International Food Differences

All I know is I loved going into the little grocery stores in London (by our hotel) and Scotland in Edinburgh on Grassmarket.. they are more like convenient stores that I came across but they had what I wanted! I will be keeping tuned to this is near and dear.. I will be innterested as I did not go into grocers when in Germany. I was just excited when I found my HP sauce here in my Harris Teeters Grocery store. (Yes I even found Marmite, which I refuse to ever eat again! LOL)

 

Lol yep it was getting rather long. I'll be back soon with a better post (on phone & terrible at phone typing) but I will say if you've seen British bake off, u would have a better appreciation of the international difference s than most

 

We don't have cookies in Australia. We have biscuits.

And we use what we'd call a digestive or a sweet plain biscuit - an Arrowroot is my biscuit of choice for those kind of crusts.

Australians generally buy milk from the fridge in the supermarket and store it in the fridge at home. Ditto butter. Eggs are stored in the fridge at the supermarket but I know people who put them in the fridge and people who don't. I use the fridge.

I can't believe you can't get castor sugar, @bestcee! That blows my mind. In my pantry on any given day I have: white sugar, castor sugar, brown sugar, dark brown sugar and demerara sugar. And yep, they are all used!

 

Yep everything she said (although I know biscuits in the US are like our scones ( not sc-own, rhymes with shown but scone rhymes with shone).
I love overseas grocery stores/ we generally call them supermarkets & I took a photo of the milk section in one in Hong Kong because it was interesting to me to see Aussie branded, English labelled milk among all the Chinese labelled milks in the fridge section.
Powdered sugar we don't have but I've used caster sugar as a substitute. Cream is so weird but the US half & half [I think that's what it's called] we have nothing like that (we bought so.e when we were in the US years ago thinking it was just milk & had it on cereal & I just couldn't do it; it was like eating our thickened cream on corn flakes

 

Oh, @bellbird, the very thought of eating cornflakes with cream makes me gag.

We store milk & eggs in the fridge. On friday night, I leave a little butter in a dish to serve with homemade bread over the weekend. But I don’t always keep that dish filled.

I know this is a unique Canadian thing: our milk comes in plastic bags. Every house has a jug that you put the bag in and then you cut off the tip of the plastic bag. It actually results in fresher milk and less food waste. I’d be interested to know if other countries have this, or if it’s just us.

 

As for sugar, I normally have granulated sugar, raw sugar, light brown sugar and dark brown sugar in my pantry (in the United States).

 

I love these threads and learning about our differences! But I'm kinda confused by this and want to HEAR your voice read me this sentence above because the way I pronounce scone, shown and shone... all rhyme! But having listen to British audiobooks, I think I know that shone is pronounced differently and never knew scone was supposed to rhyme with that way! Huh! cool!

I remember when we stayed in St. Kitts for 3 weeks with my SIL that their grocery store was a LOT different than I was used to since everything had to be shipped there. They only had boxed milk and I couldn't quite wrap my head around that! I mean it totally makes sense, but just kinda blew my mind that they could do that and it wouldn't spoil on the shelf!

 

Jenn McCabe and I discussed something similar after coming back from the UK. we are used to 1/2 n 1/2 in our coffee and the coffee we were drinking over in the UK was yuck.. I ended up going to SB and getting black coffee which I was ok and I made due with what I was drinking in the room or at different places.

I eat cereal dry so call me weird

 

oh now this is interesting! Ours are glass jugs, plastic jugs, laminated cardboard containers. I guess you can say the US has lots of waste.

re Eggs, we keep ours in the frigerator and as far as butter goes, I too leave it in the refrigerator. I keep Ketchup, Mustard and my HP sauce all in the frig. Peanut Butter that I don't usually keep anymore was always a cupbord item and the jam/jelly is refrigerated after opening. I keep Worcestershire sauce in the refrigerator too after opening.

 

Karen, check Walmart .. they have milk in the box.. should be in the baking isle with the powdered, condensed & evaporated Milk. My Aunt always kept a box of milk on hand when my cousins were little in case of electrical outages as they lived in Florida. That was the first time I ever saw boxed milk on a shelf!

