cookie culture shock

[baratron]

irc log from #commonroom, posted with permission of the participants. Typos mostly uncorrected :)

baratron: what on earth is "snickerdoodles"?
baratron: someone posted on ukvegans asking for recipes for Christmas cookies. i pondered that one all day - wondering if they meant speculaas or one of the german spiced cookies that i don't know the names of

Comments

[treacle_well]

That is amusing.

Also:

richard says "do you think it's the sort of thing a mother would send to her floundering son on his first christmas away from home along with the clean laundry?"

Why yes, yes it is. It's useful for someone who doesn't ordinarily have baking ingredients on hand. It's useful for when someone doesn't want to bother or take the time to measure out dry ingredients individually (in some cases that's very handy--I make myself waffle mix so I can just scoop the dry stuff out, stir in some liquid, and there I have it--waffle batter in a jiffy).

How is it as good a gift as actual cookies would be? Well, upon using it, the person gets to have fresh, warm from the oven cookies (which is only sometimes the case with a gift of actual cookies). Also they get to have cookies later, after they are no longer buried under all the pre-made cookies that everyone else gave them.

[hobbitbabe]

Yeah, I think Canadian lemonade is sorta halfway between lemon squash and bitter lemon in the UK.

I don't actually like the vegetable very much, so I don't know if there is a different word for it in Britain. Hmm. Were there any in the Wallace and Gromit movie? Zucchini aka courgette aka zucchini squash is one kind. Also, I don't know if marrow aka vegetable marrow counts as a squash.

[jinian]

As best I can tell, genus Cucurbita is originally American, and that's all the edible squashes. Other food crops in the same family, like watermelons, are from Africa, and certainly squashes can be grown about anywhere. I'm pretty sure there are pumpkins (the same species as many other edible squashes, just very highly bred) in Britain now; surely there aren't still turnips being used as jack-o-lanterns.

[rivka]

You don't have Christmas cookies in the UK? At all? There are no traditional biscuits that people make at Christmastime? Every family doesn't have their own set of biscuit recipes that they make every year at Christmas, and that define the flavor of Christmas for that family?

...Whoa. This is me experiencing culture shock.

[syllopsium]

Nope. Mince pies. Christmas cake. Christmas pudding. Sprouts. Nuts. Turkey. stuffing. cranberry sauce. gravy. quite often sausages. In recent times, stollen is becoming quite popular too.

[baratron]

People in the UK don't generally make biscuits at all. We buy them. Our biscuits are like dwarf bread in the Discworld books: hard and last forever in a tin - months, at least. The only time people make biscuits is if they're trying to make soft American-style chocolate chip cookies, or if they're a freak of nature like me. Even then, it's now possible to buy a large number of dairy-free and/or gluten-free biscuits.

The website Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down and, particularly, the corresponding book have reviews of just about every biscuit on sale in the UK, plus a few old favourites that got discontinued years ago but we still remember fondly.

[rhialto]

biscuits - from the french "bis cuits" (and in dutch it is pronounced much more like the french but the spelling is sometimes dutchified to "biskwie") is something like "cooked (baked) twice". No wonder it is hard and dry.

I was reading http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculaas and at the bottom it gives an interesting origin for the dutch expression "iemand versieren" (lit. to decorate someone, meaning to chat someone up), which involves decorating a speculaas doll and giving it to the fancied girl.

[hobbitbabe]

Do you have Peek Frean brand of biscuits in the UK? If yes, then I think maybe sugar cookies are like the Peek Frean "Nice Biscuits".

[baratron]

Nice is just a standard type of biscuit here, not owned by any particular manufacturer. Every supermarket own brand does digestives, chocolate digestives, rich tea, Nice, custard creams and bourbon creams, at the very least. Many of them also do malted milks ("moo cow biscuits"), Viennese fingers, fake Kit Kats and fake American-style chocolate chip cookies (let down by the fact they're solid rather than squidgy). British biscuits have to be made hard enough to withstand being dunked in tea or coffee, you see.

You can now buy "real" American-style chocolate chip cookies from the shopping centre (mall) chains Cookie Jar or Millie's Cookies, or the instore bakeries of large supermarkets, but they last two days at most and cannot be dunked into any hot beverage. In fact, they usually crumble in your hand as you try to eat them.

[redbird]

I think you might know hot chocolate mix as drinking chocolate.

As it happens, the only hot chocolate mix I have is British--Green and Black's now does a Maya Gold drinking chocolate. Quite nice.

When I'm not using that, I mix cocoa powder, sugar, vanilla extract, and usually orange extract, cinnamon, and a pinch of salt, and add that to heated milk. Basic method from the Droste package, elaborated with flavorings over the years.

[hobbitbabe]

Many hot chocolate mixes here in Canada include powdered milk or something similar, so you add them to hot water rather than hot milk. When our kids were little, they used to strongly prefer "real cocoa" to what they called "boyulled hot chocolate", but fortunately didn't mind if the milk got heated in the microwave.

[redbird]

Some here contain powdered milk; Maya Gold doesn't, and is in fact specifically vegan (the bar form of that particular chocolate is one of the desserts I can offer to vegan friends, using my standards, which are that it has to be something I would eat myself).

[baratron]

That's just it - a British person wouldn't make a homemade hot chocolate mix, because you'd just buy the one that Cadbury's make in their factory. "Instant" hot chocolate, that contains powdered milk as well as the cocoa powder, sugar, salt & vanilla mixture, exist - but comparatively few people drink that by choice. Generally speaking, only people who hate milk or are on low-calorie diets drink the instant ones, because they are watery by comparison with hot chocolate made with real milk.

I buy Green & Black's standard hot chocolate powder, myself - we buy Fairtrade and Organic wherever possible, and I don't like the Cocodirect hot chocolate at all (it has no vanilla, which is wrong wrong wrong).