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Thursday, March 03, 2011

cultural differences, or snack food education

When I first lived in the UK a few years ago, I didn't experience too much culture shock, but I expect everyone around me got tired of hearing about the little differences there were. Now that I live with an English dude, I often find out about little differences that I didn't stumble upon on my own before. This seems to happen most often with food.

For example, this evening I read Smitten Kitchen's blog post about home made goldfish crackers. Remembering these cheerful snacks fondly, I exclaimed something to the effect of, "This blogger has a recipe for goldfish crackers! That's awesome!"

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The outburst was met by a blank look from my fiancé.

"You know, goldfish crackers. They are cheesey and shaped like fish? Did you never have those as a kid?"

"No. Are they like Wotsits?"

"What are Wotsits?"

etc.

In a similar way, I've learned about eggy soldiers, Twiglets, jelly and ice cream, (ew, seriously, ew) and a host of other foodstuffs I can't call to mind right now. Likewise, I introduced him to poutine, beaver tails, and whatever rubbishy snacks I had as a kid. He put up with my moaning about the lack of readily available good peanut butter, until I found a suitably virtuous (no added salt, no added sugar) version at the health food store. Peanut butter is serious business. Anyway.

We're both a bit puzzled by some of the traditional Scottish things that show up on menus, though. Cullen Skink anyone?

(Not that there is anything puzzling about the soup in itself - it's the name that puzzled me!)

5 comments:

  1. lol I love this post! My hubby learned all about eggy soliders, jelly and ice cream etc too. He still doesn't GET the eating a hard boiled egg in an egg cup *shakes head* but after tasting the jelly and ice cream he did agree it was good. You HAVE to try it if you haven't, its the perfect combo yummmm. I used to love wotsits too oh great thanks, now I'm craving everything I can't get!!!

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  2. ok I just clicked on twiglets because i hadn't heard of them..... they are supposed to taste like marmite???? BOKE!!!!

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  3. @CelticCastOn Eugh I don't know... the thought of those two textures mixing makes my stomach turn!

    Yeah, I'm not such a fan of marmite either.

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  4. This makes me laugh so hard, because the exact.same.thing happened to me today at hockey practice. "Huh, goldfish crackers?". I miss a lot of the food of my youth, but the stroopwafels more than make up for it.

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  5. Haha... that happens to me all the time! My partner's Australian... the differences never seem to end :)

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