Read the text and compare with Meals in Ukraine Meals in Great Britain

The two features of life in England that possibly give visitors their worst impressions are the English weather and English cooking.

A traditional English breakfast is a very big meal — sausages, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, and mushrooms. People who do have a full breakfast say that it is quite good. The writer S. Maugham once gave the following advice: "If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts daily." But nowadays it is often a rather hurried and informal meal. Many people just have cereal with milk and sugar, or toast with marmalade, jam, or honey. Marmalade and jam are not the same. Marmalade is made from oranges and jam is made from other fruit. The traditional breakfast drink is tea, which people have with cold milk. Some people have coffee, often instant coffee. Many visitors to Britain find this coffee disgusting!

For many people lunch is a quick meal. In cities there are a lot of sandwich bars, where office workers can choose the kind of bread they want - brown, white, or a roll - and then all sorts of salad and meat or fish to go in the sandwich. Pubs often serve good, cheap food both hot and cold. Schoolchildren can have a hot meal at school, but many just take a snack from home – a sandwich, a drink, some fruit and perhaps some crisps. English kids eat more sweets than any other nationality.

"Tea" means two things. It is a drink and a meal! Some people have afternoon tea, with sandwiches, cakes, and, of course, a cup of tea. Cream teas are popular. You have scones with cream and jam.

The evening meal is the main meal of the day for many people. They usually have it between 6.00 and 8.00. On Sundays many families have a traditional lunch. They have roast meat, either beef, lamb, chicken, or pork, with potatoes, vegetables and gravy. Gravy is a sauce made from meat juice.

The British like food from other countries, too, especially Italian, French, Chinese, and Indian. The British have in fact always imported food from abroad. From the time of the Roman invasion foreign trade was a major influence on British cooking. Another important influence on British cooking was of course the weather. The good old British rain gives us rich soil and green grass, and means that we are able to produce some of the finest varieties of meat, fruit and vegetables, which don't need fancy sauces or complicated recipes to disguise their taste. People often get take-away meals—you buy the food at the restaurant and then bring it home to eat. Eating in Britain is quite international.

 

Read the text and compare with Meals in Ukraine A Variety of American Food The French are famous for their sauces, the Italians praised for their pasta, the Germans celebrated for their sau­sages, but is there anything unique to eat in the United States? When you get right down to it, there's noth­ing quite as un-American as Ameri­can food. Because the United States is made up mostly of immigrants, there is an amazing variety of foods. The United States is a vast country influenced by many cultures and climates, and the traditional food of one area is of­ten totally unlike that of another. New Mexico and Massachusetts are good examples of states that have very different traditional foods.

To understand and appreciate the food in any one region, it often helps to know the area's history. For exam­ple, New Mexico was once the home of the Pueblo Indians who lived in villages and grew native crops such as corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash. Later, Spanish settlers arrived in this area. Those two groups exchanged ideas and customs and passed these customs on to their descendants. This intermingling of cultures is evident in the food of New Mexico. New Mexican meals make much use of corn, which is served in a variety of ways — baked as tortil­las, served fresh as corn on the cob, blended into soups and sauces, and mixed into salads or with other vege­tables, especially red and green pep­pers. Native blue corn is quite sur­prising when it is served as blue corn bread, chips, or tortillas. In the mar­kets of New Mexico, you can still find chicos, or sun-dried grains of roast-sweet corn. Chicos last a long time, but when soaked and boiled, they taste almost like fresh corn. Many recipes also contain pinon or pine nuts, the small sweet seeds of the southwestern pine tree, once a sta­ple food in the Pueblo diet.

A Spanish influence can be found in the sweet, anise-flavored cookies sold in New Mexican bakeries. They are prepared much like they were made in the kitchens of seven­teenth-century Spain for the Christ­mas feast. Some traditional foods of New Mexico that show both a native American and Spanish heritage include enchiladas (corn tortillas stuffed with cheese, onions, toma­toes, and chilies, and sometimes chicken or beef), pinto beans, black beans, and hot and spicy salsa, an uncooked vegetable sauce.

