Eating new things

Just returned from several weeks in Dorset then London. I had tried scotch eggs on a previous trip and sampled some more on this trip. If fresh peas are a side dish choice when ordering fish and chips try them. Hope you’ll experience some good full English breakfasts. Indian food can be outstanding too in London.

My drink of the day this time was a Gin and Tonic. It was so warm outside and this is a refreshing drink with a generous amount of ice. Who knew there were so many decisions to make when ordering a G/T? On a past trip I’d had a Pimms Cup but this summer I thought it was too sweet.

Fish and Chips! Head to The Laughing Halibut, 38 Strutton Ground. Old school. Go whenever we’re in London.
Tea- We had tea at Fortnum & Mason,c. 1707, , so much delicious food. Lovely. We had orders of both Savory and Sweet foods. You can buy excellent teas there too; look at their website!

Forgot to mention. To save time and not worry about packing you can buy some great Fortnum and Mason teas at LHR in the Duty Free shops.

Bangors and mash? don't know hat that is.

Bangers (with an "e") are in this context sausages. Like a breakfast sausage, but often with different spices and textures. Cumberlands are nice, so are those with apple or leek as an ingredient. Mash is smooth mashed potato; in the winter, parsnip is often added to the mash. Bangers and mash then is usually a fairly large plate with a portion of mash and usually two nicely caramelised bangers next to the mash, or sometimes artistically on or in the mash (too poncy for me) and a good dollop of onion gravy. Yum.

Bangers are also old cars often bought as a first car very cheaply. Don't last long. But that's a different discussion.

Afternoon tea and Cream Tea can be had all over England from fancy to plain.

which season will you be here, Liz?

Have a cheese toastie at the Borough Market. There are a lot of food stalls that are worth exploring. Go Hungry!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqHcUJMNoBU

Bangers and Mash, Toad in The Hole, Spotted Dick, Scones and Jam, Yorkshire Pudding, Bacon Butty, Fish Finger Sandwich, Cheese and Pickle Sandwich, Sticky Toffee Pudding…. To name a few….

Bacon will be different to what you are used to.

Don’t forget a proper English Breakfast which includes beans, sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs and toast.

Even with the evil Empire of Starbucks to get a cup of black coffee you’ll need to ask for an Americano.

By the way, coffee from Costa, Cafe Nero or Harris + Hoole are ALL much better than Starbucks.

Jellied eels are a traditional London dish. I have never tried them. Another is pie, mash and liquor (a sauce) from the East End.

Fish and chips are best eaten as a takeaway but there aren’t many in central London as the rents are too high. If it has to be a sit down meal in a restaurant, the best I have had in London is the Golden Hind on Marylebone High Street - they have been operating since 1914 so they must be doing something right. It’s usually served with mushy peas - dried peas soaked overnight and cooked to a mush. Awful.

A cream tea can be found everywhere - I prefer this to afternoon tea, as afternoon tea can be quite large and is served between lunch and dinner (or if you are up north, so you skip lunch, eat afternoon tea then don’t want an evening meal until about 10pm.

There are a variety of regional dishes, particularly cakes such as Eccles cakes, Chorley cakes, Bath buns and Bakewell tart/pudding that are easier to find in a supermarket than a London cafe or bakery. British cheeses are also good.

I never eat sausage and mash out as it’s easy to make and better served at home with good quality sausages. It’s often served with onion gravy.

Nigel, I will be going September 13.

AMann my only “souvenir” from this trip was a gain in knowledge and 4 gin glasses.

Pasties, (pronounced Pass-Tees).

I got back 2 days ago from a trip that included the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales and my last night at a hotel at Heathrow. There were similar foods in all those places.

I'm a devoted coffee drinker who uses an Italian Bialetti pot daily at home. I grew up drinking iced tea with lemon.

But years ago and on this trip I found myself loving the black morning tea provided in most hotel's tea service -- with milk and demerara sugar. Try it! It's delicious.

Don't be surprised if soup lacks any recognizable vegetables. Most seem to have the texture of tomato juice. Very tasty, but at first it's a bit shocking.

Sticky toffee pudding is a good item for your list. BTW, neither Yorkshire pudding nor sticky toffee pudding is what we would call pudding.

There are other dishes that have the pudding name. Like the little hockey puck looking things on the breakfast buffet. Those are black/blood pudding aka pork sausage with grains and spices and blood. If the hockey pucks are lighter in color, they are called white pudding with similar ingredients except no blood.

