the food rant thread

[Kim]

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I got some more of that minging jizz for you as it's salad for tea

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Yeah, I'll do the washing up.  Apart from that jar of spunk for the recycling.  That's your problem.

[Oaky]

Steak salad, at least in Pittsburgh, comes with chips (well, french fries...).

ETA: mind you one of the bars there serves a burger-based comestible called the Steelworker.  Two burger patties with macaroni cheese sandwiched between them, wrapped in bacon, battered and deep-fried.  I never did try one of those - I'm not sure the medical cover on our travel insurance was up to it anyway.

[barakta]

I bought proper dirty burger & chips from the local kebab shop type place for my tea tonight - yum.

And better still I was able to stop them putting their own weird sauces on it and use my own (refrigerated) mayo and unrefrigerated ketchup. *YUM*

[Jaded]

Stayed at a hotel in Cheltenham once. Had to send the egg mayonnaise back. "That's not egg mayonnaise", I said, "that's egg salad cream".

I had something else instead.

In The US and A once I put on half a stone in a week. So decided to have a salad. The plate was about 15" wide and the whole massive pyramid of dressing-drenched green would have collapsed if one extra bit of crunchy bacon had been put on the top.

[contango]

I also like the filling quotient of American sandwiches. They slice up an entire animal. In the UK, we've manage a single slice one molecule thick. An average British ham sandwich would, to any American, be vegetarian. Our fillings are practically homeopathic.

I remember a comedy act some years ago talking of the man who managed to cut a human hair into 16 separate and identifiable strands, and how after he retired he was put in charge of slicing the ham for British Rail sandwiches. In the UK a ham sandwich usually has a barely discernible slice of something that's kind of pink. In the US a ham sandwich has half a pig in it. There's no mistaking that it's got ham in it.

I was once terrorised outside Richmond by a huge waitress who insisted I had to have sweet tea. She wouldn't let me have it unsweetened. Seriously. She stood over me and watched me drink it while my girlfriend sniggered. Till she fell under the gaze. You too, sweetcheeks. (I think she might have actually said 'sweetcheeks'.) Every time we took a sip she'd get us a new refill. We had to visit every rest stop on I-73, not just to relieve ourselves but to run around in mad circles trying to expend the sugar rush. If you've seen the episode of the Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse hit the neat slushie syrup, you'll know the sensation.

I was served sweet tea by a waiter in South Carolina, I suspect to thwart my efforts to eat the toreados he served me. Sadly it worked, the sugar rush combined with the heat of the toreados put paid to my desire to defeat them.

A proper NY baked cheesecake is hard to find, but worth it. There's a place in Boerum Hill that serves baked slices of heaven and they put a dollop of proper ice cream on top just in case you're running a calorie deficit. The cop thing is a good tip, they're good at detecting handsome calories. A friend of mine is in the LAPD and he took us for ride in his police cruiser and anyway, we pull up in South Central by a group of heavily tattooed Hispanic gang stereotypes who all start giving us the eye. We then have to push through this crowd being very British, wielding Mac-10s of sorry, to find a grubby looking van serving what the people of Hackney call 'street food'. I got a burrito about the same size as a body wrapped in a carpet. And bless my gut, if it wasn't the most awesomely filthy burrito ever. I was in spicy, meaty, cheesy heaven.

I just don't rate New York cheesecake but know what you mean about burritos. When you need a second person to carry it away you know you're in USAnia.

[ian]

I do wonder how Pret do in the US – they're sprouting around New York. I confess I've never been in one on the grounds it seems a bit pointless as every other shop in London that isn't an Eat or similar is a Pret (I've been in the Nandos in DC though, just because). Do they do the homeopathically underfilled brit sandwiches or do they say fuck it, slice the whole damn pig and order another truck load of avocado. I've seen Americans peel apart a brit sandwich and the look of disappointment that slowly curdles on their face is priceless. 'This is it?' those forlorn faces say as they appraise a lonely sliver of ham, so thin it looks like it was cut on an ultramicrotome. I just nod knowingly. We have, as a race, suffered at the hands of our tyrannical and misery sandwich overlords. It's the entire class system. You can bet whatever the Earl of Sandwich first slammed between two slices of bread, it had the kind of substantial weight that would been admired even by a blimp-sized family of mid-westerners.

