Separated by a Common Language

I'd told myself I was going to take a break from writing about food, but that decision seems to be in conflict with my determination to write about linguisticky things that come up in my day-to-day doings...and it seems like all I do is eat.

Better Half is mad for (AmE=crazy about) gooseberries, a fruit I'd never experienced in the US, though I did know that the kiwi (fruit; BrE) used to be called the Chinese gooseberry. Anyhow, this is the label on the punnet (BrE*) that he bought this week.


I said to him, "Sweetie, you don't have to buy things just because it says on the label that they're perfect for you."

Better Half was not amused. It is a trial to live with me, I must admit.

Gooseberry fool is a traditional British treat, which involves gooseberries (duh), sugar and lots and lots of cream. BH made some when his nan (=grandma) visited Friday, but in an attempt to make it less calorific, replaced some of the cream with yog(h)urt. (Myself, I think that yog(h)urt has its place, but that any excuse to eat cream should not be taken lightly.) Fools can be made with other fruits as well, but gooseberry fool is the king of fools.

Now, I have to give two links for recipes, suitable to each continent's measures and ingredients. For the American version, click here, for a British version, click here. Some recipes include custard in the fool, but that's newfangled tomfoolery.

If it's just about berries, sugar and cream, why do you need different recipes? Well, because cream just isn't the same in the two places. In the US, there are three (basic) types of cream: light cream, heavy cream and whipping cream, which I always thought was a con, because it doesn't seem to be terribly different from heavy cream. In the UK, on the other hand, there are single cream, double cream, whipping cream and clotted cream. Clotted cream has been subjected to heat and is very butter-like, and perfect for spreading on scones with a bit of strawberry jam. As for the first two, one might believe that these are easily translated. Single cream = light cream and double cream = heavy cream. Right?

Wrong!

...as I discovered when I first made my chocolate mousse recipe here. It called for heavy cream, so I bought some double cream. Some double cream is label(l)ed "suitable for spooning"--when you scoop a dollop onto your cake, it'll keep its shape. I made my mousse with non-spooning double cream, but it was still much heavier (48% butterfat) than a heavy cream (36-40%). The mousse was perfectly edible, but it was more like eating a truffle than a mousse. No one could finish their portion, except for BH's sister's better half, The Gardener. The man has the sweetest tooth (full of cavities) and the kind of metabolism that I mention in my prayers. Not only did he finish his own, he finished everyone else's plus the "safety serving" I'd held back in the fridge.

Single cream and light cream have around 18% butterfat. Whipping cream has 30-40%. So, if you have a US recipe that calls for heavy cream, use whipping cream if you're in the UK. North America also has half-and-half, which has 10-12% fat. I've seen it claimed that single cream and half-and-half are the same thing, but really you have to add a little milk to single cream to make it like half-and-half.

Cream is a more serious business in the UK because it is so central a part of pudding (AmE = dessert). Cream is poured over most puddings/desserts, including a cake, true puddings ("sweet dessert, usually containing flour or a cereal product, that has been boiled, steamed, or baked." --American Heritage Dictionary), apple crumble (AmE = apple crisp), or even fresh fruit salad (which, even though I am a great fan of cream, I find a little disgusting). For some desserts/puddings, one is offered warm, pourable custard as an alternative to cream. The only puddings/desserts that I can think of that one doesn't always get cream, custard or ice cream with are those that are already made of cream, custard or ice cream, like fools or trifle--a concoction of sponge cake, (BrE) jelly (AmE=gelatin, usually called by the brand name Jell-o), custard, sherry, cream, and jam. In the US, one might get whipped cream or ice cream with cake, pie or crumble/crisp, but not poured cream.

Another oddity in the gooseberry label: it says "ENGLISH MID SUMMER GOOSEBERRIES", but the county of origin (almost legible in the photo) is Perthshire--in Scotland. I fear for Waitrose (supermarket) if the Scottish nationalists pick up on this slight. (I could say something about the space in mid summer, but hyphenation will have to wait for another post.)

* A note on punnet. Historically, this word refers to a shallow basket for collecting fruit, but these days it's the (often plastic) container that soft fruits are sold in. In AmE, we tend to say a pint of strawberries, referring to the amount, rather than the container, whereas hereabouts one buys a punnet of strawberries. When I refer to the container itself, I'd probably say a pint box. If it were a bushel of strawberries, I'd probably call the container a crate, especially if it were wooden.

Overheard an exchange at the supermarket today. An elderly (English) lady asked an (English) employee, "Where are the scones?" And he replied "There are scones just there." She laughed and said "You say scons, I say scoans. It's just one of those things." I recall debating with friends in Illinois nearly 20 years ago about what the "correct" pronunciation of scone was--that is, which was the more British. But, as our little supermarket drama points out, they're both English. John Wells at University College London has done a survey (NB: link is pdf file), finding that two-thirds of the 2000 Britons surveyed prefer the pronunciation that rhymes with con. He found no differences between the north and the south of England, but Scotland is solid 'scon' territory.