Take a trip to Massachusetts, however, and not a chili pepper nor a tortilla will you find in a traditional meal. Influenced by the cold cli­mate and the English-speaking peo­ple who settled there, the New Eng­land kitchen gives off the aromas of soups and stews and of meat that is roasted for hours in the oven. Pota­toes, carrots, and turnips were pop­ular because these root vegetables grew well in the region and could be stored all winter long in the days before supermarkets and refrigera­tors. English-style puddings and pies are traditional desserts rather than the fresh fruit one often gets in the Southwest.

Whereas beef and chicken ap­pear in many New Mexican recipes, in Massachusetts fish is very popu­lar because of the nearby seacoast. New England is famous for its clam chowder, lobster, cod, scallops, and fish cakes. English herbs and spic­es are the seasonings used in New England dishes, which might taste rather bland to people accustomed to hot and spicy New Mexican food.

Each region of the United States is unique. Louisiana has a French influence. Many Germans populate the Midwest. In traveling around America, a tourist has the opportu­nity not only to visit a variety of plac­es and see diverse landscapes, but to taste a variety of foods as well. Some may be very different. Others will taste just like home.

Read the text and do task 1 In Search of English Food How come it is so difficult to find English food in England. In Greece you eat Greek food, in France French food, in Italy Italian food, but in England, in any High Street an the land, it is easier to find Indian and Chinese restaurants than English ones. In London you can eat Thai, Portuguese, Turkish, Lebanese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Swiss, Swedish, Spanish, and Italian—but where are the English restaurants?

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It is not only in restaurants that foreign dishes are replacing traditional British food. In every supermarket, sales of pasta, pizza and poppadoms are booming. Why has this happened? What wrong with the cooks of Britain that they prefer cooking pasta to potatoes? Why do the British choose to eat lasagne instead of shepherd's pie?/Why do {hey now like cooking in wine and olive oil? But perhaps it is a good thing. After all, this is the end of the 20th century and we can get ingredients from all over the world in just a few hours. Anyway, wasn't English food always disgusting and tasteless? Wasn't it always boiled to death and swimming in fat?

The answer to these questions is a resounding 'No', but to understand this, we have to go back to before World War II.

The British have in fact always imported food from abroad. From the time of the Roman invasion foreign trade was a major influence on British cooking. English kitchens, like the English language absorbed ingredients from all over the world—chickens, rabbits, apples, and tea. All of these and more were successfully incorporate into British dishes. Another important influence on British cooking was of course the weather. The good old British rain gives us rich sol and green grass, and means that we are able to produce some of the finest varieties of meat, fruit and vegetables, which don't need fancy sauces or complicated recipes to disguise, their taste.

However, World War II changed everything. Wartime women had to forget 600 years of British cooking, learn to do without foreign imports, and ration their use of home-grown food. Ministry of Food published cheap, boring recipes. The joke of the war was a dish called Woolton Pie (named after the Minister for Food!). This consisted of a mixture of boiled vegetables covered in white sauce with mashed potato on the top. Britain never managed to recover from the wartime attitude to food. We were left with a loss of confidence in our cooking skills and after years of Ministry recipes we began to believe that British food was boring, and we searched the world for sophisticated, new dishes which gave hope of a better future. The British people became tourists at their own dining tables and in the restaurants of their land! This is a tragedy! Surely food is as much a part of our culture as our landscape, our language, and our literature. Nowadays, cooking British food is like speaking a dead language. It is almost as bizarre as having a conversation in Anglo-Saxon English!

However, there is still one small ray of hope. British pubs are often the best places to eat well and cheaply in Britain, and they also increasingly try to serve tasty British food. Can we recommend to you our two favourite places to eat in Britain? The Shepherd's Inn in Melmerby, Cumbria, and the Dolphin Inn in Kingston, Devon. Their steak and mushroom pie, Lancashire hotpot, and bread and butter pudding are three of the gastronomic wonders of the world!