However, I must admit that there is no adequate English language term for 'foie gras' or even 'pâté'.>>>

Bloated liver and meat paste would seem to cover it.

Has anyone mentioned gravy?
In England, gravy is a sauce made from the lovely juices from the Sunday roast.
In America, it's a greasy white stuff of nightmares.

I attach a recipe.
Do not read it if you are about to eat.

½ pound ground breakfast sausage.
2 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons all purpose flour
3 cups cold milk
Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté the sausage until it is cooked and has released as much of its fat as possible. Remove the sausage with a slotted spoon and do NOT drain the grease. You’ll need it to make the roux. (I said this was delicious, not health food). You should have about 2 tablespoons of rendered pork fat. Add the butter and melt it. Then add the flour a little at a time over medium heat, constantly whisking. Cook for about 2-3 minutes. Now start adding the cold milk a little at a time, whisking incessantly. Toward the end of the milk add the sausage back in. When you reach the desired consistency add salt and pepper to taste. Cut the biscuits in half, pour the gravy over them, and enjoy one of the most embracing and comforting taste sensations known to man.

*Opens book at G writes "Gravy (US) - an abomination unto the lord"*

And then rather reluctantly goes off to work nights - at my age.

"Ok, what's the French for chip butty?"

Easy!

Pain Americain...Frequently comes with sliced bits of burger in with the chips.

Gravy? That isn't gravy...It's flour boiled in milk and grease...

Isn't there some rule about using names for stuff that isn't what it says it is? Like Champagne for example.

How is it legal that those ghastly American orange squares of plastic wrapped plastic get to be called Cheddar, which we all know is, in reality, a cheese, which is made like cheese is made, generally by a cheesemaker, who knows stuff about cheese and how to make it.

>>Isn't lye caustic soda? Great for unblocking drains.....

You eat this?<<

When I was a child, we had a favourite record (a 78, natch) of an American comic singing, hot-gospel style, a song called "Grandma's Lye-Soap". It might be in a cupboard somewhere still. I think that involved people swallowing the stuff, with miraculous consequences.

Anyway, I think square sausages would be a good idea. I can never get the round ones to stay in one place long enough to cook properly.

The first time I came across Lye was in Malcolm X's biography.

He used to use it to straighten his hair...

Was that before of after he used it to make the grits?

Actually, in France, there is another use for lye. It is sprinkled along the walls of buildings to dissuade dogs from urinating there.

Lye is used in some northern European countries in certain fish dishes. It can also be used in making German pretzels.

Josser's gravy recipe is of course, just one definition and is used only in some regional cooking, but please, go on and enjoy your ill-informed juvenile sniggering. In some Italian American communities, gravy is a tomato-based sauce. In most of the U.S. above the MD line, gravy is also made from roast chicken, beef, etc.

The PA Dutch poultry dealer we bought our chickens from proudly advertised that their chickens were fresh killed. "We slaughter daily" was their slogan.

"fender and bumper, faucet and tap........"

I live in the midwest and we use these things interchangeably. Some are locked into different expressions.

"Fender Bender" - never 'Bumper Bender'....

"Tap Water" - never 'Faucet Water'

But other than that, either one is fair game.

Little confused, still, about the cookie-biscuit-scone thing. :D We do have scones here, they are most in New England. They are harder than our biscuits. But not really hard. :)

That gravy recipe bears no relation to anything served in the Northeast US. Here we call gravy the stuff you make from the juices from the roast, as Josser says it is in England.

Many of these foods (grits, sausage gravy) are as unusual to me as they would be to any of the British posters here.

CW - - it is regions you need to put in your book, not individual foods and such.

That gravy described above is another one of those sorta "southern things" (and midwestern too) like grits :&

Most gravy here is just like you get in the UK - nice, tasty, brown from the drippings.

Just one point. There are variations of all these of course, but anyone who says an "American biscuit" is a scone -- just hasn't had a real American biscuit.

I didn't think so. Scones are to be eaten with sweat stuff.

How do you pronounce scone in Ameriky?

Skon or skown?

Everyone I know says "skown".

these samples of "false phonetics" always throw me. I'd think "skown" rhymes with brown or clown, and I don't know anyone who pronounces it that way. How about "cone" (is there more than one way to pronounce it?) with an s in front of it.

But I'm really curious. What "sweat" stuff do you eat them with? Sweat pants and sweat shirts? Yeeeecchhh.

Typo!

The french do pronounce sweat, as in sweat shirt, sweet.

The U S of A is big, and there seems to be some confusion of regional cuisines as representing the whole of this (occasionally) fair land.

First of all, the use of lye in the preparation of corn (dent or field corn, not sweet corn) greatly increases it's nutritional value when it is the main source of calories in a subsistence diet. I beleive it allows for better assimilation of the little protein corn contains. There is no residual lye in the finished product. I believe alkali in other forms (lime or limestone) is used in some other ethnic cuisines for similar purposes. Grits are definitely a southern regional item. Of course, polenta is just yellow grits, but it is acceptable outside the south because it is Italian.

As to biscuits, what has been described in this thread is the southern buttermilk biscuit, now a standard throughout the country. The New England biscuit is the drier, harder, crumbly type, mostly a source of calories, while the buttermilk biscuit is a joy to eat. The only reasonable use for the New England biscuit is in strawberry shortcake. Of course, being raised in southern New England, we used sponge cake for strawberry shortcake, but knew of the real New England variety. By the time you get south to New York, strawberry shortcake has mutated into a rediculous cake/whipped cream/strawberry cake thing, bearing no resemblance to a seasonal strawberry delight. But I digress.

Porrige is any cooked grain-based semisolid breakfast food. In my family, there were oatmeal, cream of wheat, cream of rice, and wheatina. The first was made with salt and never sugared, the next two white and bland, also made with salt, and the last made of toasted wheat giving it more flavor. All could have butter added, and milk, too. I never knew about sugared oatmeal until I went to summer camp. The first time oatmeal was served, two of us reached for salt, and the other eight at the table went for sugar. There was mutual puzzlement expressed between the two groups. We determined that the choice was hereditary, not regional, ethnic, or religious.

American traditional candybasr chocolate is the Hershey's milk chocolate bar, made with what tastes like sout milk. We love it becouse we were raised on them. Good chocolate is not made by Hershey's, even if it is labelled cadbury. Brits may consider our distaste for bovril as equivalent to their opinion of a Hershey bar.

This has made me hungry. I'm going to the freezer for an ice cream sandwich.

sour milk

&quot;<i>two of us reached for salt, and the other eight at the table went for sugar. There was mutual puzzlement </i>&quot;

In my part of the country we put salt on watermelon to make it taste sweeter - but in lots of places folks use sugar for the same thing. One time in a cafe in England my lunch was served w/ some chunks of melon on the side. I reached for the salt shaker and in unison 3 ladies from 2 different table leaped up to warn me that I had the salt instead of the sugar caster. They just knew they were saving me from a terrible mistake.

(BTW in my family, we salt the oatmeal while cooking it, but put brown sugar on it when we eat it. Never put butter on it. Yep a BIG country)