No, Purple, we haven’t all gone to the Moon
You’ll almost certainly be in the Land of Nod right now, but here’s a wee catch-up for you to read when you wake up.
BTW glad to know you are of Scottish descent. Which part of Scotland did your family come from?
You ask about bacon butties. “Butty” is just another word for a sandwich or sarnie, which according to the Oxford Dictionary originates from the North of England. You can spread the slices of bread (or a roll) with butter or margarine or any of the non-saturated fat or cholesterol-lowering spreads available now. Here in the UK we have a product called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, which also has a low-fat version. It genuinely does taste like butter. I like my butty toasted but it’s also brilliant on freshly-baked bread. Finally, be generous with the vinny.
We also have the chip butty, a sandwich containing some big, fat chips with salt and vinegar or ketchup, which are so ruinously calorific they should be no more than a once or twice a year experience, unless you are one of those lucky people who are thin as a reed but could eat for England, or Australia. It’s quite usual if you have had a meal of traditional fish and chips to save a few nice fat chips until the end, to make a chip butty.
Which prompts me to ask what certain foods are called Down Under, which may be different from what we know them as here. For example, chips.
For us, chips are deep-fried potatoes cut into fairly large but regularly shaped chunks, often associated with fried fish, which you buy at the “chippy”. In the US, chips (or potato chips) are what we call crisps, defined as “a thin slice of potato that has been deep fried or baked until crunchy”. What we call chips, Americans call fries. The name has spread here via MacDonalds and other fast food chains but their fries are much thinner than our chips.
I’d love to know more about some of the dishes eaten in Australia. Do they draw on traditional dishes, from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the many other countries from which people original arrived? I assume also that you have ready access to produce that we hardly ever see and if we do they “cost an arm and a leg”. I once translated a series of 24 cookbooks called Cookery Around the World, but it didn’t include Australia or New Zealand and more’s the pity.
Talking about arms and legs brings me to the lovely Adam Hills, of whom Nicky is also a fan. He often appears here on a comic current affairs panel game called Mock the Week and has been known to remove his prosthetic leg and stand it on the desk at some point in the procedings, usually because a fellow panellist has asked him to.
Like all great stand-ups he is a brilliant storyteller. He tells a true story about having to fly from London the very next day after 9/11. Airport security was naturally very tight and predictably the leg set off all the alarms. But when the security officer realised what was causing the problem he was really, really apologetic – “sorry, mate, I had no idea, Go on through” – without bothering to look closer at the limb, which, as Adam pointed out,could easily have been stuffed with explosives.
2:44 pm
18 Aug 14