Cooking Languange

[Jenny A]

[/b]cookie The Northern Ireland equivalent is 'biscuit', which also covers crackers. A 'cookie' is a 'sweet biscuit', occasionally 'cake'.---A sweet biscuit I get when in the UK but a cake I would misunderstand.

cracker 'savoury biscuit'---I'd expect biscuits you might serve with gravy..

quick bread In Northern Ireland, this was 'soda cake' or 'soda bread'--we use soda bread sometimes here too.

biscuit 'scone'---a very specific English sort of biscuit and likely to have raisins or currents in it.

muffin 'muffin'

cake 'cake'

salad All sorts, but the NI names generally come with modifiers: 'green salad', 'cold meat salad', 'fruit salad', etc. --- we modify too: greed salad, chicken salad, egg salad, potato salad, ham salad.

stew 'stew'

pudding Can be sweet (Cabinet pudding, plum duff) or savoury (haggis, black or white pudding, etc).---Some very old fashoned savory dishes are still puddings, but without out modifier we mean dessert here.

The only real confusion I ever had was while visiting friends in American. We went to a medium-posh restaurant and I ordered a steak, green salad and chips. The waiter looked at me as if just ordered a medium-rare barn owl and fuh-fummed for a second or two when one of my dinner companions spoke up and said, 'He means fried potatoes.' That's when I learned that what I call 'chips', Americans call 'French fries' and what Americans call 'chips', I call 'crisps'.

As I recall, the meal was better than I expected.

Boru

italic additions mine.

The chips/french fries thing does lead to confusion. Do the French even make them? The crisps/chips thing is almost as confusing though we've borrowed fish and chips to mean breaded fried fish and fried potatoes. I noticed last trip though that most fast food in London had gone Italian or French deli style and there weren't many pasties or fish and chips to be found in the railway stations.

Actually there was more "ethnic" food in England altogether. We stayed in apartment and cooked in most nights and I was happy to eat my fill of lamb which is hard to get here despite the fact that I can't drive anywhere outside of town without seeing sheep. I gather we export them to France.

Squash versus fruit juice or -ade is another one. Though most lemon squash I had was closer to Koolade than lemonade.

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Oooh Spud. Do you ever call potatoes spuds?