Writing Samples
Stars and Gripes
By Chandra Moira Beal
Published in delicious. July 2005
"You can't get cranberry sauce in England," my friend Mary warned me at my bon voyage party, just before I moved to London. We sat under an oak tree in Austin, Texas, discussing what I would eat abroad. Friends worried that as a lifelong vegetarian I'd suffer, although I'd managed to thrive in a place where TV adverts proclaim, "Beef. It's what's for dinner." Mary, who had never left Texas, was like most Americans who have outdated notions of British food. Apparently it's all black pudding and boiled potatoes.
The first day in my partner's kitchen, I spied a jar of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce in the pantry. But the familiarity ended there. Along came Marmite, HP Sauce, Branson's Pickle, crumpets, Jaffa cakes and 99 Flakes, none of which we had in the US and all of which I embraced (in fact, I gained a stone!).
When asked what I was going to miss the most about living in Austin, it wasn't my family or friends, but breakfast tacos. Fill a freshly baked flour tortilla with scrambled eggs, potatoes and cheese, or any number of ingredients like beans, sausage or bacon, top with a dollop of salsa, and you hold the food of the gods in your hands.
There's a taco stand every few hundred yards in Austin, the best displaying hand written menus in Spanish. The salsa alone is worth the pilgrimage, each shop doing its own version of the tomato-onion-chile sauce. In fact, salsa is now America's number one condiment, surpassing ketchup. Austin has an annual salsa festival where devotees bring recipes from all over the state to compete in the merciless August heat. Friends offered to send me jars of salsa from Texas, but foolishly I turned them down, assuming I would find the same array on the high road. Instead, I found one brand: Old El Paso, a pulpy mass that's not even made in Texas.
But what England lacks in salsa, it makes up for in tea. After hearing Donald Pleasance remark in The Great Escape, "Tea without milk is so uncivilized," I quickly adapted to the white stuff. Texans take their tea, if that's what you call freeze-dried tea-flavored crystals, ice cold with lemon and sugar. It's a taste I never acquired.
"What would you like for your tea?" asked my future mother-in-law. I was confused and didn't want to offend by suggesting she steep some leaves in hot water for my tea. It took me awhile to work out that "tea" was a broad term meaning a basic cuppa or even a full dinner. Same with pudding. American pudding is thick custard and nothing more. Here it's anything from an after-dinner mint to a slice of moist cake to savory cheese to‹you guessed it‹pudding.
Our fries are your chips, but our chips are your crisps. Our crisps are crackers, but your crackers are pulled across the Christmas dinner table. It's enough to drive anyone to the cookie jar‹or is it the biscuit tin?
Undaunted by these differences, I determined to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings for my British friends. Thanksgiving is a major holiday in the US, commemorating a feast held in 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians and not, as some Brits have suggested, Œthe American Christmas' or the ŒUS New Year'. The Yanks may not know how to make proper tea, but they do know how to eat!
I did all my shopping online, but realized just how far from home I was when a search for Yukon Gold potatoes yielded no results. My imperial recipes had no metric equivalent, and I spent weeks tracking down a Tofurkey, which is a vegetarian substitute for turkey. It was flown in from the States, got stalled in Customs, and arrived at the last minute in a black cab.
But all's well that ends well. We sat down to a table brimming with mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, green beans with almonds, candied sweet potatoes and herbed stuffing. And in the center, a glistening bowl of cranberry sauce, which we raised by spoonfuls in a toast, "To Mary!".
Contact Details
La Luna Publishing
Brighton, England
Tel: 44 (0) 1273 236436
E-mail: laluna@chandrabeal.com