stupid Robert Frost poem about a fork in the road, Paine’s Common Sense (although that was in history, not English), some Longfellow (don’t remember exactly what), excerpts from a couple of Mark Twain novels, and The Grapes of Wrath.
I’m pretty sure we did more on Shakespeare alone than on all non-British authors combined.
Personally, I would have been just as happy to be bored out of my mind by American authors as British ones, and I would have been thrilled to read something interesting like Catch-22.
We (state school) did To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’m sure plenty of other American novels are commonly read in British schools. But I’ve not heard of schools devoting a year exclusively to American literature.
That’s partly down to cost. In the USA there are public lands and the deer are public property, so all one really needs is a suitable weapon and perhaps an easily-obtainable licence. (I know it’s a little more complicated than that, I’m just trying to make a general point.)
In the UK the lands are mainly private and the deer belong, legally, to whoever owns the land. So hunting is much more expensive.
Isn’t that more to do with ‘hunting’ being defined as having a team of people on expensive horses with dogs and all, rather than just being two guys with rifles and a truck?
http://www.face-europe.org/cnt-hunting_hunters.htm
This link has stats on hunting in Europe. How popular it is varies alot.
The only American literature we did at school was studying some of Sylvia Plath’s poems.
I went to a typical comprehensive (public, in your terminology I think) school, and Of Mice and Men,To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible and Death of a Salesman were set texts at young teen (up to 14-ish) level. A minority of the stuff we studied, no doubt, but memorable. I don’t recall any American poetry being in the syllabus though.
One thing I do recall, and this comes from primary school, is being told a story by a teacher that bore a remarkable resemblance to The Murders in the Rue Morgue (not that we knew at the time). She was a good storyteller, and was probably lifting from Poe wholesale. The same teacher used The Hobbit as our book one time, and she used to read it with us, acting out all the voices. Heh - nostalgia.
I pine for good Mexican food in southern California. They put rice in the burritos and there is no green chile.
Nothing substantive to add, other than I’m enjoying reading the thread, even if it is making me hungry. (What for dinner: General Tso’s? mmm spicy. Maybe Mexican? Peanut butter sandwich? Pancakes with maple syrup? Damn you people! I even want to visit my relatives and snitch some venison from the freezer stash.)
Well, the folks with horses and hounds hunt foxes (or did - IIRC it’s illegal now) not deer.
But the reason why two guys with rifles and a truck don’t tend to hunt deer is because it’s expensive.
Oh, yeah, something I wanted to ask: What about iced tea? What about sweetened iced tea? Flavored with anything–lemon and raspberry flavors are popular here?
No idea how old you are, but that is the American content from the syllabus from my secondary school, in the third, fourth and fifth year (it was a voluntary aided RC school in London 1987-94).
Knock ten years off your dates and you’re about right.
There is some dispute about that–one story says it was invented in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles (link), although the article in the link also reports the San Francisco origin story. According to the L.A. version, restaurateur Seiichi Kito invented them and failed to generate much business among his Little Tokyo neighbors, so he went slightly further afield to Chinatown, which was adjacent to Little Tokyo in those days. They caught on rapidly there, so he went up to San Francisco’s Chinatown and they sold well there, too.
Either way, they probably originated around 1900, like the Martini, the origin of which is the subject of another L.A. - Bay Area dispute.