Tag: HP sauce

#oneaday Day 566: The Top Arbitrary Number of Quintessentially British Foods

This post is largely aimed at my American readers out there — you know who you are. (Largely because you live in America.) I thought you might be interested to know an arbitrary number of the things that we have over here in Britainland that are considered edible. Some of them you may have come across before, some of them you may not. So without further ado, let us jump into the list.

Bovril

You’ve probably heard of Marmite, the thick, brown, goopy substance that supposedly you either love or hate. Well, its bastard sibling is Bovril, which rather than being made from “yeast extract”, whatever that is, is apparently made from beef. What you end up with is a thick black tar that supposedly tastes of beef but more accurately tastes “of black” and has a propensity to burn the roof of your mouth off if you have too much at once. It’s good on toast. It’s especially good on toast when dipped into Heinz tomato soup. You can also make it into a drink, which is inadvisable unless you like a mug full of black, salty, slightly beefy water.

Biscuits

What you know as “cookies”. You may have the awesomeness that are Chips Ahoy! but we have a wide selection of biscuits that are firmly ingrained into our culture. We have the bourbon cream, for example, which is two chocolatey biscuits with a layer of chocolatey creamy stuff in between and no actual Bourbon involved. We have the custard cream, which is like a bourbon only more square and vanilla-y. We have the jammie dodger, which is another two-layer biscuit with jam in the middle. And we have Rich Teas, which are rubbish until you dunk them into a hot beverage or squish melted marshmallows between them.

Fish and Chips

Plenty of places in the States sell fish and chips, but you haven’t had it the truly British way unless you follow several steps in the process. Firstly, get a portion of chips that is enough for at least three people and put it in some paper. Then smother it in enough salt to give a midget an immediate heart attack. Then drown it in vinegar. Then slap a large, greasy, wet battered fish on top of it. Then wrap it up into a neat little parcel and admire as the grease seeps through the paper. The key element of British fish and chips is the size of the portion. If you can finish a portion, the portion wasn’t big enough. There is also generally an inversely-proportional relationship between the price of a portion of chips and the amount they will give you. The cheaper the chips are at the chip shop, the bigger the portions will be.

Curry Sauce

Companion to the above, the slightly-lumpy brown-green-yellow curry sauce that is on offer in most chippies is the perfect companion to your carb overload. It may look like someone has just blown chunks over your bag of chips, but it’s a one-way ticket to spicy heaven.

Indian Takeaway

British takeaways are something else. You may have had a curry from your local Indian, but you haven’t had it properly until you’ve had it from a dodgy British takeaway — the kind of place that sells dishes like the entertainingly non-specific “meat curry”. Also, when a dish says it’s “hot”, it means it. A vindaloo will probably blow your head off. And having a drink won’t help.

Proper Chocolate

You have chocolate, sure. But you don’t have our chocolate, which is just better. From the immensely calorific Yorkie bars (which still somehow manage to get away with marketing themselves as “not for girls”) to the legendary Cadbury’s chocolate, we sure know how to do it properly.

HP Sauce

HP Sauce is the perfect condiment that goes with pretty much anything and even makes a good sandwich by itself. (On bread, obviously.) It has a taste that is impossible to describe except through the word “brown”. It tastes like brown sauce. Because it is brown sauce. Try it on bacon or sausage sandwiches for the perfect breakfast, or dribbled over baked beans to give them a pleasingly spicy kick.

I hope that’s educated you on British cuisine. Next time you pay us a visit, remember to give them a try.

#oneaday 214: You’re Not Tom Cruise

I’m not Doctor Who, you’re not Tom Cruise. So don’t even think about attempting to invent your own cocktails.

I say this as a result of a memorable evening one night at university, a good few years back now. It was one of those evenings where we had just decided it was vitally important to get as blind drunk as possible, as is often the wont of people at university. At least one member of our circle of friends was in possession of some of the more “creative” spirits and liqueurs available, so we pooled our resources in an attempt to create The Next Big Thing.

To be fair, given the evidence we’d discovered on how easy it is to make a putridly-coloured yet remarkably tasty cocktail, we had faith in our own abilities to produce something delicious.

Shortly after arriving at university, we had all discovered the joy of the Juicy Lucy, a pint-based cocktail made up of a glug of vodka, a splash of Bols Blue, a bit of Taboo and then the remainder of the glass filled up with roughly half-and-half of orange juice and lemonade. The resultant glass of green liquid looks remarkably like what happens if you fill a pint glass with water and then squirt too much Fairy liquid into it. It also turns your poo green if you drink too much of it, a fact which several of us were unprepared for and thus spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time fretting the next day that we had some form of terrifying bum-cancer.

Alongside the Juicy Lucy was the even-simpler concoction dreamed up by our hall of residence’s bar on “Hawaiian Night” (a night when everyone was supposed to wear Hawaiian shirts, and they turned the heating up full)—the Passion Wagon. The Passion Wagon was, again, a pint-based cocktail consisting of a shot of Passoa (passion fruit liqueur) and a bottle of Reef. That’s it. It came out bright orange and tasted like Five Alive. It did not, to my knowledge, do anything unpleasant to the colour of one’s bodily fluids or waste matter.

So going on that evidence, we figured that making a cocktail was pretty much simply a case of finding things which might taste nice together and then combining them together in a glass. Also, that vodka, when added to any drink, immediately makes something “more alcoholic” without making it taste any different.

How wrong we were. The first mistake we made was forgetting that Baileys curdles quite easily. After creating a number of drinks that looked like someone had spunked in, we decided that we weren’t skilled enough to do that clever thing where you make the Baileys float on top. So we left that alone. For a while. Then we elected to try combining various different flavoured liqueurs together. The least (or most, depending on how you look at this) successful attempt was dubbed “The Brown Sauce”, owing to its resemblance in taste to HP Sauce. For the readers unfamiliar with the wonder of HP Sauce, it is good on a bacon sandwich. It is less good in liquid form and drunk.

Eventually we gave up and went back to staples like Archers and lemonade. We didn’t have another home-made cocktail night after that. We left it strictly to the professionals.