And ye god, wraps. Order a deli wrap in a NYC deli. That's a wrap. A thin bit of bread making a valiant effort to restrain a riot of ingredients. In the UK at least half the wrap is literally just folded bread with no filling at all. Just dry stodge that eventually mixes with enough saliva to coat your teeth like house render.

[Mr Larrington]

I bet the Earl of Sandwich's ur-butty didn't contain anything as poncy as fucking avocado though.

[contango]

I do wonder how Pret do in the US – they're sprouting around New York. I confess I've never been in one on the grounds it seems a bit pointless as every other shop in London that isn't an Eat or similar is a Pret (I've been in the Nandos in DC though, just because). Do they do the homeopathically underfilled brit sandwiches or do they say fuck it, slice the whole damn pig and order another truck load of avocado. I've seen Americans peel apart a brit sandwich and the look of disappointment that slowly curdles on their face is priceless. 'This is it?' those forlorn faces say as they appraise a lonely sliver of ham, so thin it looks like it was cut on an ultramicrotome. I just nod knowingly. We have, as a race, suffered at the hands of our tyrannical and misery sandwich overlords. It's the entire class system. You can bet whatever the Earl of Sandwich first slammed between two slices of bread, it had the kind of substantial weight that would been admired even by a blimp-sized family of mid-westerners.

And ye god, wraps. Order a deli wrap in a NYC deli. That's a wrap. A thin bit of bread making a valiant effort to restrain a riot of ingredients. In the UK at least half the wrap is literally just folded bread with no filling at all. Just dry stodge that eventually mixes with enough saliva to coat your teeth like house render.

Can't say I've seen a Pret in the US yet, but then I don't care much for NYC (I find it much like London but noisier and dirtier).

I recently visited a chain called Jersey Mike's for a sub. I went for the small version - the "big kahuna cheesesteak". It's a good job it came wrapped in silver foil because the thing was big enough it was hard to eat without the filling falling out all over the place. If I'd tried to eat the large version (twice the size of the small one, and about two-thirds more expensive) I'd probably have been there a week later still digesting it. Maybe the whole theory of evolution is wrong and snakes really evolved from humans having figured out they only need one meal at an American food outlet, taking the time to digest it over a week or more rather than crapping it out the next day only to repeat the process and end up weighing more than their SUV.

In the UK I found Pret sandwiches to be mostly eatable (I say eatable rather than edible, due to the way some sandwich companies offerings were eatable in the sense that you could put them in your mouth and chew and swallow them but I struggle to see why anyone would choose to do such a thing let alone pay money for the privilege). Wraps were another matter. If you order the "chicken salad wrap" you can be sure that the cut ends will show succulent hunks of chicken breast. Bite into it and you'll find the hunks of chicken breast are carefully shaped to look about four times the size they really are, and the rest of the wrap is filled with limp lettuce.

Still, at least it isn't a Tesco style sandwich where what you can see is a bucketload of white gunge with the promised ingredients hiding in miniscule quantities and the shape is such that it's clear you get a couple of tiny pieces of chicken and the rest of it is just bread padded out with white gunge.

[ian]

There's always a low grade cheesesteak war going on along the eastern seaboard (believe me, don't even engage a Philadelphian in this discussion, it'll go on for hours and pull in half the neighbourhood) a good part of which is size. Size is very important to Americans. I feel for American womanhood, who upon engaging in bedroom activities with the man of their choice, are forever cursed with the knowledge that they've held a sandwich far bigger than that earlier in the day. Even American men, when they look down, must think the same, that that's no sandwich.

Anyway, some cheesesteaks are now so big that they can be mistaken for a small nuclear submarine. Admittedly, one after a bizarre Cheez Whiz accident. And no, I'm not saying anything bad about Cheez Whiz because I love processed cheese food products. Plus I think the cold war would have been a lot more interesting if they'd swapped nuclear weapons for food products. Imagine it the Americans had coated Moscow in Cheez Whiz. The Russians could have retaliated by turning the Potomac rubescent with a carefully deployed burst of borscht followed up by a cabbage-related offensive up the coast. Before you know it, Twinkies would have been falling from Leningrad to Volgograd and Hostess Cakes would have been bigger than Lockheed Martin.

