Too much American 'culture' in the UK?

[alternageek]

Krispie creams are not served cold

 

When they are sitting on the shelves for a few hours they are cold. Hot, fresh out of the fryer is when they are edible. Otherwise they taste just like a store bought donut.

 

The only thing I avoid like the plague is Sushi. Ate some once and was as sick as a dog for a day and a half afterwards.

 

I dont buy this bit about you gotta live slap bang up against the ocean to really taste good seafood. I've eaten at Fisherman's Wharf in San Franciso and very recently on the Boston waterfront. While it was overall good it was nothing to go especially crazy about.

 

Best fish I tasted was in Orleans, France while staying with some French friends. There was a largish supermarket there and the fish, unfrozen and unwrapped was out on a slab. We bought a bunch of it, took it to the house and cooked it up. Even without any spices added it was plain delicious.

 

That's what I like about the French. They're not obsessed about all this health and safety rubbish like the yanks are, deep freezing everything and wrapping it in plastic. That's guaranteed to destroy any taste of the seas.

 

Best seafood, lobster, crab. oysters was at Rio's in Vegas. Great big trays of lobster tails and king crab, as much as you could eat. Cost around 50 bucks a head for the buffet but it was worth every penny. Vegas isn't eactly near the sea either is it

 

I'd give half my monthly pension check for some smoked haddock. Cant find the darned stuff anywhere here. I have to take a trip to England for that treat

 

I think Im biased as grew up on Long Island and you could get pretty much everything you ever wanted caught either that day or the day before. Which might make me a bit snobby about the quality of seafood I eat..

 

Oh, Vegas counts, as they want the food to be good - especially at the pricier places. But to recomend someone Red Lobster is like recommending Long John Silvers to an Englishman and saying its authentic fish & chips.

[Harleyman]

It does help, though. There's no shortage of fresh fish (at reasonable prices) in Florida - and you don't see goldfish offered for sale as often.

 

 

 

The fish you ate in Orleans was probably pretty fresh - notwithstanding it was on a slab. if you eat 'old' shellfish (and particularly old shrimp) you may not make a habit of doing so. (The Jews and the Muslims have those food rules for a reason.)

 

We eat shrimp at home quite often. Naturally it's all sold frozen but freezing it definitely does kill the taste a lot.

I find a lot of fish tend to have a bland taste in this part of the world. Catfish and salmon are about all that apppeals to me these days. Any other kind of fish has to be prepared Cajun style if it is to titivate my discerning pallet in any way.

[buck]

All sound good, but no where near as good as Boston Market that Buck & I have in Ct

Most of our seafood restaurants serve fish shipped straight from the fishing boats in Massachusets or Maine. Most supermarkets have a lobster tank full of them still alive and kicking, ready for you to take home and cook yourself, or have the store cook them for you. The Big Y supermarket chain cooks fish and chips to take home as good as you get back home. We used to have a fast food fish and chip chain called Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips, which was very popular. Arthur was a British character actor in many movies mostly comedies. After he died the chain eventually failed.

[Harleyman]

When they are sitting on the shelves for a few hours they are cold. Hot, fresh out of the fryer is when they are edible. Otherwise they taste just like a store bought donut.

 

 

 

I think Im biased as grew up on Long Island and you could get pretty much everything you ever wanted caught either that day or the day before. Which might make me a bit snobby about the quality of seafood I eat..

 

Oh, Vegas counts, as they want the food to be good - especially at the pricier places. But to recomend someone Red Lobster is like recommending Long John Silvers to an Englishman and saying its authentic fish & chips.

 

 

You've never tasted H. Salt fish and chips I'll bet. H. Salt are not found in many places. Luckily there's one in the next town over.

I know what good fish and chips should taste like and I'll bet anyone from your side of the pond would agree that they rival anything there.

 

Best fish and chips I've found though are sold at a pokey little cafe in Florida on the Gulf coast. Name and location secret. There are too many people already who know that place.

[Peas Maker]

Is there too much Americana on British TV? Or in society- fast food, coffee...our behaviour and language?

 

The French have notoriously tried (or succeeded?) on several occasions to curtail all US culture in their society, and restrict the amount of English language in their media. Were they 'right' to at least try to halt the ceaseless tide of US adverts and TV shows etc, as we in the UK receive? Or were they missing out?

 

Not that I have a problem with Americans per sé, nor am an ultra-Tory etc, but there does seem to be a huge amount of US culture in our society?

 

Or does it not matter?

 

 

No I luv a Mac ds. Any tilme

 

But I suppose to much is bad for you .

