The British Food Entry (Finally)

I'm sorry this took so long. I came home from England, adjusted back to EST, and then went to Canada for a weekend. I'm about to move back to school tomorrow. I've been busy, I'm sorry! Think of this as the epilogue or appendix to my blog.


WITHOUT FURTHER ADO!

Every morning I have a quasi-traditional British breakfast. This means I can have sausage, British bacon (this is a slice of ham), eggs, cold toast, tomatoes, baked beans, etc or I can have cereal, yogurt, fresh fruit, croissants and a cheese portion. For some reason baked beans are a big deal for breakfast. I can’t imagine wanting to eat baked beans ever, let alone for breakfast, but I’m sure they question the existence of Pop Tarts. However, England is home to the best yogurt perhaps in existence, which more than makes up for their baked bean disaster. Anyway you can mix and match your breakfast; you’re certainly not limited to one option. Breakfast seems to be the big time to eat fruit, rather than as a snack or the like.

Lunch in England is not the event it is in the States. Most people don’t go to restaurants for lunch but rather pick up ready-made sandwiches, wraps or salads from lunch-oriented places like EAT or Pret. Most places that sold food would offer this for lunch. We eventually realized that Boots (the pharmacy, think CVS) had the best meal deal – for £3 you could have your choice of a sandwich, wrap or salad, any one drink, and one “snack”. A snack can entail a candy bar, potato chips (“crisps”), any variety of nuts/seeds/dried fruit, etc. Either way, the possibilities are pretty endless. They have a very good variety, and the food is actually quite good for the amount of money it costs! The other major option is to go for a pub lunch, but that takes a very long time, when most people’s lunch break is not long enough for that! If you do go to a pub to eat, there are burgers and the like. British burgers are made of sausage, it turns out. (I was displeased.) Also at pubs you can get something called the ploughman’s lunch. (My friend Andy tried this when we went to Sheringham. A ploughman’s lunch is a large hunk of cheese, a baguette, pickles and some sauce; you build a sandwich. He thought it was pretty good.)

Dinner at Caius is (presumably) a little different than dinner for normal Britfolk. Our dinners are three-course extravaganzas, beginning with the choice of soup or an appetizer. British people have not yet fully explored their soup options beyond Cream of Blank, but many of these soups have been superb. A main course typically involves chicken, meat, or pork; a variety of potato and some vegetable. They also have a vegetarian option, and it is generally very good if you are not in the mood for the Meat of the Day. (Recently the main course was duck and we all asked for the vegetarian option.) Dinner ham is called “gammon” for no apparent reason and they like to pair it with pineapple. Dessert usually is some form of British pudding, which is essentially something sweet with sauce. While I would prefer to never see potatoes again, the food has always been enjoyable!


As for other food:

Pasties, as made famous in Harry Potter (when he orders eight of them on the train), are sort of ubiquitous; every town I’ve been to so far had a shop that sells them. I honestly have no idea who would eat eight of these, but they were quite good. It was very much the English equivalent to a Hot Pocket: cheese, potato and some filling like spinach, lamb, steak, ham, etc.

Treacle tart – another Harry Potter food – is a very sweet pie-like substance. It’s hard to explain, honestly, beyond that; it’s sweet, circular and rather compressed. I’m not quite sure what’s in it, but it might be better that way.

Falafel is a big deal here, and as you can imagine I was quite excited about this. Falafel is fried chickpeas, a mash of vegetables, hummus and some form of spicy sauce in a pita for those of us who have yet to experience it. . Nearly every sandwich-oriented place seems to offer falafel, and for a while there was a vegetarian cart nearby that would make heavenly falafel in front of you.

Indian cuisine very popular too. The curry I’ve tried is GREAT, it actually has spices and flavor and whatnot. It’s a glorious break from meat and potatoes! We don’t get meals on weekends, so groups of us will go on mini adventures for food, and we try to vary it as much as possible, getting things we would not normally get at Caius. After Oxford In An Hour and a Half, the grad students, Dennis Britton (my Shakespeare professor from last semester) and a few undergraduates and I went to sample some high-quality Indian cuisine. We were all very impressed.

Gelato is readily available and so is ice cream; you can buy either from any variety of carts for about the same price, around £1.40 for either. This is a vast improvement over the price of gelato versus ice cream in the US!

In terms of liquids, juice and smoothies are pretty popular, but you can get Coke, Red Bull, etc nearly everywhere. There is no shortage of coffee in England; there’s a coffeeshop on nearly every street, Dunkin Donuts style. In terms of alcohol the two major beverages seem to be cider or Real British Beer. I don’t know anything about beer in the first place, so I couldn’t tell you anything about Real British Beer other than it tastes like beer and Foster’s seems to be the equivalent of a Budweieser. You can get bitter beer (not butterbeer! We had all hoped) or ale too; ale is different than beer apparently. I’ve tried both, but I couldn’t taste much of a difference, to be honest. I’m a big fan of cider – Strongbow is the best.

Yes, England is big on fish & chips, but I haven’t seen much of it in Cambridge. We might be a little far from the ocean for that. Everywhere else we’ve been to, however, has had several fish & chips places. Oddly though, shrimp is wildly popular... maybe there’s a shrimp farm nearby. Interestingly enough, they are never called shrimp but rather “prawn”; you would buy a prawn sandwich for lunch with prawn-flavored crisps. Don’t try prawn-flavored crisps.

Also, mayonnaise is HUGE in England – you can get it on EVERYTHING… most times it actually is part of your meal, whether you want it or not. One of our popular appetizers at Caius is prawn salad with a healthy, hearty dollop of mayonnaise. If you order cheesy chips (cheesy fries) you can get mayo on that, too. This is another very odd English trend I don’t understand, but they are all very enthusiastic about it!


English foods I have not experienced/seen/doubt their actual existence: Toad in the Hole, Spotted Dick. If you find yourself in England, please try to find them for me!