Which of these British foods should this American try first?

[BananaPudding]

My little Texan village grocery has expanded and is trying to be very posh all of a sudden (which is a change from the standard Velveeta and Hamburger Helper choices) and has put in a British section of food! Imagine my shock to find some of the things you talk about in my own store here. It's quite pricy as it's all imported, so I want to try just one or two things at a time. Here's what they have to offer:

HP Brown Sauce and Fruity Sauce
Branston Pickle
Marmite
Heinz Baked Beans (apparently different than ours?)
Blackcurrant jam
Galaxy bars
Bounty bars
Bird's Custard
Bisto granules
Robinsons barley water

Think there are more but can't remember. Of these, what should I try?

Oh, almost forgot the Heinz Spotted Dick. It's creating hilarity/shock throught the town

Mmmmmmmm....pumpkin pie. Love it!

What goes on a cheese and pickle sandwich? Only bread cheese and branston? No condiments?

Bread, butter, cheese, Branston. Nothing else.

Not keen on bread sauce but love parsley sauce and onion sauce oh and yorkshire puddings and hash browns but I presume you have those in the US?

Can you get Toffee Poppets in America or what about Jammy Dodgers? You really need to try Cadbury's chocolate fingers too and Mcvities Caramel Digestives mmmmmm.

i'm interested inhow much you charge for things.

i live in MI, and pay about $2 for hienz beans, and $5 for a small jar of marmite, so am also shocked byt he cost of it where you are (though i guess a small place costs more than the big store i go to)

we also have ribena - black currant flavoured fruit cordial. it is something that i LOVE!! (about $7 for a small bottle), and they stock jaffa cakes, but not McVities, which are the RIGHT kind.

you shuld eat the galaxy bar when it's at about body temperature - if it came out the fridge, you won't get the sake flavour, but greene & black's is way better.

oh gosh, i usually avoid the food threads but now i've come over all homesick for sainsbury's. (honest, last time i went home to the UK, i nearly cried when i walked in there and just felt so at home!!)

btw 'brown' is not a flavour - you get red sauce (tomato) & brown sauce
HP = Houses of Parliament (see pic on front) though it's no longer made in the UK, and there was a question raised regarding this IN the house.

i could go on about the difference between pickle in the UK & US, but have said enough for now.

A British friend of mine wrote this blog entry about the difference between English & American Baked Beans as she was so fed up with people laughing at her obsessive hunt for the 'right' kind in America.

libertylondongirl.blogspot.com/2009/01/in-england-everyone-eats-baked-beans.html

Apparently American ones are sweeter. Who knew?!

Meant to say Kerrygold Irish butter, and cheese (should read my posts before firing them off). This one looks ok...

Squash in England is a drink; in the US it means things like pumpkins that grow on vines (butternut, spaghetti, etc.). Also, scones are biscuits.

We got Kerrygold cheese in Germany, it was a pale cheddar.

I always have to laugh at the Americans (not all of them, just some of DH's colleagues) whe hate living in Geneva because "you just caaaan't get oraaange cheeeese"

Gah, you are living in Switzerland, on the border to France. Even small supermarkets have about 40 different types of gourmet cheeses, we live in the CHEESE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. And you are upset because you cannot get cheese from a tin?

Weird.

You have a picture of Spam in your photobucket Bananapudding... Brits know about Spam - there is a whole Monty Python sketch about the stuff!!

My grandma used to feed me Spam sandwiches as a child, on brown bread.

Whoo Hoo! Just looked on the website for our American food store and they're getting Twinkies in!!

Will have to go in and pick some up along with a fridge pack of Mountain Dew... DH will want some Cinnamon gum but the smell makes me retch

Spam is a vastly underated foodstuff. Tis evry popular in the Far East, oddly enough. A Taiwanese friend introduced me to spam fritters...sounds revolting, tastes divine!

Twinkies would survive a nuclear winter, there was a story about a packet of twinkies being found from the 50's or 60's and they were pristine, exactly the same condition as a new one. Thats just wrong......

I've been getting special packages of marmite with every visitor to Oz this last 18 months... my mum FORGOT last month (nearly sent her home), but then just as a friend was flying back with two jars I found it in the local indy supermarket...same bottle but lablelled "Ourmate"??!!! It's exactly the same stuff labelled for over here... it wasn't as expensive as Texas though :-)

We now have the following in our cupboard:

Marmite
Ourmate
Australian Marmite (it's black and repulsive)
Vegemite (as above)

I have weaned DS onto Vegemite so I don't have to share the marmite/ourmate :-)

Have never posted on mn before and I think it shows my personality to a tee that my first comment is on a food thread!
Twinkies are vile, my mils friend in America sent us some a few years back and after waiting so long to try some me and my dh were bitterly disappointed.
Spam has to be fried in a non stick pan then sandwiched between two slices of wholemeal bread with Branston fruity sauce...mmm

For ds' birthday party every year (his birthday is on Thursday), I make a whole platter full of marmite sandwiches. I do it as Nigella Lawson suggest: mix very soft butter with a small amount of marmite (I do it to achieve a "mid-brown") and then spread the sandwiches.