One of my favo(u)rite in-class activities is to have my students work in teams to create lexical field box diagrams (a way of representing the relations between word meanings) for terms for baked goods. This never fails to create vigorous debate, as one needs to decide things like "Is a scone a bread or a cake?" or "Is a bagel a type of roll?" Part of what makes the debates so complicated is the differing extents to which American English has infiltrated the class. (God help any American exchange students in this activity.) Not only is the range of baked goods in the two countries quite different (and taste preferences are quite different too), but even the words for the common items are often different.

Scones are sometimes likened to American biscuits, which one of the great lies of our time. I'm seriously wondering at the fact that there haven't been any wars about it.  Scones and biscuits are only as similar as British muffins are to what Americans call English muffins. Superficially, they look the same, but the tastes and textures are very different. American muffins (e.g. blueberry muffins) have made their way to the UK and become popular, though I have heard older people react to them with puzzlement--"that's not a muffin, that's a cake!"

The most recent Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine includes a letter to the editor that calls for a campaign to resist the word cupcake for what would traditionally be called a fairy cake (pictured) in BrE. To me, the two things are a bit different, with fairy cakes being smaller and typically a specific kind of sponge cake (traditionally with icing), whereas a cupcake is a cup-sized cake of any sort. You can get fairy cakes of other types, but the assumption upon hearing "fairy cake" is that it's a vanilla sponge.

British biscuits would be called crackers in AmE if they're savo(u)ry or cookies if they're sweet, but American cookies have made definite inroads here in the past few years, with cookie shops like Ben's Cookies (my favo(u)rite: peanut) and Millie's Cookies (my favo(u)rite: raspberry and white chocolate) serving American-style cookies. One wouldn't call those biscuits, as they're soft. My dad (what a guy!) sent me Christmas cookies the last time I was in England for the holidays. (One needs familiar baked goods at holidays, I think, and in the UK it's all about mince pies [AmE prefers mincemeat pies].) I showed Better Half how we put a slice of bread in the cookie tin in order to keep the cookies soft. He looked at me in horror and said, "Why would you want to do that?"

Digestive biscuits, or digestives for short, are somewhat like American graham crackers--though they differ in shape (round vs rectangular), and I often find digestives to be a bit greasier than graham crackers. My personal favo(u)rite UK biscuit is the malted milk biscuit (pictured), or if I'm feeling super-naughty the milk chocolate malted milk biscuit--with a layer of chocolate on the bottom.

One could go on and on about baked good differences. Ok, one will.

As an American, I can make a sandwich using sliced bread, a roll, a bagel, whatever. In the UK, sandwiches are made with sliced bread, and anything else is called by the name of the bread it's in--for example, a ham and cheese baguette. A bacon roll is bacon inside a roll that's been sliced in half (usually with ketchup or brown sauce), and is a popular hangover treatment. Just to confuse you, a sausage roll is not a sausage sandwich made with a roll, but a sausage baked in flaky pastry. The closest American equivalent is a pig-in-a-blanket, which, when and where I was a child, referred to a sausage (often a hot dog), wrapped in bread or (American) biscuit dough and cooked. Nowadays, I mostly see it referring to sausages wrapped in pancakes (about which more below).

Baps (BrE; pictured left) are soft rolls for making sandwiches with, and also a crude term for a woman's breasts. (Channel 4 recently ended an advertisement for the film [AmE prefers movie] The Gift with "...and Katie Holmes gets her baps out!" Apparently, the highlight of the film.) Baps (the baked kind, too) are softer than a Kaiser roll (AmE; pictured right), more like a hamburger bun, though American hamburger buns are typically rather brown on the outside, and baps aren't. Better Half tells me that barmy cake is a Northern term for a bap or a bap-like roll, but I've found little printed evidence of it, besides a number of sandwich shop names. [Postscript: see comments for a correction.]

Hamburger bun is odd to English ears because buns are usually thought of as being sweet, such as Chelsea bun (pictured), currant bun and hot cross bun (also found in the US).

The god of British baked goods is the crumpet (pictured), which is kind of cheating, as it isn't actually baked. Crumpets are made on a griddle, though I've never known anyone who makes their own. They are heavenly, and because of their relation to American pancakes (though crumpets have yeast), I like to eat them very un-Britishly with butter and maple syrup, but they're equally euphoria-inducing with raspberry jam. (American pancakes, by the way, are thicker than British pancakes, which are more like crèpes. We eat them with different things and at different times. Be cautious in ordering "American pancakes" in UK restaurants, as they're often not cooked all the way through. A lovely British tradition is treating Shrove Tuesday, i.e. the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, as Pancake Day.) The last time I was in the US, the international section of our megasupermarket had something called crumpets, but they looked nothing like the kind you get here. They looked more like thick, misshapen pancakes. I didn't dare try them, as the disappointment of a bad (and overpriced!) crumpet would be very, very keen. Pikelet is another (regional) word for crumpet, sometimes specifically applied to a flatter type of crumpet. Crumpet, you probably know, is also dated (sometimes crude) slang for an attractive person (usually a woman) or sometimes a term of endearment.

