I feel obliged to offer some justification in re the Full English Breakfast. Let’s see.
Fried bacon
Fried sausage
Fried eggs (swimming in grease)
Fried tomatoes
Fried mushrooms
Fried bread
Baked beans
For breakfast.
Can you eat it? Yes. Is it nice? Some. Kinda. Shameful? Each to their own.
Someone mentioned meatballs upthread, which reminded me of a proposal for the Netherlands: the meatball and peanut butter sauce sandwich. Had it once in Amsterdam. That’s enough for a lifetime.
I would associate poutine more with the province of Quebec than with Canada as a whole. It’s the French-Canadian dish of shame. I don’t think it’s all that common outside Quebec.
I Dutch and we have a number of tasty but unhealthy deep fried snacks. They will clog up your arteries but are pretty good and, at least to me, hard to resist after a few beers. However, there is a thing called FEBO which is an automatic distributor of this type of food. They lie in there all day at a lukewarm temperature. Miraculously no one seems to ever catch anything from eating them, but it does NOT improve the flavour.
I agree with you, to a degree. Poutine is French-Canadian, and should not be called representative of Canadian cuisine as a whole. However, poutine is insanely popular here in the Canadian west (why, I don’t know), to the point where you almost have to specify, “Fries with my burger, yes, but no gravy nor cheese curds.”
Albertans typically hate Quebec. Why Albertans love a Quebec food is beyond me.
As I don’t really like food all that much, and I just eat a limited range of bland boring stuff that is largely unchanged than since I was a child, I’m not sure if there’s a meal I can point to that matches what the OP is aiming for from my home country of New Zealand, nor my adopted country of Australia. Vegemite seems too obvious.
Actually, both the cheese rolls and mutton pie look good – not so much the “fairy bread”. In fact they remind me that I have pork sausage rolls and meat pies in the freezer and are kinda making me hungry. Lord knows what the mutton pie would actually taste like, though, but I generally enjoy meat pies.
It’s news to me (I mean about the poutine – we all know Albertans hate Quebec!) and the reason is beyond me, too!
I grew up with them, especially the one in the pic I posted which was made locally to me (at the time), so it’s hard to be objective, but they are greasy, and claggy, and completely 100% delicious.
I have only ever eaten mutton pies in Scotland and enjoyed them.
There are a couple of tinned meat puddings in my reserve cupboard. We used to eat these when camping as all you have to do is boil them for a while. Use a big pot and you can put potatoes in as well. There is also a tinned jam/sponge pudding. You put that in the boiling water after taking the other stuff out.
The roasted whole sheep’s head dish known as the smiley.
I can see the whole “eat everything” point of the origins. But that doesn’t mean they need to be displayed at the side of the road and served whole. Learn how to make brawn, FFS.
Bread soup bowls go back to at least the Middle Ages. And they are awesome.
I once took a trip to Italy, then France, then England.
The worst food on the trip: England. The hotel served bangers and mash and I ate a bite or two of each, then left. I love sausages and potatoes but it tasted like they boiled the stuff till all flavor had left.
The best food on the trip: also England. There was a place not far from Covent Garden, but I don’t remember the name. I got some very good chicken there.
I stopped by specifically to mention this dish. I’m a brunch kinda guy, so this got my attention initially. And if you have pancakes and sausage, a little syrup on that sausage plays well. So maybe that was the idea here. But it doesn’t work for me with C&W.
Can’t do it. There’s something off-putting about the texture, like it needed to cook longer to finish.
I was watching “Win Ben Stein’s Money” one night and the contestant got a question about Scots throwing a big log. The answer of course was the caber toss. He didn’t know, so he took his best guess. “The haggis toss?”
I need to try a Scotch egg, though. They look killer. Continuing the nationality, has anybody tried Buckfast? Apparently it creates anarchy. Some NSFW language possibly in this…
Yeah, although Velveeta is good (especially for chile con queso).
Then there’s McDonald’s.
McDonald’s uses their very own blend of processed cheddar cheese.
Their blend is 60% cheddar cheese and 40% other ingredients, which include water, salt, whey powder, butter, milk proteins, emulsifying salts, natural cheese flavoring, and food coloring.
I’m sorry, what’s wrong with this? It sounds lip-smackingly good. As mentioned on the wiki page, we’ve got a version in the Philippines made with chickpeas. Also heavenly.
For the Philippines, I’ll nominate Filipino spaghetti. It’s based on the American version of spaghetti Bolognese, so it’s twice-removed from its putative country of origin. It’s made with tomato sauce sweetened with sugar, or just straight-up banana ketchup. You’ll want to add some cut up hotdogs, the more artificially red the better. On top of it all, grate a crapton of cheddar.
I believe LaChoy is (or was) based in Minnesota (Duluth, I think), but the dish I was talking about is served in restaurants and takeaways. There was one restaurant the family ate at when my parents were still together (the FuChu, on old Highway 12, just west of Minneapolis), and celery chow mein was always on the menu. (A trip to the FuChu on Saturday evening was always a big deal.)
The few times I had anything by LaChoy were enough to put me off it. (Think “bland” and :“watery.”) In their defense, however, they at least tried to emulate Chinese food by using such ingredients as water chestnuts and bamboo shoots. (At least, those seemed more Chinese to me.)
If you want really good Chinese in Minneapolis, go to The Village Wok by University Stadium, near where University and Washington avenues intersect (IIRC). The place is always packed with Asians, and you almost need a bilingual dictionary to read the menu.
I believe the bangers commonly sold in British supermarkets are a holdover from WWII food rationing—they’re mostly filler, which is why they’re so bland. On the other hand, you can find some very good regional sausages in England, if you buy from a traditional butcher’s shop.
If the mash you had was bland, it’s because the chef was cooking for the lowest common denominator. Making good mashed potatoes can be a challenge for many people; I usually put garlic and pureed root vegetables into mine, plus gobs of butter.
A good gravy is also needed with bangers and mash. I make mine with pork drippings whenever possible.
For Pennsylvania, Scrapple is hideous. Like greasy crunchy meatloaf.
The South’s Boiled Peanuts are wrong on every level.
Taiwan’s boiled pigs ear served cold has got to be a joke on tourists. Actually I have had boiled chicken dummies served cold in England a few times as well….just……why?
I agree the full English can be hard to eat, but it can be very good. Haggis can be good as well.
I spent some time in The Czech Republic, I thought hot red wine for breakfast was going to be weird, but I loved it.