In celebration!

Welsh rabbit.

Here in the Netherlands they observe Twede Chocoladetaartdag (on the 28th) instead. Which is convenient for this household, since that's Fiona's birthday.

I'll be baking this in honor of the day.

Someone offered me an egg cream recently. I thought of saying "No thanks, I don't like either egg or cream" but (a) this would be two lies and (b) the irony wouldn't communicate.

Andrew Plotkin @4: Similarly, hilarity has ensued in British gatherings where an American was asked to go to the kitchen and get 'some orange squash.' Means something else over here, of course, but still a kitchen item ...

5
British lemonade isn't quite the same as American. That might confuse people a bit, too.

P J Evans @6: In my experience, if you order 'lemonade' in Britain (or, at any rate, in Edinburgh, which is my one datapoint) you are liable to be given anything ranging from tart lemon-juice-and-water-with-some-sugar through limonata all the way to Sprite. And the waiter will give you a weird look if you order a Sprite and then complain when they give you lemonade, because apparently to them it's all the same thing ...

That vacation verged upon Picky-Eater Hell for me, though I've gotten better since then. It was Educational.

Elliott, a month spent mostly in England left me able to drink tea with milk. Or with sugar. (I still prefer it without either, given a choice.) Educational, oh yes. (Sometimes I actually want a grilled tomato.)

P J Evans @8: I would have been much happier if I'd found out sooner than 2/3 through the vacation that every pub in Edinburgh serves, all day, *baked potatoes with your choice of stuff in them*. Ambrosia!

pj @ #8, I went through a period of trying different things in my college days and trying tea with milk, English style (after a trip to London with my family) made me an addict.

I've always liked grilled tomatoes with any meal including breakfast, mom would do that during the summers when we had so many tomatoes we had to do Something About It (including canning, different kinds of relishes and canning, etc.).

I don't believe I've ever had grilled tomatoes. And I grew up in Sack-o-Tomatoes, so it's not as though it wasn't an option...

(I think the perfect form of a certain kind of Sacramento snobbery is to use the phrase, "They buy their tomatoes from the store." This was inspired by the fact that my visiting MiL will buy (Florida) tomatoes from the store, even when tomatoes are in season and can be had MUCH TASTIER from the local farmer's market—in front of the store.)

Shepherds' pie rarely contains any shepherds. Nor does toad in the hole.

Contain any shepherds, that is. It also doesn't contain any toads, if you make it right.

As far as I know, Monster Slim Jims contain no actual monsters, Sasquatch meat sticks are not made from sasquatches, and Little Debbie Zebra Cakes have no connection with African equids.

Froot Loops have no fruit, AFAIK.

Scotch Chocolate Cake, pick two.

Yes, but do they have froot?

(Similarly, watch out for words like "choclatey" or "creme".)

Furthermore Bombay duck is a kind of salted fish^{1. And if, like Anne Sheller @ 14. we're allowing brand names, many of yoou are going to find this foodstuff to be problematic on a number of levels. (In case anyone's wondering, that's not the slightest bit photoshopped. Honest.)}

1. Which Wikipedia tells me is no longer available in the UK because of EU regulations. But I'm sure that can't be right, because if the EU had tried to ban a traditional British food in the late 1990's there would surely have been a memorably high-profile Daily Mail campaign to preserve it. Wouldn't there?

Oops. I seem to have spectacularly messed up an attempt at using the /sup> tag for my footnote there. Sorry!

praisegod #18:

That link gives me a permission error.

Praisegod #18 - The EU declared Bombay Duck to be doubleplusungood in 1997 owing to the way it was prepared and packed. After several rounds with the India High Commission, it became legal again in 2003. The UK, however, remains unsure about this, thanks to its usual fuckwittery about EU regulations (old joke: an EU ruling covering two sides of paper will, by the time Whitehall's finished with it, have turned into a 150-page publication).

On a personal note, my mother, when she was living in the Irish Republic in the 1970s, got a letter from Irish Customs telling her that they had destroyed an entire consignment of spices because it had contained "fowl products". You guessed it...

joann @ #20:

Click in the address bar and press enter, or perform some equivalent action. Like most hotlinking protections, it forbids direct linking from another site, but it'll let you through if it thinks you manually entered the address.

P J Evans @ 8:

Sometimes I actually want a grilled tomato.

Yes! With melted mozzarella cheese and a pinch of oregano.

B. Durbin @ 11:

and can be had MUCH TASTIER from the local farmer's market—in front of the store.