Of course there are many many more cakes and breads and rolls and such that are different in the two countries, but my main aim here (as ever) was to point out differences in the language for them. I'm sure others will fill in some of the items I've missed here...

Comments and discussion are very welcome here, but please keep them on the topic of the post at hand.

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The British are masters and mistresses of understatement, one is told. Yeah, well, maybe.

For your consideration, my current list of most hated, painfully overused words:

• essential
• fanatical
• excellence

I've grumped about excellence once before, and I'm sure that it's come in from US corporate-speak. So let's concentrate on the adjectives, which seem to represent the full extent of many advertising copywriters' adjectival vocabularies.

The bus that goes past my house says that it offers Essential Travel for our City. If I weren't boycotting the word, I could shop at Essential Records or Pet Essential or let (AmE prefers rent) property at Time Essential and listen to The Essential Mix on Radio 1 or read the dozen or so publications that say they are the essential guide to the city and what's going on in it before heading over to the Essential Festival, essentially.

If fanatical is less used, it's only because there seems to be a rule that it must only be used in alliterative phrases. The Odeon cinema (AmE prefers movie theater) chain is Fanatical About Film. Upper Crust sandwich shops are Fanatical about Freshness. And everyone else is Fanatical about Football.

Another relevant example is brilliant (informally, brill), which in recent years was the overstater of choice among young people. Now it's amazing, which I hadn't noticed until a Swedish colleague pointed it out. We were in my office when a student came and asked to borrow a book. Our interaction went something like this:

Me: Here you go.

Student: Amazing! Thanks!

Me: You can give it back to me at seminar.

S: You're amazing! Thanks!

SwedCol: [muffled giggles]

These are not the words of an understating culture--and yet they are so repetitively and unimaginatively used. One can't really find too much fault with the young people, as youth everywhere get infected by the buzzwords of their age. But the advertisers? Aren't they supposed to make us want to buy their product, rather than wanting to track them down in their offices and bludgeon them with thesauruses?

Could it be that overstatement is so foreign to British culture that those who try to do it cannot help but do it badly? Perhaps overstatement should be left to Americans, who do it so effortlessly. Mission Accomplished!

You can buy this

I've just come from Scrabble club, where I often have to suffer the indignity of people putting down completely silly misspellings of words and saying "Maybe the Americans spell it like that." (The Association of British Scrabble Players started playing to the international Scrabble dictionary, called SOWPODS in American Scrabble circles, in 2001. The American National Scrabble Association has taken an isolationist position, and now only North America doesn't play the combined dictionary.) I take great joy in telling the people who guess silly "American" words that the American spelling system is more regular than the British. Unfortunately, no one pays attention to me when I do so. So, I'll subject this audience to my rant, since I can't know for sure if you're ignoring me or not, and can pretend that you're all fascinated by my opinions on spelling-rule complexity.

The American rule is: if the stress is on the syllable that attaches to the suffix, then you double any final consonant that follows a short (lax) vowel. But if the stress is elsewhere, you don't double the final consonant.

So:
comMIT --> committing (not *commiting)
reFER --> referred (not *refered)
BUS --> bussed (not *bused)

but:
EDit --> editing (not *editting)
LAbel --> labeling (preferred over labelling)
aBANdon --> abandoning (not *abandonning)
FOcus --> focused (preferred over focussed)
SEver --> severed (not *severred)


British English follows the same rule, EXCEPT when it comes to words ending in L, which are doubled after short vowels regardless of the stress. So, for no particular reason labelling, travelling and gambolling have one more L in the preferred BrE spelling than in the preferred AmE spelling. Notably the 1990 Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) doesn't even mention the possibility of labeled, labeling and labeler. The American Heritage Dictionary lists the double-L versions after the single-L ones.

For some reason, focus is also an exception. While the COD and Microsoft's UK English spellchecker prefer focuses over focusses, I have been "corrected" for using only one s.

Ones that really strike my American eye as wrong are BrE dialling and fuelling. Since the l is preceded by a 'long' vowel (the diphthongs /aj/ and /ju/) in my pronunciation), they shouldn't have doubled consonants, just as one doesn't double the L in tailing or healing. They seem to come under the 'doubling' rule because dial and fuel are perceived as having two syllables each, with the latter one being unstressed--i.e. di-al and fu-el. The COD presents the BrE pronunciation as /dai(ə)l/ and /'fju:əl/--so definitely two syllables in fuel but not necessarily in dial. I'm not convinced that the second syllable in fuel is regularly pronounced. Better Half pronounces fuel with one syllable and dial with close to two.

I'm not a big one for spelling reform, so I don't mind that the two spelling systems differ. Just don't insinuate that American spelling makes less sense than British!