Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I saw mention of a veggie haggis and had to say TRY IT! Its great! Although I grew up in Scotland I've never been able to stomach trying meat haggis due to the smell but I adore the veggie one and we have it with neeps and tatties every Burns Night without fail!

My husband recommends the meat one from Coburns in Dingwall (my home town...also suppliers of the haggis at Madonnas wedding to Guy) which he can only eat when I'm away for a couple of days with work or he has to put up with me retching throughout the house!

If you're going to Scotland to try food I also recommend butteries and macaroni pies! oh and macaroons and tablet if you're sweet toothed!

I am enjoying this blog a lot - but, like others, am disappointed by the easy option of showing unappetising images of foods. Imagine, if someone went into a really dull supermarket in a backwater somewhere and took some photographs of food and then said "This is American food"? Wouldn't you be a bit piqued?

II have a website called http://www.whatamieating.com which I hope might help you with some of the confusions of the namings of foods in our respective countried. But I see a need now to write a definition of 'pickles' in English English, which I would say should be almost any food preserved in vinegar (herrings, vegetables and so on). I will do this soon.

'Fish and chips' is mentioned - and can, it is true, be anything from cheap old coaley, with soggy greasy chips, to stonkingly fresh line-caught fish of some kind. You'd expect the same in the US, wouldn't you? A burger, a dish many foreigners think of as archetypally American, is not the only dish you produce, and can be represented by everything from a flaccid, grey disc of cheap meat to something enticing and succulent. It's the same all over the world. And all of us are trying to get better at it I think.

At the recent British Cheese Awards, to which *bus-loads* of French come, there were nearly 400 varieties of artisan cheese - and many of these cheeses are readily available across the country. Sad that we are defined by 'Cheddar'. Thanks to twcaac for talking it up! A well-made artisinale Cheddar is a complex hard cheese with a good smell of the farmyard. But all over the world people think of Cheddar as that bendy, flexible, flavourless item wrapped in plastic and sweating gently. Wouldn't we all?!

And jellied eels in France are 'aspic d'anguille' and a great delicacy. But a rose is a rose by any other name.....

Never liked McCoy's. But at least you didn't say Ahmed on the High. Ew... I developed a great relationship with the butchers in the covered market and ended up making a lot of fabulous dinners with food a lot of my MCR dorm-mates had never seen cooked before (mussels, duck, soba, risotto). But there's always that flip side: I can go high-end or I can go low-end, and nothing says low-end like chips and cheese with garlic, bbq, and chili sauces, topped with kebab meat.

I also liked kebab kid in Gloucester Green, as their kebabs on naan are ridiculous. The meat is much sweeter than at the vans, and it's a refreshing change of pace. I'm so jealous you're headed back.

You can find clotted cream in the states, actually.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=clotted+cream+us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Get good scone mix and some proper jam, and eat till you burst or succumb to a sugar coma. The gospel of clotted cream cannot be pledged enough.

Yes, please do the Scots next. I lived there for three months last year and learned a lot. Fish & chips always come with mushy peas. Don't ever ask for an appetizer at a restaurant, as you'll end up with Appletizer, a carbonated apple beverage. Don't EVER order a burger, as they are the size and texture (and probably taste) of a hockey puck.
In Scotland drink the water, it's from local sources pure as the driven snow. Drink the whisky. Eat Loch Etive mussels (Mussel Inn, Glasgow where you order mussels by weight and choose your sauce).
And if you really want bacon, as my husband did when I cooked breakfast every morning in our flat, try frying up two slices of pancetta from Tesco.
No, I didn't bring myself to try even a veggie haggis. But the pizza over there is fantastic. I won't say it gives Italy a run for its money else I'll not be allowed back to Florence!

I've always heard there was a polytechnic in Oxford besides Oxford Brookes...

As a Brit who has lived in US for the last 40 years although with much time out back home I think this article is more than a little dated.
Plus the photos show the most appalling cheap commercial products.
Bakewell tart ( and I speak as a native of Derbyshire) does not have a thick layer of icing/frosting and a cherry on top. It is just jam/preserves on the bottom and layer of frangipane over. Other items such as kippers are highly coloured and the scotch egg is very nasty looking.
So was the article making cheap shots or a point? if this is the best research you can do I suggest you look outside the supermarkets.
What differentiates tea and high tea is a main course. High tea is served in lieu of dinner. Afternoon tea is calorie laded snack served in addition to dinner. Of course there is an element of class distinction here too.

I will also add it's important not to confuse 'tea' and 'high tea'. In some of the country (mainly the south), 'tea' is a light meal consumed in place of supper. In the north, you'll find 'tea' refers to any evening meal.

'High tea' is an expensive mish-mash of hot beverages and baked goods consumed by tourists.

kebab vans!
as soon as twilight rolls in, most every busy intersection or well-traversed street becomes home to the kebab van, offering all sorts of unhealthy post-pub-or-club fare. kebab and kabob are two different things, as i learned. kabob is grilling skewers with meats and veggies stuck on, whereas kebab is carving off of large hanging cuts of meat and sticking it in a pita with fixings.

while studying in oxford, i gained a pound or two from frequent late-night cravings for chips and cheese with garlic sauce from the kebab vans. thick fries with real melted cheese, loads of ketchup and the garlicky mayonnaise--i've tried to replicate it here in the u.s., but the closest i've had since then was at some belgian fry stand one night in nyc.

UK Cornflour = US Cornstarch
UK Treacle = US Molasses
UK Pancakes = US Crepes

@Esmerelda - no worries at all! Hope you like the blog - its full of places, mainly in London, to buy cupcakes! There's an occasional mention of fairy cakes too.

@Jennywenny - those ones are called butterfly cakes!

@NotAmerican - never heard of a sausage roll with potato in it!

Scotland is the best place to go for baked goods such as pies - you can get everything from meat pies to my all time favourite macaroni cheese pie! Seriously this is my idea of ideal comfort food!

Pigs in a Blanket are slightly different from sausage rolls. A good sausage roll is ground sausage and (often) potato in a savoury pastry.

Interestingly, pigs in a blanket in the UK are chipolatas (small, spicy sausages) wrapped in streaky bacon (US style bacon).

Which of course brings up the bacon question...thick, fatty UK bacon, or crisp, fatty US bacon. Canada and Ireland, stay out of this!