But yes, British supermarket sandwiches. If there's any meal that epitomises disappointment, it's there, on the shelves of a high street. It's no wonder Pret and the like get away with £5 sandwiches when the alternative is a couple of limp slices of bread uneasily caressing a minimal amount of filling that's been embedded in a tomb of glutinous mayonnaise for about seven days. The whole thing tastes of sticky nothing enlivened by occasional cryptic changes in texture.

[geraldc]

Pret does well in Hong Kong, which constantly amazes me. Especially considering what else you can get for the price.

With HK, they were explaining that it's people who don't want to waste their lunch time, queuing for a space in cafe/restaurant. Or girls on a diet. The single sandwich, in its tiny triangle box sells very well in Hong Kong.

[Mrs Pingu]

I like sandwiches with only a modest filling. The idea of half a cow between 2 bits of bread doesn't do it for me at all.

[Mr Larrington]

I like a sandwich which doesn't come with half a market garden in it.  It irks my Yorkshire soul to pick out bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato and drop them in the bin.  Unfortunately the only retailers who seem to agree with me are the horriblemarkets, whose products taste like they're kept fresh by the "machine wash at number five" method.

[ian]

Nah, I want a sandwich that groans with filling. Getting all that filling in should be like squeezing an over-upholstered fellow into an economy class seat (did I ever tell the story of the large chap who got stuck in his rigid-sided exit row seat and the entire crew had to come and pull him out, at one point they were probably calculating if they had enough butter to lubricate him free, before he popped free and hit the bulkhead so hard that he ended up upgrading himself to business class).

The benefit of the overfilled sandwich is that it's nicely layered and you can mine the filling to build a couple of meaty side salads to accompany your now more modest sandwich. You can't go the other way, not even Jesus can turn a solitary slice of processed and reformed ham into anything worthwhile, never mind construct a couple of extra meals out of it. And I'm sorry, Pret, but really a NY club sandwich with three (THREE!) slices of pastrami wouldn't even be allowed. They'd get Bob Geldof to organize a benefit gig for that sandwich.

I'm surprised China isn't full of Prets (Google says there's one in Shanghai), bready goodness is a bit of a novelty. I think Subways are popping up.

[hellymedic]

We've been brought up with salad in sandwiches.
Kid Brother's sandwiches from Mum seemed popular enough for Kid Brother to be able to sell them to supplement his pocket money.
Kid Brother's (then) 4 year old daughter disassembled tuna sandwich, inserted lettuce from sandwich tray garnish and reassembled sandwich at nephew's wedding reception Ooop North.

[contango]

There's always a low grade cheesesteak war going on along the eastern seaboard (believe me, don't even engage a Philadelphian in this discussion, it'll go on for hours and pull in half the neighbourhood) a good part of which is size. Size is very important to Americans. I feel for American womanhood, who upon engaging in bedroom activities with the man of their choice, are forever cursed with the knowledge that they've held a sandwich far bigger than that earlier in the day. Even American men, when they look down, must think the same, that that's no sandwich.

There's certainly some good stuff and some less good stuff out there. When it's called a Philadelphia Cheesesteak it's probably not a good idea to insult it too openly in Philadelphia. It would seem like going to Champagne and telling them their fizzy wine stinks. Size certainly matters, and what you do with it makes little difference as most of it will fall out over the table anyway. And that's before you get onto the sandwiches...

Anyway, some cheesesteaks are now so big that they can be mistaken for a small nuclear submarine. Admittedly, one after a bizarre Cheez Whiz accident. And no, I'm not saying anything bad about Cheez Whiz because I love processed cheese food products. Plus I think the cold war would have been a lot more interesting if they'd swapped nuclear weapons for food products. Imagine it the Americans had coated Moscow in Cheez Whiz. The Russians could have retaliated by turning the Potomac rubescent with a carefully deployed burst of borscht followed up by a cabbage-related offensive up the coast. Before you know it, Twinkies would have been falling from Leningrad to Volgograd and Hostess Cakes would have been bigger than Lockheed Martin.

