In fact, the Brit who once had Thanksgiving with my family declared it, "the best invention the British ever made".
Of course, this boy loved to eat and didn't stop before he had consumed five very full plates and three pieces of pie. All this while remaining rail thin- I don't get it. His favorite dish was greenbean casserole and he fell in love with root beer, which he had never tasted before and assumed when we offered it that it was actual beer.
Yorkshire pudding.....so, so, so un-American and that's for sure.....a Yorkshire pud is a "must have" accessory to roast beef (or pot on the hob boiled beef if you prefer)...along with very hot horseradish sauce and English mustard, it must be English as opposed to French or Dijon mustard..it complements the beef much better than any of the others.
A Yorkshire pudding can either be cooked as an entire single unit, cooked in a very, very hot over and when it has risen it should remain crisp and not collapse as soon as it is taken out of the oven. Yorkshires can also be cooked in smaller individual units, in non stick containers which retain a circular shape for each pud, and once cooked can be placed on each individual plate - or just slap the ot in a separete dish for people to help themselves. The sooner they are dished up after bweing taken out of the over the better.
In the film "84 Charing Cross Road" which starred the Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins, playing the part of a real life London bookseller in the between the 1940s and 1960s by the name of Frank Doel, and whose bookstore was, in actual fact, located at No 84 Charing Cross Road*, in Central London.
The other major character was the real life American New York City based writer by the name of Helene Hanff, played by the late Anne Bancroft. Over the years, Helene Hanff conducted an on-going letter correspondence with Frank Doel, during which she ordered a range of specially selected books, many of antique value, and an amazing bond of friendship built up between these two people living in two of the world's largest cities but separated by a vast ocean.
When Helene received her very first invoice from Frank she was totally confused by the way the sum due was expressed in the British currency at the time - pounds, shillings and pence, a three tier system which was not replaced by the current decimal form until 1971.
Helene had a very good friend and neighbour living in the same apartment block as she did in NYC, and he happened to be an Englishman living and working over there - remember this was in about 1948 or so. In her brash New York style she asked this Limey to "translate" the money as she "sure can't figure out what hell two pounds seventeen shillings and three pence" means! "I can figure out Sanskrit and Classical Greek but I sure as hell can't work out this English money of yours" she said to this English guy.
He had a rather "posh" Southern English English accent, and he had to explain to her what exactly a Yorkshire pudding was as she had no idea, she had never before heard of such a thing. He told her that it was basically "a large empty waffle!"
When she heard him pronounce the word "raspberry" in his typical English way she responded New York style: "Kent you just magine it! - an entire nation saying: "RAAAHZ-br'ee!"
On the first Christmas which came round following the start of this renmarkable trans-Atlantic correspondence of both a business and personal nature and the sending of books and invoices in old style £.s.d from London to New York City, and the reciprocal remittance of $.c cheques (sorry!! - checks) from New York City to London, Helene did a whole lot of shopping in her local stores and packed up a huge parcel containing all kinds of wonderful foodstuffs - hams, tinned fruits, and a whole range of goodies which were quite unobtainable in a severely bomb damaged, immediate post war London of 1948 where full scale strict rationing of practically every kind of foodstuffs and consumer goods meant that many of those goodies in that American parcel were non existent over on this side of the ocean at the time.
Helene sent the parcel to Frank at his store to be shared out between his own family (Dame Judi Dench played the part of his wife) and also between all his staff at 84 Charing Cross Road. All the recipients of this parcel thought that they had landed in heaven, as they hadn't seen such "luxuries" since before the war. This amazingly generous lady with a wicked sense of humour did exactlky the same thing every Christmas, even after rartioneing had ended in Britain, and all such goods became readily available again to everyone over here.
Charing Cross Road runs northwards up from near Trafalgar Square all the way up to the point where it becomes Tottenham Court Road at the junction with Oxford Street. Frank Doel's dusty old bookshop at No 84 Charing Cross Road, with it maze of narrow passageways lined with gazillions of dusty old books and manusctipts of all kinds, typical of that period, has long, long gone.
Old Frank would not recognise the location today - at No 84 Ch X Rd - on the very same site today stands a modern, glossy building housing a computer/high-tech store on several storeys. I walked past the site several times when I was working in London a wee while back and when I saw the huge numbers 84 on the glossy walls of this new buiding in busy, traffic choked Charing* Cross Road, I thought about Helene and Frank and this extraordinary true life story.
*Charing in Charing Cross Road - it's pronounced "CHARR-ing". At the bottom end of Charing Cross Road is Charing Cross train station, a terminus for commuter lines to much of the South East London suburbs and much of South East England.
There is a town in Kent called Charing - that version is pronounced as "CHAIR- ing". Well, that's England for you.....plenty of things are not really as they appear at first glance.... ;-)
Helene and Frank never actually met in person in spite of the deep bond of friendship that had built up between them over the years, and although Helene herself, who was unmarried, finally achieved her very long held ambition to come to England, and to London in particular, poor old Frank had died suddenly before she could do so, just before Christmas 1965.
***just slap the ot in a separete dish*** = slap the lot on a separate dish
I really must take the time to proofread more thoroughly....no spelling or grammar checkers in Antimoon...