Culture Questions!

[RPin]

UHT proccessed milk is very common here. I find the taste very similar to bottled milk, and if the temperature is what bothers you, just put it in the fridge for a few hours before opening.

It's a lot cheaper because it lasts longer, is easier to store and manage, etc. But before you buy, you have to keep in mind a little secret: at the bottom of the box there's a little sequence of numbers, and one of them stands out from the rest. That number goes from 1 to 5 and it means the number of times that milk went back to the factory for reproccessing. Never buy one higher than 3 or else it will taste bad.

One thing from american cultures that I can't understand is how people can eat greasy, fat food for breakfast such as eggs, bacon, etc.

[Kirb]

One thing from american cultures that I can't understand is how people can eat greasy, fat food for breakfast such as eggs, bacon, etc.

Because they are delicious and we die of cardiac arrest before realizing that it is bad for us.

[Swikan]

Rpin: That's called "stick to your ribs" food because it keeps you from being hungry all day. What do you have for breakfast?

[Jim North]

I love eating fried squirrel. TV and movies tell me this is weird.

Why?!

And regarding cheese on pie . . . it's odd that I grew up in the South, where people will eat damn near anything (especially if it's greasy, fried, and loaded with fat), but besides this thread the only other place I've heard of this practice was on the movie Thank You for Smoking.

[Col]

Restaurants give you large portions so you can have LEFTOVERS!

[Noise Monkey]

One thing from american cultures that I can't understand is how people can eat greasy, fat food for breakfast such as eggs, bacon, etc.

Bacon tastes goooooood.

[Paul Escobar]

One thing from american cultures that I can't understand is how people can eat greasy, fat food for breakfast such as eggs, bacon, etc.

That seems to be a general Anglo-Saxon thing. First time I visited London, I ordered the "traditional English breakfast" at the hotel, not really knowing what it meant (the only alternative this cheap hotel offered was cereal). Turned out it was fried bacon, fried sausage, fried egg, fried tomato, fried toast (yes, fried not toasted). For someone used to yoghurt, bread and fruit for breakfast, that was quite a shock... an animal fat shock, clogging the arteries. I dropped the hotel breakfast and had sandwiches for breakfast the remainder of that visit.

Here in Denmark, we produce lots of pork. We export almost all the bacon to the UK and North America. I don't know how you guys survive that fatty stuff!

Restaurants give you large portions so you can have LEFTOVERS!

Over here, it's considered rude not to finish your plate. So big servings would be a direct threat to, if not one's health, then at least one's waistline. I guess that's why servings in European restaurants are usually only half as big as in the USA.

There's quite a few "eat as much as you can for [insert amazingly low price]"-type restaurants around, but the food in those places is usually rather dreary.

[Noise Monkey]

I don't know how you guys survive that fatty stuff!

For a very short time.

[Legendary]

I love eating fried squirrel. TV and movies tell me this is weird.

Why?!

And regarding cheese on pie . . . it's odd that I grew up in the South, where people will eat damn near anything (especially if it's greasy, fried, and loaded with fat), but besides this thread the only other place I've heard of this practice was on the movie Thank You for Smoking.

Just saw that on Saturday, and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the cheese on pie post.

It's not gross, it's American.

[TRI]

One thing from american cultures that I can't understand is how people can eat greasy, fat food for breakfast such as eggs, bacon, etc.

One word: protein. It's a long lasting energy source and the reason I eat so many eggs for breakfast I occaisonally get totally sick of them: I have to walk 2.5 miles to school and 2.5 miles back before my next meal and if I have 200 calories of eggs I'll be less hungry by lunch than if i have 200 calories of sugary cereal.

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The American portion size thing also varies from place to place in America, and on what food you're ordering or what kind of restarant you go to. I recently went and visited my New England relatives where I learned that their small ice cream cone is about four times the size of my Californian small ice cream cone.

The difference is that here "small" is actually the smallest size. There if you want the smallest size you often have to say things like "single scoop" or "1/8 kiddie scoop."

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I never understand people who have applesauce as a dessert. I mean it's got "sauce" right there in the name. You wouldn't settle down with a nice bowl of hollandaise, or even a bowl of chocolate sauce.

One thing nobody mentioned about cranberry sauce 'though is that in addition to adding moisture and sweetness it also adds acidity to your meal. Without it your traditional Thanksgiving dinner is nearly acid-free. Adding acid rounds out the pallete of flavors.

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About (American) biscuits vs scones.... they're similar but there's still a big differences: biscuits generally don't have butter in them, scones do.

Scones are very similar to a loose, raised pie dough; whereas biscuits are a sort of bun made from a loose dough with baking powder instead of yeast as the leavening. Because it's loose it can't be kneaded and thus comes out crumbly instead of chewy.