[Harleyman]

Most of our seafood restaurants serve fish shipped straight from the fishing boats in Massachusets or Maine. Most supermarkets have a lobster tank full of them still alive and kicking, ready for you to take home and cook yourself, or have the store cook them for you.

 

So too here also. Go to any beach town fishmarket along the Califonia coast and you'll see them everywhere

[Harleyman]

we're not all deserving of such hatred.

ask any one in Sheffield that knows me, i'm alright jack! err rich!!

 

oh curious to see ALF is considered culture !!!

 

You have to understand that friend Rich is the real life Alf Garnett or his American equal Archie Bunker.

With Garnett w*gs start at Calais and with Bunker gays are anywhere west of the Rockies.

Cant stop em submitting their daft comment though. It's an open forum

[Rupert_Baehr]

Most of our seafood restaurants serve fish shipped straight from the fishing boats in Massachusets or Maine. Most supermarkets have a lobster tank full of them still alive and kicking, ready for you to take home and cook yourself, or have the store cook them for you. The Big Y supermarket chain cooks fish and chips to take home as good as you get back home. We used to have a fast food fish and chip chain called Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips, which was very popular. Arthur was a British character actor in many movies mostly comedies. After he died the chain eventually failed.

 

I grew up on an Island. I'm certainly familiar with the concept of 'fresh' fish. I've eaten really fresh fish ... it was dead (but the nerves were still making it twitch. )

 

As far as the locals were concerned, Fresh fish was fish which had been caught within the last 6 hours or so. - After that, it was getting old.

 

BTW Mackerel (when they are fresh) are green with black markings. They go blue when they're going stale.

 

Local fishermen still do keep lobsters and crabs in vivier tanks - storage tanks immersed in seawater - but if you eat a crab/lobster which has been in a vivier tank (or in a tank in a restaurant) it's a good idea to know how long it's been in there. Crabs and lobsters do not live on salt water and although they can survive in a storage tank for weeks, they (just like vertebrates who don't eat for an extended period) lose weight. - It doesn't show on the outside, but they can be fairly hollow.

 

If you are choosing a crab/lobster from a tank and there is one with a very clean shell and one with a few barnacles, go for the latter. He's been inside that particular shell for a long time (and is likely to be fairly fleshy - provided he hasn't been in the tank for too long.) A shellfish which is very clean may just have shed his shell and produced a new one. That takes a lot of body mass.

 

Crabs and lobsters are cooked alive. Dead crabs and lobsters may make you dead, too.

 

If you get a live lobster and you are going to cook it yourself, put it so sleep first. It's kinder to the lobster and it may well be kinder to you, too - they tend to move around a bit (for about a half second) when you dump them in boiling water. A lobster's tail can displace quite a lot of boiling water and sod's law says it's going to go on you.

 

To put a lobster to sleep:

 

Hold it vertically (or put it on a table) with its head (and pincers) pointing downwards. With your other hand, stroke the lobster along its back towards the tail (curling the tail under the fish.)

 

You only have to stroke it 3 or 4 times and it will go to sleep. - You can then stand it on its head and claws and it won't move.

 

I worked in a restaurant during the school holidays and we used to do this from time to time and put the lobsters on the tables alongside the candles and other ornaments.

 

Customers come in, you show them to a table and one of them is bound to ask:

 

"What's that?"

 

"It's a lobster."

 

"But I thought lobsters were red?"

 

"They are - when they're cooked. That one is very much alive! - It's just asleep." (I'd also removed any binding which might've been around the pincers [put there to prevent the lobster from savaging other lobsters.])

 

The customers usually don't believe you ...

 

So you pick up the lobster, straighten out its tail (slowly) and lay it on the table. Then you rap the tail smartly (but not too hard) with the back of a knife.

 

The lobster will wake up - immediately - and it will be in a very bad mood!

 

If you want to have any chance of a tip from those customers, don't point the sleeping lobster at them. The smell of wee tends to ruin the ambience.

 

(If you put a sleeping lobster in a pot of boiling water its tail doesn't move. - It's dead before it can wake up and you don't get scalded.)

[KidsBootcamp]

I understand how the US language evolved (it hasn't changed much since the says of the first settlers), accents the lot but what gets me is when they correct Brits, like when you say "scone" and they say "Oh you mean a biscuit?" "No, I meant scone! What you mean is cookie"

[Harleyman]

I understand how the US language evolved (it hasn't changed much since the says of the first settlers), accents the lot but what gets me is when they correct Brits, like when you say "scone" and they say "Oh you mean a biscuit?" "No, I meant scone! What you mean is cookie"

 

Do you really believe that Americans still speak much the same English as the Pilgrim Fathers?