As others have mentioned, the bacon is more like thin ham. It became my favorite meat source for breakfast.

Here's a fun link that describes what a full UK breakfast is all about: https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-is-a-full-breakfast-435324

By all means, try some Indian food. One joke I've heard is that the English national dish is chicken tikka masala. My dinner at the hotel at Heathrow was a yummy lamb curry in a tomato based sauced with just the right amount of zing.

Porridge is oatmeal. If you don’t eat it at home, hopefully your hotel will have some for you to try. When I ordered it in Dublin I asked the waiter if it was made with milk or water. After he left, the Scottish woman sitting at the next table told me that the way she made it was to put the oats in a bowl with water and let that sit at room temperature overnight. The result will be perfectly creamy porridge when it's cooked the next morning.

If you have the chance, check out the Marks & Spencer (M&S) food department. The Costa coffee shops feature M&S food. I can highly recommend the coconut and lime loaf cake.

Have fun with your food exploration. Whereas I normally lose weight on my trips to Europe, this time I brought home 10 (!) extra.

my favorite English breakfast spot is The Grazing Goat in Marylebone- everything is super fresh there. we usually have breakfast there before heading over for a day of shopping at Selfridge's, which is only a few blocks away. shop your way up the Selfridge's building, then have lunch at their food court at the top. another thing we always do is get takeaway picnic foods from the Caffe Nero sandwich/coffee shop across from Big Ben, then walk around the corner to the Embankment area next to the Westminster Millennium pier, where there are steps or tiers along the River with views of the London Eye and Westminster Bridge. this is an inexpensive lunch option when you're sightseeing around Westminster area. don't miss the RAF Battle of Britain monument along the Embankment past the pier

Bangers and Mash has been described previously but let me "Americanize" the definition. When Nigel said it's the size of a breakfast sauasage, he's talking about a British breakfast sausage and not an "American" breakfast sausage. The British one is about 3-4 times the size of the average American one. More the size of a Knockwurst.

Bangers and Mash is not a breakfast meal but for lunch or dinner. It usually comes with onion gravy. One of my favorites but it seems to be disappearing from a lot of pub menus.

A "Full English" breakfast will usually include a fried egg, sausage, bacon, fried toast, baked beans, grilled tomato, sauteed mushrooms, sometimes black pudding and if no fried bread than toast.

No one has mentioned "pies." No not the sweet American pies but meat pies. There are numerous types but the three most popular seem to be Shepherd's Pie (Lamb), Cottage Pie (minced beef) and Steak & KIdney. The meat is inside the pie in a gravy. Whipped potatoes top the pie rather than a crust

London is also awash with ethnic cuisines from around the world.

A high tea is where you get served finger sandwiches and pastries and can pretend you are high society from the 1930's. A cream tea, as also described earlier, is heaven. A scone slathered with clotted cream and jam/preserve/marmalade of your choice served with a pot of tea. If eaten outside on a warm, sunny day it's even better.

The unofficial national dish of the UK is.....Chicken Tikka Masala. It was invented for the British by an Indian restaurant in the UK.

And then there's.......Nando's

just to be clear. If you want a tea service with clotted cream, you have to ask for cream tea, or do all the tea service's do clotted cream. Ya'll are being very. helpful.

Fish and Chips. Traditionally and ideally from a dedicated "chippie" which is either wholly takeaway or with a small seating area. The food comes wrapped in paper which steams the contents and the chips are soft rather than crispy, a well made and cooked batter on the fish should still be crisp. The vinegar in fish and chip shops is not actually vinegar, it's a non brewed condiment created with water, acetic acid, flavourings and often caramel colour and not a patch on proper malt vinegar. It's cheap so that's why it's there. Fish and chips in a pub or restaurant will be served with crispy chips, sometimes triple cooked (steamed, fried at a low temperature and fried again at a higher one), this is believed to result in the perfect chip. The batter for the fish is better if beer is substituted for the water, the carbonation makes for a crispier batter and the beer adds flavour. I like mushy peas especially if they have a touch of mint. Tartare sauce should be served.

Pies come in a huge variety of flavours, mostly encased in pastry and often with a shortcut base and puff pastry lid. Steak, steak and kidney, steak and ale, chicken and mushroom, chicken, leek and ham, lamb and mint, minced beef and onion and a variety of vegetarian options. Then there are those topped with mashed potato such as shepherds, cottage and fish pie. There's also a wide variety of sweet pies, often fruit ones.

