A tea sandwich is a dainty sandwich that is a fixture of the English afternoon tea. Less a meal than your typical American sandwich, it's meant as a little snack to hold you over until dinner (or supper) later on.
A tea sandwich can be eaten in just a few bites. It is typically made with thin-sliced, white bread slathered with butter or mayonnaise and a scant amount of filling. Tea sandwich classics include cucumbers, watercress, radishes, cream cheese, egg salad or smoked salmon.
Looks are important when making tea sandwiches: bread crusts are trimmed and people like to get cute by cutting them into triangles or whimsical shapes with cookie cutters.
Recipe: Open-Faced Cucumber Tea Sandwiches (VeganYumYum)
Recipe: Salmon And Caviar Croque Monsieur With Watercress Salad (Washington Post)
British bread puddings are a family of desserts that go back as far as the 17th century and are popular in the U.S. Bread pudding is a handy way to use up stale bread. Either bread crumbs or stale bread cubes are soaked in an egg custard mixture of milk or cream, eggs and sugar -- plus vanilla or other spices like cinnamon and nutmeg -- then baked. Bread pudding can be eaten hot or cold, plain or made even more rich with a sauce like crème anglaise.
Bread pudding can be complicated with chocolate, nuts, dried fruits or other flavorings and can be made with sweet breads such as brioche. The homey traditional British baked dessert Queen of Puddings is made from a breadcrumb-thickened egg custard that is baked until set, then topped with raspberry or black currant jam and covered in meringue. It is returned to the oven to color the meringue and served hot, with lots of double cream.
Bread and butter pudding is another matter, a kind of baked French toast in which buttered bread is layered with raisins or other fruits, covered in a milk and egg mixture and baked.
Which apples are best for cooking and baking?
Which apples are best for cooking and baking?
There are no firm rules about which of the world's thousands of apple varieties are most appropriate for cooked sweet and savory dishes.
But for baking, Honeycrisp, Cortland, Golden Delicious, Gala, Newtown Pippin and Granny Smith work well because they hold their shape in pies and tarts without turning to applesauce. Some people favor naturally sweeter apples like Golden Delicious and Gala when baking desserts; Newton Pippin and Granny Smith add a tart note to savory dishes like stuffings.
To make apple sauce, Gravenstein apples have an ideal sweet-tart balance; Jonathan apples have a tender texture and moderately tart flavor.
Bangers and mash is quintessential British comfort food. Traditional pub grub and a common everyday dish on British tables, the bangers are traditional British pork or beef sausages, and mash is slang for mashed potatoes. Bangers and mash are traditionally served by placing fried sausages on a pile of mashed potatoes and dousing them in an onion gravy.
While bangers and mash is a classic working class dish, it's also found gussied up on gastropub menus where it may be prepared with any number of fancy sausages or gravies.
The term "banger" is said to refer to the sausages' tendency to explode -- or bang around -- in the pan when cooked over high heat.
White pudding, or boudin blanc, is a European sausage made with white meat from poultry, veal, pork or rabbit, mixed with veal or pork fat, plus cream, milk, eggs, flour, breadcrumbs or even truffles. It is then loaded into an intestine case and poached, fried, or baked. Unlike black pudding, it is bloodless.
The boudin blanc is a French Christmas tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, and recipes vary from the chicken-based boudin à la Richelieu to the meatless year-round boudin blanc from Le Havre, made with pork fat, milk, eggs, bread and rice flour. The Spanish make boudin blanc with pork, tripe and pine nuts; health-oblivious Scottish chip shops batter and fry it; and the Irish add toasted oatmeal, lard and cloves, and eat it for breakfast.
Black pudding is the polite term for a charcuterie otherwise known as blood sausage or boudin noir, a dark-colored European and Russian sausage made primarily from pig's blood and fat bound up inside a pig's intestine, that is believed to have been invented by the ancient Greeks.
A number of flavorings can be added to the black pudding mixture, from onions to brandy, eggs, milk, spinach, cream, breadcrumbs, apples, prunes, raisins and herbs. The Scottish mix in blood-absorbing oatmeal or barley. The French boudin noir is fried or broiled and usually served with apples or mashed potatoes. Germans enjoy it with a side of hot potato salad, and the British and Irish serve it with bacon and potatoes.
Marmalade is a fruit preserve that is most often spread on toast. It is made with citrus fruit, sugar, water and added pectin when needed. British marmalade, much of which is made in Dundee, Scotland, is bittersweet, whereas the American-made version is just plain sweet.
The Seville orange is widely used to make British marmalade, as it is higher in pectin than a regular orange and helps the marmalade to set naturally once pectin is released by boiling the fruit and sugar.
Marmalade comes in variations according to how thick you like the cut of the peel. Marmalade can also be made with grapefruit, limes, lemons or clementines.
You can also spread marmalade on sandwiches or scones; mix it with whipped cream and spread it between layers of cake; or mix it into a marinade for chicken or pork.
A fritter is a catch-all phrase for a little cake-like morsel of food that's traditionally doused in a batter (or chopped up and combined with batter) and deep-fried.
You can eat fritters as a main course, a side, a dessert or a snack. Fritters can be made from just about any main ingredient, but crab, corn or apples are popular ingredients.
The British are particularly fond of drowning unlikely foodstuffs in batter -- pizza, or Mars bars, for example -- and frying the hell out of them. Fish and chips, no stranger to the deep fat fryer themselves, are often accompanied by additional battered fried fritters that can range from pineapples to peas.
