12. Food and gastronomy - P

At around four or five o’clock it’s teatime. The traditional tea consists of biscuits, cakes or fruit pies and a cup of tea. In the southern part of England cream teas are popular. They eat scones (sweet buns) with strawberry jam and clotted cream (taken from the top of heated milk). Pies have a pastry case on the bottom and on the top, the filling is in the middle. They can be sweet (apple, lemon) or savoury (filled with meat, spicy).

The hot dinner is served around 7 o’clock. There is an increasing number of people who eat fast food or convenience food. TV dinners are more and more popular-you buy them frozen in the supermarket, keep them in freezer or in the fridge and heat them up in the microwave-it’s quickly ready. Many people go to restaurants and pubs. Britain is a multicultural society and there are many restaurants you can choose from. Greeks sell kebab (grilled meat served with bread and salad). Chinese food is usually eaten with chopsticks made from wood, bamboo or plastic. Eating with chopsticks can be quite tricky, so you might need to practise holding them first. The main dish in most Chinese meals is eaten with rice or noodles. The typical dishes are fried noodles or rice with meat or vegetables. Lots of Chinese cooking is stir-fried. All the ingredients are cut up into small pieces about the same size and then cooked quickly in a large pan over a high heat. They use soy sauce to add flavour and colour. Fortune cookies are given to you at the end of your meal-you break it and find a piece of paper inside where you can read your fortune. Mc Donald’s, KFC and Burger King sell hamburgers. Italians sell pizza of all shapes and sizes with a fantastic variety of topping-you phone and they deliver it to you in a special box which keeps it warm. There are hundreds of different shapes of pasta. They are usually served with sauces or stuffed with a filling. Green pasta is made with spinach. Spaghetti Bolognese is probably the most well-known dish. It’s served with a meat-based sauce that was first made in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Don’t overcook the spaghetti. It should be “al dente” (soft on the outside but still firm inside). You can find Italian delicatessens in many large cities around the world. They are usually stocked with a huge range of pasta, cheese, sausages and ham, as well as cans of olives and vegetables preserved in olive oil. Indian restaurants sell curry (ground meat mixed with curry, which is very spicy). The best rice for Indian cooking is Basmati.

Pubs (=public houses) are popular. People under the age of 18 can’t enter the bar section of the pub, only the restaurant or garden section and they can drink only soft drinks. If you want beer, you can choose from lager and bitter. Lager is sweet in taste and light in colour. Bitter is bitter in taste and dark in colour.

A ploughman’s lunch is a cold meal originating in the United Kingdom, commonly served in pubs. Its core components are cheese, chutney and bread. The dish can also include such items as boiled eggs, ham and pickled onions. It’s traditionally accompanied with a drink of beer. As it names suggests, it’s more commonly consumed as a midday snack. Shepherd’s pie is a meat pie with a crust of mashed potatoes. Bangers and mash, also known as sausage and mash, is a traditional British dish made of mashed potatoes and sausages, the latter of which may consist of a variety of flavoured sausage made of pork, beef or a Cumberland sausage. It’s sometimes served with onion gravy, fried onions, baked beans and peas. It’s considered bad in taste by many people.