Or picked up off the side of the road by the freeway entrance/exit where the big trucks didn't slow down enough to allow for centrifugal force and didn't tie down their tarp covers properly. There used to be a Dole tomato processing plant in Davis, just down the road from Sacramento so that was a good place to find them.

23
My mother once made a batch of pickles using cucumbers that had fallen off trucks - she used the ones that hadn't broken on landing.

I've seen oranges by the side of the freeway where the trucks were, perhaps, just a bit overloaded for the driving conditions.

I'd mention spotted dick, but I don't know if it's accurate or not. I certainly hope not.

This chocolate cake recipe is very similar to the one I use (down to the fluffy white seven-minute style icing), which I got from my grandmother. It's an awesome cake, very good and quite reliable.

eric #25: Spotted dick exists. I used to get it as a pudding at school.

I can confirm that Spotted Dick is not only real, but is available canned in the British section (!) of my local Publix grocery store--along with, I kid you not, Mushy Peas.

There is also a recipe for Spotted Dick in the excellent Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, which it's a gastronomic companion to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series.

Oh, I know spotted dick exists, I'm just scared to look at the ingredients.

My N. Irish I laws and I have a tradition. The first cuppa tea I'm served on any given visit has milk in it. 5 minutes later, there's a horrified realization from the tea preparer that I'm the American one and the only one who likes tea with my sugar.

joann @ 20: Paul A.'s solution works for me with the link, but in case it doesn't work for you, the product in question is called - and I felt I needed to show an independent source for this - 'Brain's Faggots'.

Lila @ 28: there are many things to be said about mushy peas, but 'misleadlingly named' is not one of them. They are peas, and they are mushy...

"Thousand-year eggs" are not, thank the August Personage of Jade, really a thousand years old.

Prairie oysters. Although individual specimens may actually have originated from the prairie, so there's that.

32
And their nominal relative the mountain oyster?

There is also mountain chicken a delicacy of the eastern Caribbean.

I can report that "World Peace Cookies", though nice enough to eat, do not perform as advertised.

Steve Taylor @ 35: Or possibly you haven't eaten enough of them. I feel you owe it to the world to test this hypothesis.

chocolate truffles aren't

praisegod barebones @ 36:

Or perhaps he just didn't put in enough whirled peas.

#33, well, if you allow for the fact that the were grown in the mountains that's a 50% truth in naming.

Porcupine meatballs.

Insert standard callback to little Wednesday Addams asking about Girl Scout Cookies.

--Dave, and then there's hot pockets, which have to be kept cold, and don't contain pockets. usually.

Me: This is called Fettuccine Alfredo.
Son: Is this chicken in here?
Me: Sure. You didn't think they still made it with real Alfredo, did you?

I'm sure I've eaten enough Caesar Salad to go through at least Suetonius' 12, all on my own...

Every time I eat Altoid mints, I always wonder how many altos you have to grind up to make one tin of 'em...
Side note--Pork sausage tonight, because it is Ground Hog day.

For the fine delicacy known as "head cheese", the "cheese" is the deceptive part, unfortunately.

Alan, I was afraid of that.

On a more general note, I've come to the conclusion that the word 'delicacy' doesn't actually mean "something we think is delicious," but "something we eat in our culture and are expected to like, so we act like we do, at least in part to freak out you furriners." I expect a lot of people secretly detest their culture's "delicacies."

Usually with a background of "our ancestors had to eat this or starve, so now we eat it and pretend to like it and/or everyone who couldn't stand it died of starvation, and the ones who actually liked it had a survival advantage over the ones who had to gag it down." Nothing else explains the Icelandic rotted fish, for example.

Xopher, #46: Hence Terry Pratchett's term "local delicacy".

ObSF: In Diane Duane's The Romulan Way, there is reference to a region in which one particular foodstuff (a common tuber) is highly denigrated. The people who settled that region came from a ship in which a disaster took out most of the hydroponics section, and that tuber was pretty much the only thing they had to eat for years. It's colloquially known as "the wretched root".

Xopher, #46--good guess. I'd still be curious to see how many people today have a real, inherent liking for some fermented item and how many don't, or have to learn to tolerate it, and who they got this from. I read some pretty incredible stories about carefully (we hope) aged meat eaten by Inuit and a few hardy souls here in the southlands--"high" meat; Google it if you have a strong stomach. I am not sure what genetic linkages could be found for tolerating aged or spicy foods, let alone liking them, but it would be interesting to find out, as I suspect there is something to your theory.
Some claim that humanity started out scavenging lion kills, and I suspect those didn't stay fresh very long in that climate. Why then do human beings not have the ability to eat rotten meat like bears, etc. do all the time? We age it, but it's a bit of a different process than what happens to something that gets run over.