The British Jubilee Feast
The nation is celebrating the queen's 60 years on the throne - and the supermarkets have used this as an excuse to market British food. Since these are convenient items to pack into a cool bag and turn out onto plates I took them to my mother's house for a light lunch so she didn't have to bother.
So out came the little pieces of fat and processed meat:
the sausage rolls,
the ham and pineapple on sticks, the tomatoes and cubes of cheddar cheese,
pork pies,
the mini sausages and
scotch eggs and chicken drumsticks...
and my father was in junk food heaven.
And then, for 'afters':
swiss rolls (in red white and blue), French fancies,
Maryland cookies with candy-coated chocolate chips and Battenburg cake.
As I put them out I noticed that each one of these British foods is named after some foreign place - which made me wonder if the Swiss prefer their cakes in a roll, or the Marylanders insist on cookies defined by their chocolate chips, or the Germans are susceptible to a square of marzipanned and coloured sponge cake. After a little in-depth research I can report that the cubes of sponge with white blob of 'cream' and lividly coloured icing is the result of Mr Kipling's fancy rather than an French one because Hodmandod Majorette assured me that she had never heard or seen such things for sale in France.
Poor Hodmandod Majorette! To think she has swapped all the delights of French cuisine for this...but the valiant girl assured me she liked it too and ate it all with as much relish as the rest of us.
So out came the little pieces of fat and processed meat:
the sausage rolls,
the ham and pineapple on sticks, the tomatoes and cubes of cheddar cheese,
pork pies,
the mini sausages and
scotch eggs and chicken drumsticks...
and my father was in junk food heaven.
And then, for 'afters':
swiss rolls (in red white and blue), French fancies,
Maryland cookies with candy-coated chocolate chips and Battenburg cake.
As I put them out I noticed that each one of these British foods is named after some foreign place - which made me wonder if the Swiss prefer their cakes in a roll, or the Marylanders insist on cookies defined by their chocolate chips, or the Germans are susceptible to a square of marzipanned and coloured sponge cake. After a little in-depth research I can report that the cubes of sponge with white blob of 'cream' and lividly coloured icing is the result of Mr Kipling's fancy rather than an French one because Hodmandod Majorette assured me that she had never heard or seen such things for sale in France.
Poor Hodmandod Majorette! To think she has swapped all the delights of French cuisine for this...but the valiant girl assured me she liked it too and ate it all with as much relish as the rest of us.
posted by Clare Dudman at 7:19 pm
2 Comments:
fascinating about the names. Looking at the selection, I wonder if these foods are traditional British as they sort-of arise from a time when everyone did physical work for a living, so needed the calories? Maybe we should have a competition for the post-Jubliee modern British traditional food for the nation of couch potatoes and facebook addicts we are always being told we have become ;-)
I bet you're right Maxine! Unfortunately, certain members of my family still love them!
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