Add cold butter to a biscuit during the dry phase and you have a scone.
Add a lot more liquid and some melted butter and you've got pancake batter.
Add more flour, replace the baking powder with baking soda, use sour milk as the liquid portion, and knead slightly and you've got soda bread.

The other difference is in how they're served. Nobody I know dips scones in gravy or has biscuits with jam on them.

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Now what I wonder about is what's up with the whole muffin and English muffin thing? I always figured English muffins were a confused American attempt to make crumpets but then I heard that they were actually invented in England and that got me wondering where the difference came from again.

[War]

The thing with the word 'cookie' outside North America is that it's a bit of a kiddie word. You'd be hard pressed to find a person of advanced age or a serious disposition calling a digestive or custard cream a 'cookie'. They'd say biscuit.

Biscuits are hard so I use the word cookie for soft/gooey ones. America likes their soft foods, I thought Merc's packet of cookies had gone off because they were soft out of the packet.

Biscuits go soft when they go off, cakes go hard. This is why a jaffa cake is called a cake.

Milk should be delivered to your door in glass bottles with a foil top.

[Noise Monkey]

Milk should be delivered to your door in glass bottles with a foil top.

Only if you can't get her pregnant on your own.

[Kirb]

Now what I wonder about is what's up with the whole muffin and English muffin thing? I always figured English muffins were a confused American attempt to make crumpets but then I heard that they were actually invented in England and that got me wondering where the difference came from again.

If I remember correctly, the modern English muffin was created by a British immigrant in New York around 1900.

But I'm sure the 'flat bread' recipe that the english muffin is based on has been around for much longer.

[McDuffies]

Well, because pork is sort of a 'sweet' meat, so it goes well. As for cranberry sauce...I have more often seen it with Turkey, especially at Thanksgiving. It goes well because it's not entirely sweet...the tartness really comes through, so it works with meat.

Heh. I don't know if any of that made sense, but there it is.

Pork sweet, hm, not the way we prepare it. In our cuisine mixing sweet and salty is considered , we leave sweet food for desert, save for a few combinations like adding potato to cakes or wallnuts to salad.
I guess it's a thing of being used to national cuisine. I like to try all kinds of international food so I didn't have problem getting used to sweet/sour Chinese meals, but most of people here won't even touch that.

Unlike most of western countries, killing baby animals still isn't prohibited here, young pork and veal is considered a sort of specialty here. But one of the grossest variants I've seen it, when lamb is baked in oven, people like to eat chunks of fat that's left inside it. I mean, pure lamb fat.

I do consider Hungarian cuisine the best in the world. The trouble is, it's hot and hard to digest, so I can't eat it very often anymore.

Bet most of you lot didn't know the fridge is an Australian invention either, eh?

Like I always mention that vampires are Serbian invention.

They weren't serving me no omelettes or steak!

I bet you got tartar beef.

I have never in my life eaten, or even heard of, cheese with cranberry sauce.

I'm aware that Americans eat turkey with crannbery sauce due to long string of Thanksgiving specials on tv, but I've never tried it. I have, however, tried combination of cheese and crannberry sauce that mcDonalds had for a while, and decided that cheese is ok, and sauce is ok, but together they suck.

The regional specialties of any country are always what the peasants were forced to eat because they had no real food. Frogs legs, snails, tacos, caviar, pasta, McDonalds, Vegemite, meat pies...

Food ethimology. Countries where forests were rare formed their cuisine to be prepared without using a lot of heat. Besides eating what they found in place, eating insects was also due to that insects were cooked relatively shortly. In our parts, woods are plenty so we eat everything pretty much overcooked.

As for lobsters... I like them too much to care that they die by boiling.

I'm led to believe that dropping them into boiled water is the easiest way to kill them. There's supposedly another way, by stucking a knife in their neck where the shell breaks, but not many people can do that properly, and if you just stuck a knife the wrong way, they die in much more pain.

And veal? I tried it to say I had, but agree with you - I've seen how they "make" veal - break a calves legs, and chain it's mouth to a trough until it has to eat to breathe. Put it in a box so it can't move.

Awful. I think I've said it before, killing animals for food is a natural order of things, but torturing them their entire life just to get them fatter faster, simply can't be excused any way. And food produced that way is unhealthy.
(It's done with chickens too, have you seen chicken farms? They're held in too small cages, stuffed with chemistry that makes their flesh grow faster, but their bones can't follow that growth, so when they grow to a full-size chicken, their bones are still in stadium of half-grown and they can't even stand on their legs.)
Bah, I'm just happy that we here keep our poultry running around the yard, they should at least live a nice life, if short.

