Candice:
<snip>
I had some experience with English cooking when I was at Oxford one summer
in the 1970s. I learned, for instance, that there are several different
versions of afternoon tea:
[...]
The lunches were worse, so I finally appealed to the Bursar for yoghurt,
fruit, cheese, and peanut butter
<snip>
English catering was ever a struggle. (In *Nose to Tail Eating*, Fergus
Henderson urges prospective cooks never to show fear 'because your
ingredients will know it, and misbehave'.) That's why so many domestic
bursars came from the Forces, why food bills were known as battels and why
undergraduates were fined in ale for breeches of dining etiquette. But
peanut butter lunches?
And you never had anchovy toast with a nice pot of Lapsang at around, say,
4.00pm?
<snip>
And I'd like to know what black buns are
<snip>
Well 'black bun' was trailing a coat. Baking declines as you go South, it
seems to me: the fight against bad bread was lost at Chorleywood.
As Lyn M says, it is actually a Scots baked good intended for Hogmanay. It
may be eaten occasionally without suffering undue harm. And her description
is a nice one; I had forgotten the little crust. The only thing to add is
that it has _elements_ of Christmas cake and Christmas pudding without being
either of these. In short, it is sui generis.
As to those 'split and buttered' eatables Joanna mentioned, there is an
English/Scots divide over *scones*: short /o/ versus long. A Scots scone is
anything between a sort of circular pancake and a flat circular bread baked
on a girdle. (According to Gavin Douglas, Aeneas ate them along with other
foodstuffs; however, they weren't used as trenchers, which are mentioned
separately.) Most, and certainly potato scones, should be cut up into
triangles. A Southern English scone, on the other hand, is much smaller
and higher and is shaped like a miniature toque; which is where the
connection with fine cooking starts and ends. Too often it is made of a
strange off-white material which gets between the teeth and coats the roof
of one's mouth. Sometimes it contains currants, presumably so that you can
measure how much of it you have taken as you bite and proceed to chew.
CW
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'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
(Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
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