What are your national delusions?

Honey, you just have to go to the right store.

In my last small town, there was a coffee bar/morning repasts/regular bar in a business building of much charm and many years, that had a vast array of good tea not in bags. Population about 25,000. And not all that prosperous a place, always struggling, what with the downed lumbar and fishing industries and difficult transportation to get there.

Careful re generalizing. You are building on short experience.


Oh, wait, you went to Texas. .

* kidding. I assume Texas varies.

I grew up with minced meat pies made by my mother, I think from a can as the mince meat source. I think of this as Boston stuff...

When I first got close (after the usual irish family years long big grudges, with my cousin who I ran into at our school) and we long after shared holiday meals, I tended to bring a nice minced meat pie from a good bakery, plus apple and pumpkin. None of them told me straight out that they hated it. Luckily I managed to gather that their preferences were otherwise.

I've no idea now that there was any real suet in that canned stuff. I figure my cousins didn't like raisins.

Ok, there's one -

The irish hold grudges longer than anyone else on earth.

Back to the tea for a moment. I have had tea of every description, pretty much, and have enjoyed many kinds. English black tea is one of my favorites. So is Earl Grey. I used to drink black and green tea, combined, because that is the only way I like green tea. That said, I have been drinking Lipton my whole life as a matter of choice and will continue to do so. Hot or cold, plain or sweet, it's fine for me.

Don't really like mince pie.

What's brown Windsor soup?

Or is it better not to know?

I think Lipton has some great tea.


Hmmmmm....maybe I'll have a morning tea rather than a morning coffee......

Hmmmmmmm.......is it healthy at least?

Well, I always said you are family..

As I understand it here, it means suet is in the mix.

from wiki -
Suet /ˈsuːɨt/ is raw beef or mutton fat, especially the hard fat found around the loins and kidneys.
Suet has a melting point of between 45° and 50°C (113° and 122°F) and congelation between 37° and 40°C. (98.6° and 104°F). Its high melting point makes it ideal for deep frying and pastry production.

I probably have a recipe from a thirties/forties cookbook - back sometime later.



Nope, not in that 1932 book. Although grapenuts raisin pie was.. (page 262) in case anyone wants me to type it up..

I said it's bland and tasteless. Of course it's healthy.

I guess I'm surprised at that, being a spicy fan myself - though of course not always.
I did pick up fbaezer saying he didn't like garlic much, which made me listen. (How could that be, I said to me)

I've had several meals in Guatemala, and don't remember any except for the time I insisted on Pipian al negro - a dish of tongue bits with black beans, don't get me started - my mother used to cook corned beef tongue. I dallied over the meal. That was a long time ago, I might like it now.

I think I get it, re cultures, that spicier represents less sophisticated, or maybe southern, or? Something about spice hiding impurities.. bad meat.

Mincemeat used to contain meat and the spices were added as a way to help it keep longer. Little by little, it got to be comprised of more and more spices and less and less meat and thus became a sweet instead of a meaty dish.

In England they call them mince pies and in America we still call them 'mincemeat pies' although most people in America don't put meat in them anymore - but yeah - some still do.

When I moved to rural Maine, where alot of people still hunt and deer season begins in November just in time for the run up to Thanksgiving, this person made and gave me a 'real mincemeat pie'.
I was a little confused as to what she meant by adding the word 'real' until I tasted it and realized it was totally different than the 'mincemeat pies' I'd grown up eating- there was meat in it.

Well, I don't like or eat game, but my father and brother like it, so as I was leaving for New Jersey to celebrate Thanksgiving, I figured instead of wasting it, I'd bring it down there and see if anyone there liked it.

My dad LOVED it! He'd been brought up on a farm in Texas where everyone hunted and was used to eating venison sausages and 'real' mincemeat with venison - and he'd missed that.

So yeah - in America - some people do still put meat in their mincemeat pies - at least in Maine.

I'm supposing that means the lambs were vegans, or close to it.

Here's a recipe for it, but this is the top end of the market. BWS came to prominence during the war, with 'restaurants' serving working men. The standard of cooking was not high, ingredients were substituted or left out, and you just ended up with brown sludge.
http://www.windsor-berkshire.co.uk/brown-windsor.php

I never heard of English black tea until just now. Sorry for being a bit preachy earlier, I was having arguments on other threads and I think that may have affected me on this one. Over here Liptons is associated with tinned ice tea and powdered 'instant' tea. That's obviously not the case over where you are. I'm sure it's well suited to ice tea, and if you like that then fair play to you. I always drink coffee in the mornings anyway, no tea until 11am.

Sounds horrid to me because I don't eat lambs or beefs....I can well imagine her maj tucking into it in the Victorian era....

Liptons is perfectly respectable tea here...nice plain tea.

I don't like lamb, way too fatty, so I wouldn't want to try it. I'm not really a great fan of soup anyway.

That's a goddamned lie ! ! !

You're gonna pay and pay for that one . . . until the day you die!

(Maybe for a while afterward, too . . . )

British tea culture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Britain tea is usually black tea served with milk (never cream