As for cheese, I didn't try much of the "fancier" kind in France. They had a cheese that really did smell like body odor. I like cheese that's soft, like brie, so I can spread it on bread. Mmm. Cheese on apple pie makes sense, cheese and apples go great together. Cottage cheese and pineapples is tasty stuff. There's also ricotta cheese, which is pretty good with chocolate.

I like cheese with white mould, camambert, brier and stuff. They are delicious, alas too expencive for me to buy on daily basis. I couldn't get into cheeses with blue mold though.
I also usually eat my cheese with olives.

OT: Another glass-of-water thing in the microwave.. I heard that if you warm up a glass of water (not boil) in the m-wave before popping m-wave popcorn, more of the kernels would pop.

But I like to crack un-popped kernels with my teeth.

The thing with the word 'cookie' outside North America is that it's a bit of a kiddie word. You'd be hard pressed to find a person of advanced age or a serious disposition calling a digestive or custard cream a 'cookie'. They'd say biscuit.

Cookie indeed is a kiddy stuff.

That seems to be a general Anglo-Saxon thing. First time I visited London, I ordered the "traditional English breakfast" at the hotel, not really knowing what it meant (the only alternative this cheap hotel offered was cereal). Turned out it was fried bacon, fried sausage, fried egg, fried tomato, fried toast (yes, fried not toasted). For someone used to yoghurt, bread and fruit for breakfast, that was quite a shock... an animal fat shock, clogging the arteries. I dropped the hotel breakfast and had sandwiches for breakfast the remainder of that visit.

Ha ha, famous traditional English breakfast. We here eat meat products and stuff for breakfast, but English, they really clog your venes.
I actually have a very skimpy breakfast, coffe or tea with youghurt, I get up late and close to lunch so that's the way I used... I make it up for lunch and supper.

Over here, it's considered rude not to finish your plate. So big servings would be a direct threat to, if not one's health, then at least one's waistline. I guess that's why servings in European restaurants are usually only half as big as in the USA.

Hehe, I usually can't finish plates in restaurant here. Actually, I can, but I always regret it when I have to unbuckle my belt. Seems like in West Europe, they prefere to serve smaller portions.

[Mr.Bob]

Yes. Smaller portions, and double the price. It's an outrage, that's what it is.

[Mercury Hat]

The other difference is in how they're served. Nobody I know dips scones in gravy or has biscuits with jam on them.

Have you been to the (American) south? Biscuits go with all meals of the day, they're really good with jam in the morning.

Of course they're even better dipped in cheese grits.


I don't have much objection to veal, I just don't like how it tastes. I'd rather have the full grown cow.

I love camembert and brie, Duffies, but yeah I don't want my cheese to be any color but white or yellow.

The traditional English breakfast usually comes with black pudding, too. To my horror, I watched Bob and War consume theirs the day we met up to go to Alton Towers. It's black, all right, but it was all crumbly like a brownie of horrors. Bob says it helps not to think about what it is.

War thought our sausages were terrible, but I had to explain to him that he hadn't actually eaten any sausage. It was all hot dogs.

Apparently, Americans putting (Italian) sausage on pizza is weird.

For breakfast, I don't usually have anything. If I'm out somewhere or if it's a weekend, bacon, an omelette, cheese grits, and pancakes are excellent. Sausage gravy over biscuits is pretty good, too.

Contrary to War's protests, grit is something you do put on the street, but gritS are a wonderful foodstuff which he must be forcefed so he can learn to like it.

[RPin]

Rpin: That's called "stick to your ribs" food because it keeps you from being hungry all day. What do you have for breakfast?

In Brazil it's most common to have something light (and mostly sweet) for breakfast. Mine is usually some cake, fruits, yoghurt, juice... I once tried eggs for breakfast and felt sick all day, but I guess you can get used to it.

Maybe it's because I don't live in a cold country were you could use that much energy.

[Rkolter]

War thought our sausages were terrible, but I had to explain to him that he hadn't actually eaten any sausage. It was all hot dogs.

O_o

My grandparents on my father's side are Hungarian. They make their own sausage from scratch. They have to make several times the amount they plan to serve, because the rest always goes home as leftovers.

If it's not one of their sausages, it's just a tubular meat product.

[Mercury Hat]

Well we'd eaten corndogs and he said our sausages weren't as good as English ones. The inside of a corndog, of course, is nowhere close to being a sausage.

I don't like English sausage much, really. The inside's all soft, I don't like the texture. I like bratwursts the best.

[Noise Monkey]

Contrary to War's protests, grit is something you do put on the street, but gritS are a wonderful foodstuff which he must be forcefed so he can learn to like it.

I had grits once in all the years I've lived in the south.

It's kinda like eating out of a baby's diaper, but not as tasty.