The Favourite British Dish

[SepticTone]

I think we stopped having tartar sauce with fish here sometime around 1979. But deffo not on fish n chips.

[fenman007]

Some form of shell fish on samphire with marmite-cheddar sammich for dessert and a pint of decent bitter works for me. Curry is always good no matter what your nationality (unless you live a very sheltered life in the backwoods of god know's where, you can always find the makings of some sort of curry, at least I've never not been a place I couldn't make one / buy one).

[SepticTone]

Shellfish on samphyre? You really are from the Fens, aren't you?

Welcome to the forum.

You're right about curry, but shellfish with samphyre's a bit Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for where I come from. Plus, as our local British shellfish tend to be umm, let's say, rather small, to say the least, you'd need a lot to make a decent meal.

[Koz]

You must give me a recipe for biscuits & gravy, please.

As a Copperhead, I still have problems getting it to come out right, but the basic southern B&G recipe is:

Cook up a batch of sausages. remove the sausages and reserve the grease in the pan.

Add a bit of rue, or flower to make a rue of the sausage grease.

Add cream or whole milk. Stir and let thicken up to a white gravy. I always add black pepper to it which would earn a swat of the hand with a ladle by some southerners, but that is my personal taste.

Shred the sausages and add them to the gravy when it properly thickens. Ladle it over the top of some biscuits, split in half to better absorb the goodness.

Make an appointment with the doctor for the health issues that follow.

Making biscuits is an art form though ,that I have not mastered. I tend to buy the tube kinds at the grocery to solve this ineptitude but this is again, borderline sacrilege in the deep south.

But that is the basic recipe.

[SepticTone]

Thank you very much for responding to that, Koz, & welcome to the forum.

On the face of it, biscuits n gravy seems to be some gravy & bits of sausages poured over some dry unsweetened biscuits, which on the face of it, doesn't set my tastebuds alight with anticipation, frankly. But thanks for the contribution & your effort in providing it.

But I have absolutely no doubt that, when eaten in a proper Southern diner, with the fat sherriff sat at the zinc counter drinking coffee, or better still, someone's kitchen in Mississippi without the sherriff, I'd rave over it.

It doesn't seem overly unhealthy, unlike most British basic foods like curries and naan, fish & chips, pie and peas and stuff like that, so I wouldn't worry about the health implications.

Even I was taken aback at the description of a dearly cherished trad Australian dish described to me with relish by an Aussie friend of mine, the 'pie floater'. Google it.

Eating basic foreign food you've never had before is really all about location, location & location I've found.

The most memorable meals I've had have been, like, eating cheap tagliatelle alla olio y alio in a pavement cafe in Naples looking at Mount Vesuvius across the bay; having moules frites in a cafe in the Latin Quarter in Paris, staring across the Seine at Notre Dame, or having a plate of bread, feta, peppers & olive salad with a tin jug of freezing cold rough local retsina drunk out of scratched mugs in a village taverna looking up at the Temple of Athena in Lindos, Rhodes. And many more. But I digress.

Oh, & I also now know what a Copperhead is, thanks to you & Wiki. One more bit of knowlege added to my mental database.

Thank you once more.

[Kate]

Ah, no no no...that's not real gravy!

Real gravy is made with sausage - the stuff that's not in nice little links or patties. You fry it up in the pan. When it's all cooked, you add in the flour - not sure how much, I've only watched my mom make it, not made it myself yet. Mix it all around and add milk. Stir it and let it thicken.

Biscuits are usually just made with biscuit mix - although I'm sure there's some great recipes out there if I could look. Darn this Internet connection....

Anyway - in my opinion, using canned biscuits is basically sacrilegious. They don't taste the same.

It doesn't sound from the description like it's that good, I agree - but it's delicious when you try it. At least, I think so. Of course, I was raised eating it.

[Koz]

Yeah. I know about the sausages. I usually remove the sausages so when I mung up the gravy I can at least salvage the sausages. Probably part of why my mix always tastes off.

As for the canned biscuits. I agree it is sacrilege, but my last attempt at proper biscuits resulted it something more fit on a hockey rink or as sling ammunition than under the gravy. My kin are from up north so I didn't get to watch Grandma make the biscuits and have been trial and error cooking them myself off net recipes.

Biscuits and Gravy done right is awesome though. It sounds simple, but when you have the recipe perfected you practically want to just wallow in it. Used to have it every other day for breakfast from this hole in the wall diner in Atlanta that was just down the street from work.

[SepticTone]

when you have the recipe perfected you practically want to just wallow in it.

That's an image I can really do without, but I get the gist.

[davec]

Great googly moogly, this thread tore up the pea patch while I was away!!

Welcome to the forum, Koz!

Hmmm.. where to begin...

Samphyre? I'd love to get hold of some, but I very heavily doubt I will here in the American Midwest. If I do, it's probably $8 a pound. I love greens, especially collards and dandelion greens, which would have earned me a swat on the hand with a ladle from my parents. (Really just--soul food, you know. Rest their souls, they were so Midwestern.) Real Beverly Hillbillies stuff, by the lights of most people I grew up with.

I love Marmite too, even though it's just congealed mold , but because it's sold in incredibly small quantities in the States, the markup vs. British prices is ridiculous. I felt like I was gold plating a slice of bread with it. Really, the markup is worse than in the case of HP Sauce.

I lived in New Orleans (N'Awlins) for a while, and yes, the French influence pervades the South. Substantial quantities of black pepper in any recipe is just--gauche. But here in the Midwest, biscuits and gravy have a pretty peppery gravy. The biscuits, BTW, just aren't right unless they have that proper baking soda bite to them, and actually I like it. Any good homemade bread or biscuit dough requires kneading, rising, knocking down, and rising again at least twice, so it's a pain--best to head out to the local diner for this dish.

Pie floater-- a meat pie floating in pea soup. And served with mint sauce? Gawd, this is so Yorkshire I can taste the Humber river just reading about it! The Aussies must be mostly descended from the detritus of Yorkshire jails. The floater business is just their way of being nostalgic about how they got to Oz.

Koz--are you by chance a programmer? 'Mung' is originally an acronym--to 'mung' something is to 'Mung Until No Good'--a little recursive humor. (And if you are a programmer, are you a Pythonist?)

[SepticTone]

Samphyre is a weed which grows in coastal or marshy areas, I believe: it isn't cultivated. You can probably get some from Florida? You must have some marshland in the US as you've got every other sort of land.

Marmite is horrible: even the TV ads here say 'You either love it or hate it!'

Australians have 'Vegemite'. That's also probably horrible too.

The pie floater: it's really not served in pea soup: it's really served in what we Northerners would call mushy peas. It's also served upside down to make the hard crust on top of the meat pie soft when you eat it, in case you haven't got any teeth or don't like hard things in your mouth.

Hull & the Humber: I think most in Hull would think themselves distinct from Yorkshire people, & the Yorkies would probably agree: we still fight little local battles here when the Southern Jessies in London decide to move our local boundaries a few miles, for something to do in their Whitehall offices, little imagining the immense hatred it engenders in Northerners being interfered with by Southern Jessies.

Most of the deported English settlers to Australia were actually from the South of England, as they were easier to catch than Northerners when stealing a loaf of bread.

Northern English really started colonising Australia in the 1950's/1960's, when all white British people were offered £5 passage deals to emigrate to Australia. Not white? Don't even bother to fill in the application form, mate.