For example, Marmite Crumpets don’t exist. You cannot buy them at the supermarket. To be clear: you can buy crumpets, you can buy marmite, you can buy butter; but you have to assemble them at home.
If you walk into a breakfast cafe, they will happily serve you sausage / egg / bacon / french toast / bubble / squeak (whatever that is). But no marmite crumpets. If you ask them to make it, they will give you a very strange look. It’s not typically offered. It’s something you just have to make at home.
It is unbuyable. Any tourist who comes to the UK to try a Marmite crumpet would need to bring a toaster or an oven with them, or quickly befriend a brit and hope that they have all the ingredients at home.
It’s not a secret. You just can’t have it.
*munches into crumpet thoughtfully, and salivates at the juicy savory delight, whilst staring at you pityingly and condescendingly*
Anyway, what’s something that I could never experience unless I made it myself in your local?
Jam that doesn’t get moldy. Store-bought jam is usually made from freeze-dried powder (supply-chain effects) while mold doesn’t like the acids in real jam. Learned that the hard way after i moved out from parents farm.
Marmite Crumpets don’t exist
Yet you brought them into existence. May god have mercy on your soul.
I didn’t invent them. I was born into them, molded by them.
Coffee. I used to be a coffee fiend, I drank up to 12-13 cups a day, and only stopped because it was worsening my anxiety. I live in a coffee producing country and learnt how to make a good cup in an espresso machine, even got all the doodads to make the process standardized and get the exact same cup every time.
I can only drink coffee made by select hands now. Everything else tastes like jet fuel, and it’s worse when travelling.
The Cannibal Sandwich, which doesn’t actually use human flesh, but is also not a sandwich. Anyway, you take a slice of rye cocktail bread, spread on some raw, ground beef, then top it with some sliced onion, salt, and pepper. You can’t get it ready-made, because nobody likes e. coli or salmonella poisoning. In fact, you have to make special arrangements to get the beef ground by a butcher in a clean grinder, and pretty much eat it the same day.
Though you can get aperitives and stuff with raw ground beef in European countries. More strict food safety laws and whatnot.
Ha! We can get marmite and vegemite here in the states. And they’re both fucking delicious when used right.
But, you can’t get applebutter anything in the wild around here. Might be possible elsewhere, but I haven’t run across it.
Not sure what is and isn’t a thing elsewhere, but applebutter isa strongly spiced apple product used as a spread. It’s sweet rather than savory. It typically features cloves, cinnamon and allspice as the main spices, in varying proportions. It is also fucking amazing.
But you won’t find it in restaurants at all.
There is a great southern tradition of applebutter biscuits. Biscuits here, again in case it isn’t known, are a fluffy, light, scone-like quickbread. And it’s similar to your scenario. Places could offer that as a menu option and bring it to you. They could possibly make a deal for individual packets of it like exist for jelly, and bring that with biscuits. But nobody does.
It’s one of those things that if you came over here, you can’t find it in restaurants. Even worse, while you can buy commercially made applebutter (there’s a few brands out there) they are all inferior to even mid tier homemade applebutter. So you can’t even buy the experience the way people can at home. You can’t just go out and buy Whitehouse applebutter and get the right texture and taste on your biscuits (or toast, or crumpets).
The commercially made options are all too thin for one thing. They don’t spread like applebutter is supposed to. It’s supposed to have a thick consistency, closer to something like a jam or preserve. The commercial stuff is also over-homogeneous and too finely textured. Homemade is going to have small chunks of softened apple as opposed to a blended texture.
The spice mix in store bought also tends to be both blander and too , I dunno, even? Homemade, you get layers of the spices. Store bought, you get one layer, there’s no depth to it. Part of that is it being made in huge batches, and part is the longer time from jar to your mouth; so I can’t say it’s anything the makers have cheaped out on or anything. But it is not as good as what you make yourself (or someone’s grammy makes).
Also, marmite and applebutter on toast is absurd in how good it is. The savory and salty bang of marmite with a spoonful of sweet, spicy applebutter on top will make you want to slap yo mama. I find marmite and vegemite don’t do well on biscuits compared to toast, english muffins, or the like. Too much bread for it to really pop unless you do an entire spoonful, at which point it’s too much.
Apple butter is an underrated condiment. I used to eat it on pancakes instead of syrup as a kid, and I put it in oatmeal and such as an adult. I don’t have it often nowadays, but there’s a place that produces it and other fruit butters nearby, and there’s occasionally some other brands in stores and roadside shops.
For those that haven’t had it, I guess imagine baked apples or an apple dumpling but reduced down so it is super concentrated into something spreadable.
I’ve had apple butter single serve tubs at diners. It’s not as good as homemade but I can and have had apple butter biscuits at a diner.
Marmite crumpets shouldn’t exist!
What other cosmic horrors are you creating in your kitchen‽
The British were so focused on whether they could, they didn’t stop to think about whether they should.
Speculoos and jelly sandwiches. It’s possible they serve that in Europe somewhere, but you could never find that served in the US.
I’d like to be proven wrong though.
But jello food is more a US thing?
Jelly is what we call fruit spread made without the skins of the fruit. It’s like jam but made into a clear gel with the fruit juice only.
Ah. We call it Konfitüre all the same.
Marmite on Weetbix.
Ingredients:
- 1 Weetbix
- butter (lots)
- Marmite (lots)
Method:
Select a choice looking compressed wheat brick, apply a thick layer of butter, spread the Marmite across the layer of butter.This was a common school snack when I was growing up.
_
Here’s something that you can’t buy outside of Italy: mozzarella. I tasted proper mozzarella in Tuscany and it’s nothing like the shit labeled mozzarella sold in supermarkets around the world, and for a good reason: real mozzarella has a shelf life shorter than Trump’s attention span.
We have a deli here that makes fresh moz daily, you can find places that do it all over. Shelf-life really only keeps it out of supermarkets. The problem for many forms of cheese in many countries, and especially the US, is the requirements around pasturization. Completely changes the texture and taste. And for moz specifically, the lack of Buffalo.
