What are your national delusions?

I forgot to mention that the tea I drink is sun tea.

Great stuff . . . lazy man's tea . . .

What has that got to do with anything?

You don't know what you're talking about. BTW Liptons is gnats, it's the tea that cheapskate landlords put in their hotel rooms because they know it will still be there in the morning.


For not bringing his own tea bags and kettle. Lets face it, if Tony Blair couldn't get a decent cup of tea, what chance does anyone else have?

You can't expect to make a decent cup of tea with anything other than boiling water. Once again Liptons is not a quality product.

A tour de force of iditotic English tea prejudices. What the adulteration of tea has to do with it is that your ancestors started all this superior cup of tea tripe at a time when they were being sold absolute shite. If the tea is of good quality, then prepartion in a tea ball in a tea pot, or with a tea bag in a cup or a teapot will produce the same good cup of tea. Your bigotry notwithstanding, Lipton's certainly is not the only brand of tea which can be purchased in North America--this is on a par with your stupid remark about having had iced tea in Texas.

The idiocy of English tea prejudice is so pervasive that even if an Englishman had a good cup of tea in North America, he wouldn't admit it. You don't hear them complaining about the tea they get in Canada, and exactly the same brands are available in Canada as in the United States. Those brands, by the way, are all also available in tea bags. You're posting drivel.

Differrences in taste are not evidence of either inferiority or superiority. I find it telling that you think Lipton's is the only tea one can get in America, and whatever iced tea you had in Texas is exemplary of all the iced tea in America.

So the fact that no Englishman has ever stated they've had a decent cup of tea in America, is down to our own prejudices, not the fact that Americans can't make tea, or cheese for that matter? Very convenient.

You crack me up Bubba . . . are you attempting to fulfill a stereotype?

What stereotype would that be? The disappointed Englishman, forced to roam across America, condemned never to taste a decent cup of rosy ever again?

Ummmm, Set, great cataloger of US "excesses", you sure can get a grip on an unimportant little bone, can't you?

Earlier in this thread i thought about pointing out that matters of taste are not subjects for a discussion of delusions, but you're making me wonder, Izzy. The English did not invent tea. Tea was being drunk by millions of people before the English ever heard of it. What you are talking about is preferences of taste. There is no reason to assume that the English are the indisputable arbiters of what constitutes a good cup of tea--only of what they prefer.

Time and time and time again i've heard Americans complain that you can't get a decent sandwich in England. That doesn't mean that there are no good sandwiches in England, only that they didn't get something to their taste. Veterans of the Second World War who were in England (my mother and father included) used to tell horror stories about the food in England. Some of that was no doubt a result of shortages and rationing, but a certain amount of it was undoubtedly a product of differences in taste. Having different tastes is no evidence of delusion. But insisting that one's own taste is the only standard by which taste can be judged certainly is.

Rationing was part of it, and it only got worse after the war. People basically did not learn how to cook, and there was a huge educational movement after the war aimed mostly at women. Brown Windsor soup is a particular abomination. Stereotypes remain, even though London has some of the finest restaurants in the world.

Sure, and some of the finest restaurants in the world are in North America, too.

When i arrived in Ireland for the first time, i went into a shop and ordered a hamburger. It was awful, almost unbelievably awful. I realized that it was chopped ham which had then been cooked on a grill. Hamburgers are not called hamburgers because they are made of ham. For a long time in America, what is now called a chuck roast was called a Hamburg steak. Even as late as the 1950s when i was a boy, you would see signs in a butcher shop for Hamburger steak, and for ground Hamburg steak, which is what one used to make hamburgers--this is beef i'm talking about. The message, however, apparently didn't make it across the Atlantic. I learned that i should look for beef burger on the menu. The only really good hamburger i ever had in Ireland was made by my landlady, who, along with her husband, had managed a hotel in Boston for 15 years before they had saved enought to retun to Ireland to buy their own hotel.

I largely subscribed to the awful sandwich stereotype until i went into what was called a deli, and had a salad sandwich. It was sliced tomato, cucumber, radish and onion, with watercress and lettuce. It was a wonderful sandwich. I learned a lesson i should have already known--you get what you pay for, and if you go into a fast food chain store, what you get is crap.

Brown sauce ...

At one point Heinz produced tinned burgers, the hamburgers were made of ham. Over here a hamburger would include the bap, and all the gubbins. A burger on its own would be a beefburger.

[shudder]tinned burgers[/shudder]

Yes. And you can generalize this to pretty much any nation.

I almost always hear people think that the food etc back home is "better" (even if they are comparing the same thing, like McDonalds in their country vs. McDonalds in yours), completely ignoring that what they mean to say is that they are used to it, and equate familiarity with quality.

There's no "right" answer about taste. So if everyone in the UK says that the tea in America sucks, perhaps they simply just like the way they are used to it, and maybe it is not objectively better.

That brings me to my national delusion of the day. Costa Ricans think they have good food, they don't like the food from elsewhere as much. But their food is incredibly bland, and they generally don't like "exotic" foods like Indian because the spices are too strong at first blush.

I can't say what's right, but I can tell you this, they like them some bland, salt-free, tasteless food here.

Speaking of hamburger... My granny told me that when she first came to canada, she went to a butchers and ordered minced meat. They gave her a jar of pie filling with raisins for mince meat pies.
So my question is - what do they call mince meat pies in England?

Mince pies are sweet, most associated with Christmas.

If it's got minced beef in it's usually called beef and (usually onion). Any non-minced beef is steak. There's also the Cornish pasty which contains mince.

It is a bit confusing: mincemeat doesn't contain any meat, minced meat doesn't contain any chopped mint leaves but grounded meat.
("Leberkäse", , literally 'liver cheese', contains neither cheese nor liver but corned beef, pork, bacon and onions in German-speaking countries )

Has this anything to do with "Mongolian style vegetarian lamb" on the menu of a local Chinese restaurant ?