The traditional Sunday Roast has provided the French with their nickname for the English, Les Rosbifs, as a result of our penchant for roast beef (in the same way that we refer to them as "frogs"). Traditionally the meat is beef, always accompanied by Yorkshire pudding which is a flour, egg and milk batter baked in the oven ideally with beef dripping (traditonally served as one big pudding but now served as individual muffin sized puddings), roast potatoes (again preferably cooked in beef dripping, goose or duck fat) and must always be crispy which is where they fail so often when served outside the home environment because they quickly lose their crispiness if left around for too long. Accompanying vegetables are a matter of tast as well as horseradish sauce or English mustard. Roast lamb demands mint sauce (a thin sauce of chopped mint, malt vinegar and sugar), roast pork is paired with apple sauce and roast chicken is traditionally served with bread sauce. Personally I think Yorkshire puddings are too good to be restricted to roast beef so I have them whatever the meat is.

There is a whole plethora or regional stews. I like a beef stew with chunky vegetables, pearl barley and dumplings (little balls of self raising flour, suet and seasoning).

The UK has a greater variety of cheeses than anywhere else (350 more than France) and there are few dishes more suitable in a pub than a good Ploughmans. This is a plate of cold cuts, cheese, pickles, bread and any number of accompaniments. The cheese and hams will vary regionally.

Whilst the UK doesn't have a strong culture in air dried charcuterie our hams our amongst the best and certainly blow many of the European 'wet' cured hams out of the water. Likewise our bacon and fresh sausages.

I don't like jellied eels, they really are an acquired taste. Pie, mash an liquor is a traditional East End dish but the few shops left that serve this dish make substandard pies, lumpy, underseasoned mash and the liqour is a a thin parsley gravy. I would pass on it and opt for something else.

Indian food has made it into the national psyche and excellent examples can be found throughout the country. Outside of India the UK is probably the best place for Indian food (despite most of the Indian restaurant chefs being of Bangladeshi origin).

just to be clear. If you want a tea service with clotted cream, you have to ask for cream tea, or do all the tea service's do clotted cream. Ya'll are being very. helpful.

Pretty much every afternoon tea will come with scones and clotted cream. Don't confuse afternoon tea with high tea which traditionally referred to a working class dinner or "tea" served early in the evening. "Dinner", "Tea" and "Supper" all refer to the main evening meal and which term you use is often dependant on which region you live.

We were pleasantly surprised with food throughout England. The traditional Sunday roast beef and chicken were very much "Mom's home cooking" to me. I admit to liking mushy peas very much and particularly liked all the Indian food we sampled at the Viceroy in York. Sticky toffee pudding could really vary by location, some much better than others. Sliced tomatoes at breakfast are perfect for me.

I am going to sneak in with Digestive biscuits, and Jaffa cakes. Things I go out of my way to look for here.

When I am in London, I always have at least one meal from one of the Ottolenghi restaurants; some of the places are sit down restaurants and some are set up for takeaway. https://ottolenghi.co.uk/restaurants. I also really like Honey & Co. https://honeyandco.co.uk/

McVitie HobNobs with dark chocolate are the best biscuit (cookie) ever. Get them at the grocery store.

If you're looking for tea to bring back as a gift, Whittard has a nice selection - we often buy it when in England - https://www.whittard.co.uk/stores

I don't think there is anything unofficial about it:

https://britishheritage.com/food-drink/britains-favourite-dish-curry

Lincolnshire sausage is regarded the best along with Bury black pudding and are de riguer.

High tea and afternoon tea are actually different and not interchangable and very different - high tea origins are working class and are to all and intents and purposes an evening meal and one could be anything served from a high table. Where as afternoon tea is a late after noon 'snack' served to the gentry that is a round of sandwhiches and confectionary cake et al. The two are often confused.

Here is a detailed explanation:

https://b-bakery.com/london/blog/difference-between-high-tea-and-afternoon-tea

Don't forget Melton Mowbray pork pie and mushy peas with mint sauce.

I love a good curry.

The best thing I ate in London was an arepa at the Camden market. Most other things are pretty bland. I did like the steak and ale pies in the pubs, though. Had mushy peas at some point, either in London or Edinburgh, can't remember and it had mushy peas with mint. Not a good combo. We had afternoon tea at the British museum, not very good at all. Should've gone to a place where that is what they do, not in a museum. The second best thing I had was a breakfast sandwich at Eggslut, overpriced and American but was so good. We also found a Korean restaurant near our hotel in London, down a dark alley. It was pretty good.