America’s government has been on short rations for a while now, but surely there must be a few nickels rattling around to teach its diplomats a few basic rules of etiquette. When the Arabs present you with the eye of the sheep, you gobble it down as if it were a sticky bun. When the Armenians boil cow’s feet in your honour, you ask for seconds. And when the British cook you roast lamb, pink in the middle, and potatoes, you don’t close your eyes and think of hamburgers and sweet corn, you smack your lips and start a conversation about mint sauce versus jelly.
What you don’t do a year into your posting, as Matthew Barzun the current Ambassador to the Court of St James has done, is gab about how you’ve had it up to here with lamb. Why not snigger about the length of cricket matches or Black Rod’s tights while you’re at it? Perhaps they already do over at the White House vegetable garden as they stand around nibbling on corn dogs (hot dogs deep fried in corn batter) and buffalo wings.
Having lived in America for most of the past 15 years, my palate has become accustomed to the local cooking. I eat jelly on my toast in the morning rather than jam. I know not to ask for a pork rind expecting the voyage of fatty, gristly discovery that is an English pork scratching. Instead what I get is a puffed up, Wotsit like thing, with only a distant whiff of pig.
But I do miss a roast lunch and I have become sadly used to thinking of lamb as a specialty food. My local butcher in Connecticut keeps a few chops in his freezer, vacuum-packed, top-shelf stuff from Colorado. Delicious but madly expensive. The first time I went to him asking for minced lamb, a special order had to be placed, the meat grinder had to be cleaned out and sanitised and I was told to come back in three days to pick it up. All for a shepherd’s pie.
Fresh, local meat is a big deal for American hunters and the progressive farm-to-table movement. A couple of years ago, I was driving along a dark country road in early winter and hit a deer. A hunter drove up in a pick-up truck behind me, wearing full camouflage, and shot it to put it out of its misery. He then asked if I wanted to take the body home for meat. When I declined, he slung it in the back of his truck. That never happened to me in Oxfordshire.
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But generally serve up a slice of roast lamb in America and most will find it too gamey. Fifty years ago they used to eat more of it, but today the average American eats just a pound of lamb per year. Or rather, most eat none, and a few Greek-Americans and those with a taste for French-style braised lamb, or racks of chops with little white chef’s hats on the bones, eat quite a lot. Almost half of Americans have never eaten lamb, at least according to a study by the American lamb board.
Why they’ve gone off it is anyone’s guess, though Claire Clark, a British chef who spent five years at the French Laundry restaurant in California, suggests, “They think it is too fatty and greasy. They’re just not used to that taste profile. Lots of Americans still won’t eat rare meat, and if lamb comes pink, which it obviously should, then they wonder if it is safe to eat.” Perhaps they just remember Clarice Starling and the lambs that won’t stop screaming.
Whatever the reason, pork, beef and chicken are the preferred meats by far. But these mostly corn-fed meats aren’t eaten for their taste, but rather as bland delivery mechanisms for bottled sauces. So perhaps we should forgive Ambassador Barzun his social prang. As a representative of his country, his taste is spot on. Give the man a Scotch egg.
What Americans do like to eat
Bacon not the soft English rasher, but fried to a crisp so it can be eaten with one’s fingers.
Chips anything from corn chips or nachos, served with dips, to potato chips, something closer to the English crisp. Flavours are different. Mesquite and lime rather than cheese and onion, prawn cocktail or Bovril.
Cookies biscuits, if you’re English; but not jaffa cakes, those have never really crossed the Atlantic. Oreos remain the classic.
Home fries mealy potatoes served with a fried breakfast. Not to be confused with a french fry or a hash brown.
Jelly like jam, though comes in flavours the English might not recognise, such as grape. Bitter, chunky marmalade is yet to take off.
Sausage we are now in deep waters. Sausage with an American breakfast is most likely a slightly sweet hockey puck of sausage meat, a sort of sausage micro-burger. Links are closer to the British chipolata. The closest thing to a British banger is the bratwurst, though this is rarely on a breakfast menu. Mini sausage rolls are pigs in blankets.
Surf and turf a celebratory main course usually containing shellfish — possibly an entire lobster — and a steak.
Tea often followed by a series of questions. Hot or iced? Herbal or caffeinated? Milk or sugar is usually last on this lengthy questionnaire.