They always go down a storm - with the adults as well as the kids!

Wow - just came back online to give feedback on my bacon sarni with Branston Fruity (Yummmmmm!) and this thread's grown a lot! Why wait till Friday for the Marmite tasting? I can quite see why one would want to wait till at least Friday for the other.

I'm reminded of a joke I read in an American paper this summer (Can't remember the title, but it was local to Sanibel/Captiva area, Florida)

What's brown & sticky?

(at this point CS family came up with everything from Marmite to meconium) BUT the answer's:

A stick!

Love it.

Because Friday is BP's payday

Marmite and bumsex Friday? Might be a bit sticky

Have you tried maltesers BP? The trick is to suck the chocolate off before you chew.

What goes on a cheese and pickle sandwich? Only bread cheese and branston? No condiments?

well, butter if you want. The pickle is the condiment - you really wouldn't want (or be able to taste) anything else.

Don't overdo it though. Once when DD was wee and we were making a picnic to take to the park she wanted to help and asked to put the pickle in my sandwich. I turned my back .... she'd proudly anointed it with about 1/3 of the jar. Was rather puzzled why I scraped most of it off because she knew I liked pickle. Bless. (it was still too pickled!)

want to add something: it all seems covered!

I'm not a marmite fan.

the only chocolate to eat is cadbury's and the only tea is Tetley.

but! if you're going to eat galaxy: banana, you've got it all wrong, you don't chew the chocolate, you let it melt onto your tongue.
like this: break of a square, put it in your mouth. close your mouth and slowly move the chocolate around with your tongue. your tongue will get covered in a film of yummy gooey chocolate. then swallow (once the whole square has dissolved). it's not just a food, it's the technique, too!

as for custard: it has to have the consistency of syrup (like toffee sauce or something): not solid like in your banana pudding trifle. (so between runny and gloopy)

ploughman's as previously discribed is the most traditional way of eating branston's.
but the cheese and pickle sandwich is yummy (try it with a bit of lettuce too)

wash it down with the barley water (about 1/5th strength)

try your bisto granules on mashed potato and sausage (not hotdog sausages but proper meat sausages) if you can't manage sausagesm, then make pork chops and serve with the mash and pour the gravy over. you need to have enough gravy left when you've finished eating that you slurp it off the plate (like as from a saucer)

why haven't you got english heinz tomato ketchup? it really DOES NOT taste like the american: it's less vinegary and more tomato-y.

ps: kraft "natural" cheese is still nto cheese.
cheese is made completely with milk: it's separated, swished about, solidified and left.
(okay, there might be a little bit of rennet, but that's only to help it set)

I've never seen a problem/huge difference between English and American ketchup (not anything like the diff between the beanz). next time I'm back in the US i'll try to notice the difference.

stillhaven't been to Asda, I have a taste for a root beer float: root beer with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. bananapud, is there anything else in a float? I can't seem to remember now.

We used to have root beer floats and cola floats in the summer when we were children. It's just the drink and the ice cream, as far as I can remember.

Momino: i have been informed that the ketchup they do in burgerking here is to the american recipe.

I forgot to mention about tea:
mke sure you drink it with milk and one sugar. do not even contemplate drinking it with lemon. that's just madness!

This thread reminds me of emigrating from the UK in the early 70s and... Dad putting a six-pack of tabasco in the shipment (this is en route to the Middle East, where hot food is not exactly rare)... an English-born School-friend getting a suitcase full of mars bars as a (requested) birthday present and... an English friend of mind inviting me over in my late teens for a special treat and my having to fake delight over her sharing with me her precious tinned custard that had just arrived from London (yuk).

What I used to miss was: cheese and onion crisps (which now seem to taste of MSG and nothing else) and cadburys' dairy milk. I used to eat it one cube at a time and make a medium sized bar last a month. My DS hears me tell this and says I'm boring him again with my tales of austerity in the 70s (but is secretly admiring me I hope/wish/no, probably not).

p.s. since Green & Blacks dark milk chocolate I haven't look back at Cadburys. To the extent that I wrote to G&B recently, having got worried about all the advertising for their new light milk chocolate that they were going to discontinue my fave flavour. They assured me that I need not lose any more sleep (and sent me some vouchers to compensate me for my trauma ).

Nickel, i'm not a fan of bk ketchup so can see what you mean.

about tea: i've seen some americans put cream in it (think my mom is one ).