I like white American cheese (aka plastic cheese) but really struggle with Cheez Whiz. It just doesn't taste anything like cheese to me. At least the highly processed and perfectly formed white American cheese tastes like part of it came from a cow whereas Cheez Whiz tastes like it never went anywhere near a cow, except perhaps by accident. Maybe the cows got a little closer than expected to the fence beside the interstate as the truck went past. It's hard to see it being any closer than 100 yards to a cow.

A food war between the US and USSR (as was) could have been interesting. A former tactic in war was to dump vast amounts of forged currency with a view to crashing the currency. If the US had dumped vast stockpiles of Twinkies and Tasty Kake products all over Russia they could have made the Russians so fat they wouldn't fit into their military vehicles and won by default. A generous dumping of Cheez Whiz would made the area glow in the dark in a way Chernobyl could only imagine.

But yes, British supermarket sandwiches. If there's any meal that epitomises disappointment, it's there, on the shelves of a high street. It's no wonder Pret and the like get away with £5 sandwiches when the alternative is a couple of limp slices of bread uneasily caressing a minimal amount of filling that's been embedded in a tomb of glutinous mayonnaise for about seven days. The whole thing tastes of sticky nothing enlivened by occasional cryptic changes in texture.

Yes, the "disappointment in a wrapper" product. At least with McDonalds you know you're buying something that isn't going to be great, but the way supermarkets present their sandwiches you'd think you're getting a decent amount of filling, only to realise that the two chunky pieces of chicken you see facing you are the only two pieces of chicken in a sea of tasteless gunge.

[contango]

I like sandwiches with only a modest filling. The idea of half a cow between 2 bits of bread doesn't do it for me at all.

I have to say I agree with you. I'd rather just eat the half cow, save the bread for someone else.

[ian]

I gave the entire cold war via food thing a good think last night. I have to say that there is no way ever that cabbage can beat Twinkies. The USSR was doomed from the start.

[fuzzy]

The Sainsbergs version of horriblemarket sandwiches can be acceptable. My bike shop boss buys the weekend satff lunch so I regularly pop out to get the supplies. Their purple baggie salt beef and Tewksbury mustard mayo or the ham hock and mature cheddar sandwiches or their southern fried chicken or chicken and bacon ranch baguettes or their indian inspired nan bread thing have substance and flavour that are tolerable.

[Mr Larrington]

I gave the entire cold war via food thing a good think last night. I have to say that there is no way ever that cabbage can beat Twinkies. The USSR was doomed from the start.

There's an old joke which goes something like:

Comrade General Stakhanov: Our soldiers of glorious Red Army get 3000 calories food a day!
General Dieselburger III: That's nothing, boy!  Uncle Sam's boys get 5000 calories a day!
Comrade General Stakhanov: Is nonsense!  No man can eat whole sack of potato in twenty-four hours!

[Mr Larrington]

Mr Sainsbury, I see you have a new design on your 1.75L cartons of orange juice.  I see it is confected using a "new recipe", though how this is achieved for 100% pure orange juice I wot not.

What I did not see is that there is no longer a ring-pull wossname under the screw cap.

(Wipes juice off trousers)

Fuckers

[Basil]

Lunchtime today.  Distraught by the fact that they were not able to serve me soup on a plank, and had to compromise with soup in a plate on a plank, they compensated by putting my butter on a rock.  (Which they'd probably just picked up in the car park)

[Mr Larrington]

Mr Sainsbury's House Of Toothy Comestibles, might I trouble you to put on the carton of your Lentil Dhal SOUP, in the biggest letters than will physically fit, "contains the foulness that is spinach".

[contango]

Have to thank the makers of tinned Cullen Skink soup for their "new recipe".

For those not familiar with it, it's essentially a fish soup. The new recipe added a load of boiled onion.

So the headline might have been written "New Fish Soup Recipe, now with less fish". Gee, thanks.

[Pingu]

Cullen skink is a thick Scottish soup made of smoked haddock, potatoes and onions.

The exact quantities may vary as does the use of milk or cream.












Waits

[jsabine]

Waits

Tom?