In which Al jumps on to the food bandwagon

[hamster8 at hotmail.com]

Can I just say that though it is fun to have a good laugh at national 
stereotypes, they are all only partly based in truth.  To say all 
Brits drink warm beer and have potatoes with everything is like 
saying all Americans tote guns and drive pick-ups, or all Australians 
wear funny hats with corks on, or all South Africans are unbearably 
rude, or all Swedes are angst-ridden.  I could go on :-)

Nevertheless, it is rather fun, so, my 14 Galleons on the subject 
follow immediately ...

1) I hate warm beer.  I also hate American beer - which I see 
primarily as being concocted to be drunk by the gallon outside during 
the summer - ergo is ice cold and has little or no alcohol content 
that I can discern.  Having said that, most British beer is little 
better - Carling is vile, John Smith's is pretty ropey, you'd be 
advised to go to Germany and the Czech Republic (home of the original 
Budweiser) for a passable drink.

2) I do not have chips with everything.  My lunch today consisted of 
a rather pleasant garlic & mozarella foccacia, with tomatoes and 
onions, sprinkled lightly with ground pepper and olive oil.  Dinner 
last night was pizza and chips ...

oh ...

darn ...

3) Moving swiftly onwards - I agree with everybody who has spoken up 
for small, independent pizza restaurants.  Pizza Hut, Pizza Express, 
Chicago Pizza Pie etc are all horrible precisely because they are big 
faceless corporations who couldn't care less what the punters shove 
down their throats.  It is perfectly possible to find good pizza in 
this country ... I just haven't worked out where yet.

4) Of course, nobody has said anything about kebabs yet - which is 
probably a good thing.  Probably best eaten at 2.30 am whilst ambling 
gently back from a club, when the poor bloke behind the counter at 
our local kebab joint suddenly seems amazingly witty.  For Americans, 
it is traditional in the UK to round off any good night out getting 
food poisoning from a badly cooked kebab - indeed, one of my 
housemates, an Italian who does a mean pasta sauce, spent four days 
off and didn't go to any lectures purely because he ate a dodgy kebab.

5) I'm with Yael on the cheese, and the pitying all Americans 
thing ... and virtually every other opinion she's expressed on this 
thread so far.  So there.

6) Spotted dick is my favourite pudding.  For a good recipe, you'd be 
advised to check out the Pudding Club of Great Britain, whose recipe 
book is to be found at most National Trust and English Heritage gift 
shops and visitor centres.  If any of them are still open.  As we're 
in the habit of posting recipes here, I may well track my copy down 
and do so.

7) I have never had chips in a Chinese restaurant.

8) I leave you now with an excerpt from 'Notes from a Small Island' 
which I think proves the point about potatoes.

"At least it gave me a chance to see the little-known but intriguing 
Potato Marketing Board building at Cowley (nr Oxford), into whose car 
park I pulled to turn around when I realised I was utterly lost.  The 
building was a substantial 1960s edifice, four stories high and large 
enough, I would have guessed, to accommodate 400 or 500 workers.  I 
got out to wipe the windscreen with some pages torn from the owner's 
manual I found in the glove box, but was soon staring at the 
arresting grandeur of the Potato Marketing Board HQ.  The scale of it 
was quite astounding.  How many people does it take to market 
potatoes, for goodness' sake?  There must be doors in there 
marked 'Department of King Edwards' and 'Unusual Toppings Division', 
people in white shirts sitting around long tables while some guy with 
a flip chart is telling them about exciting plans for the autumn 
campaign for Pentland Squires.  What a strange, circumscribed 
universe they must live in.  Imagine devoting the whole of your 
working life to edible tubers, losing sleep because someone else was 
made no. 2 in Crisps and Reconstituteds, or because the Maris Piper 
graph is in a tailspin.  Imagine their cocktail parties.  It doesn't 
bear thinking about."

*Al saunters vaguely westwards*