British Favorites - Erm, Favourites....
There are some British foods I adore.
One is Branston pickle, which is not easy to find in the States, but which makes a wonderful sandwich with good Cheddar. British Cheddar is wonderful, of course, but you have to mortgage your house to afford it here, so Cabot's Sharp or Seriously Sharp it is. Cabot's Cheddar (made in Vermont and never dyed Dayglo orange with annatto) is to most American Cheddar what a Breitling watch is to a Timex. I would put it up against most any British Cheddar out there, and I have enjoyed a good many of them in my time.
I love Lucozade, which you might find here every sixth or seventh blue moon if you're in a large city with a shop catering to expats. And Ribena, which is so rare it makes Lucozade look plentiful. Ribena is made from blackcurrants, and luscious stuff it is. You dare not spill it - it could stain the hull of a battleship.
Heinz beans are terrific; this is one Yank who loves beans on toast, a favorite picked up from two expats I knew in Atlanta. They were from Plymouth. The British Heinz beans are hard to come by, which is weird, because they're made from beans imported to the U.K. from America, but there you are. American Heinz vegetarian beans are the closest Stateside equivalent I've found. I am a purist about beans on toast. The toast must be cold and buttered; the beans very hot. And no bloody cheese! Cheese with beans on toast is as bad as milk in first, though eating beans on toast at all puts you at an entirely different place on the social scale than that occupied by anyone concerned about who puts milk in first, of course.
Scottish rather than British, but delectable for all that, is Keiller's Dundee Marmalade. Oddly, you can get this in the U.S. without a prescription, a court order or an appeal to a British consulate.
If I'm drinking tea in the daytime, Typhoo makes a decent cuppa, for those who want builder's tea. I will admit I seldom do; as a Yank, I'm a morning and daytime coffee drinker. Typhoo is findable here. Not easily, but it's out there.
But at tea time? Twinings Earl Grey, and not the Twinings USA dreck in teabags *, either. British Twinings, and loose, please, so that I can put my Nutbrown strainer over my teacup when I pour.
* Oddly, it was an American writer, Louise Andrews Kent, whose '30s and '40s cookbooks were published under the nom de plume "Mrs. Appleyard," who pegged teabags best: "The mouse in the teacup," she wrote of the damned things. If I were a mouse, I should feel offended.