 

I've heard that British granulated sugar has larger granules of sugar than the US', so I think in terms of use, the US granulated is similar to the castor sugar. But I could be wrong. The US also has powdered sugar.

@cfile I've heard that people have found HP sauce at Wal-Mart!

I feel like we should take a pic of our baking supplies! DH keeps like 3 or 4 flours and sugars on hand. I'm always afraid I'm using the wrong one for a recipe since my mom only used white flour!

 

@Juliestcyr how funny,when I was growing up I Denmark , can 1970ish where I lived ( Sealand ) for a short while they introduced milk in bags,and our jug looked exactly like yours. It didn't catch on though and soon got replaced by cartons (boxes you call them,that is funny too to me saying box instead of cartoon.
I'm Malta we use Digestive biscuits for cheesecake mix. We have powdered sugar in Denmark,but not in Malta ,and some white flours are selfraising meaning they contain baking powder or bicarbonate, but in Denmark they do not have this..

 

I loved seeing the markets/grocery stores when I was in England - I could spend hours in there discovering stuff!

 

Yes indeed Christa, I thought of our convo immediately - had the hardest time finding cream (half n half for my coffee). I settled for the flat white coffee over there. Or black like Christa mentioned.
In Montreal this past summer - we found a few places that had cream listed as an option for coffee but there were always "out".
I would never put half and half over cereal, yes, gag.

 

I have looked in ours and haven't found it. Here in Va I can only find it at Harris Teeter's .. I can find Marmite (which I will never buy) in both harris Teeter and Whole Foods.

 

mmm. arrowroot - in the US we give them (not sure if they are exactly like yours in the UK) to babies as a first "cookie" (although they do indeed state they are a biscuit - if my memory serves me correctly - right on the package) because they get soft and mushy easily. and babies can learn to eat and chew with gums or a few teeth. I used to take a couple for myself bc they were yummy and not sweet!

 

Bummer! Maybe only Wal-Marts in areas with a large British ex-pat population carry it? (Or maybe it's just random?) But at least you've found it near you!

 

Hmm - I say shown and shone exactly the same and can't figure out any other way to say shone. Like shun?

We have lots of powered sugar in the house because the daughter makes frosting for cupcakes a lot. Ditto white sugar and brown sugar.

Half 'n half - love it! I am not picky about the milk in my coffee as long as it is 1) real dairy and 2) not powered. I can't drink some of the Starbucks latte k-cups as the powered milk taste is overpowering. My husband has been known to thin half 'n half with a bit of water and use that on his cereal.

FYI - We also have heavy whipping cream (i.e. just the cream part) available in cartons. Good for whipping, making ice cream, and cooking/baking with.

The daughter learned about digestive biscuits when she went to Iceland. Our local Asian market (officially a Global Market but really mostly Asian stuff - seriously they have an entire aisle of just noodles) sells them. For those that have not had them, they are like graham crackers but without the graham taste, shaped into a cookie shape.

When we visited Belgium we went to the grocery store to buy our chocolate to take home. A whole aisle of just chocolate in all its various goodness.

What about water? It is more common here now, but many years ago I remember being confused by being asked if I wanted "still" water, as opposed to the carbonated stuff. I learned to go with tap water because 1) it was free and 2) it did not have that soda water taste.

Butter in the fridge because we don't eat it that often. Growing up, one stick always sat on the table. Milk in the fridge so it is really cold. Eggs in the fridge.

Scones are yummy! USA biscuits taste too much like baking soda for me. Give me a scone any day.

And don't forget the chips and crisps discussion. USA: chips are those thin, crunchy potato slices that the UK calls "crisps". French fries (UK chips) are the potatoes that you eat with your burger or fried fish. With variations of waffle fries (cut into waffle shapes), home fries (fried thick chunks), or steak fries (long thick French fries).

 

Jenn and Christa @cfile - what should I get?!? We'll be there this time next week and will be staying in an apartment, so we want to stock the kitchen a little with snacks and breakfast stuff. So excited!