Otázka: Food
Jazyk: Angličtina
Přidal(a): Petra Huková
Food in the Czech republic
- General information (less healthy,…)
- Breakfast
- Lunch
- Dinner
- Snacks
- Specialities (sauerkraut, dumplings, sirloin of beef, schnitzel, strudel, …)
- Alcohol
- Christmas dinner
Food in the United Kingdom
- General information (joke, traditional dishes)
- Breakfast
- Elevenses
- Lunch (The story about Sandwich, fish and chips)
- Teatime
- Dinner (convenience food, restaurants, pubs)
- Specialities (ploughman’s lunch, shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash)
Food in the USA
- Division (Indians, Immigrants)
- Breakfast (cereals, oatmeal, granola, brunch, hash browns, pancakes)
- Lunch (brown bagging, sandwiches, chips, drinks)
- Dinner (fast food, restaurants, convenience food,
- Junk food (elephant ears, bagels with cream cheese, soft drinks, pancakes, chocolate chips cookies, mom’s apple pie, PBJ, chips and salsa, all-you-can-eat lunch specials)
- Specialities (chili, chop suey, jambalaya, New England clam chowder, Shoofly Pie)
For many people in our country food, eating, sometimes also cooking is a downright pleasure. On the other hand, many people are figure-conscious and try to fast, cut down on fat and sugar or go on a slimming diet. In the whole, our food – the Czech cuisine – is said to be less healthy. The Czechs are used to eating many floury, sweet and fatty dishes, such as dumplings, pastry, fat pork and sausages. Our diet should consist of more vegetables, fruit, lean meat, poultry and fish which would supply our bodies with more vitamins and minerals.
The first meal of the day is breakfast. Some people recommend a substantial breakfast, others prefer a light, healthy one which is easily digestible. A typical breakfast menu includes a slice of bread, roll or croissants, butter, ham, salami, cheese, marmalade and healthy diet will include yoghurt, cereals with milk or fresh fruit. Popular drinks are coffee, tea, cocoa or fruit juice.
At around 10 a.m. it is time for a snack. It is good to have something small, easily digestible such as fruit, vegetables or yoghurt.
The main meal of the day – lunch – comes around noon. Most people have lunch in school canteens, company cafeterias or in restaurants, others bring lunchboxes from home. The Czech midday meal usually consists of three courses: soup, the main course and a dessert. An aperitif and starter are served only on special occasions. As for soup we can choose from clear soup (beef or chicken and vegetable broth with noodles and liver-balls) and thick soup (potato, tribe, fish, cream of mushroom, celery, cauliflower or tomato). The main course usually consists of cooked meat with side dishes, such as potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, mashed potatoes, rice, pasta, dumplings or vegetables trimmings. Meat can be prepared in many different ways-roasted, grilled, smoked, barbecued or stewed. You can choose from beef, pork, lamb, veal, mutton, poultry and fish and sea food (mussels, lobsters, prawns, oysters). Depending on how much you want to have it cooked, you can have your meat well-done, medium or rare. The dessert menu includes a piece of cake, a fruit pie, ice cream, pudding, fruit (fresh or stewed) – plain or with whipped cream. Beer or any of the soft drinks are served with it.
The Czech evening meal is not so nutritious if people have a hot meal for lunch. It may be salami, ham, cheese, eggs, bread or rolls and some vegetables. Some people prefer a hot meal, too. They may have pancakes, potato pancakes, pizza, stews or goulash with bread, casseroles, risotto or pasta with meat sauce. Some people may have a similar dish as at midday except for soup, although some thick soups with bread may be a separate evening meal.
The Czech cuisine has many specialities to tempt the visitors. Our national dish is roast pork, sauerkraut or stewed cabbage and dumplings. Another popular dish is roast sirloin of beef in cream sauce again with dumplings. Czechs often eat meat loaf and many kinds of smoked-meat products. Wiener schnitzel, which is a pork steak coated in flour, eggs and breadcrumbs and fried, is a popular dish as well. Fruit dumplings with cottage cheese are served as the main course or a dessert. Sweets and cakes are popular too. Most of them we can buy in shops or we bake them at home – doughnuts, stuffed cakes, apple pies, apple strudel, marble cakes, Christmas cakes or Easter cakes. We can boast excellent Carlsbad waffles or Pardubice gingerbread. Sponge cakes are also popular.
Some of the beer brands are world famous, but both white and red wine, Carlsbad Becher Liqueur and Moravian slivovitz can be recommended.
The traditional Christmas dinner consists of fish soup, fried carp and potato salad. As a dessert homemade Christmas sweets, cookies and apple strudel are served, There us a superstition about New Year’s Day dinner. You should not have any poultry on that day, otherwise you will have bad luck in the next year, Lentils, on the contrary, should bring you a lot of money.
According to a joke, the British should be cooks in hell. Some people say that the British cuisine is nothing but overcooked vegetables. The best meal of the day is breakfast. Every part of the kingdom has its own traditional dishes. In England they have roast beef with gravy (thickened juice from meat) and Yorkshire pudding made of flour, eggs, and milk and baked in the oven. Scotland has haggis, which is made of sheep’s internal organs. Northern Ireland is not that bad, they have smoked salmon there. Wales is a bit worse, it’s lamb with mint sauce.
The British are known for their full breakfast which includes fried bacon and eggs, sausages, fried tomatoes, dry (not fried) toast and marmalade (made of citrus fruit, especially oranges, bitter in taste because an orange peel is added), a bowl of cereal with milk, porridge or cornflakes with milk and sugar. They drink a glass of juice, a cup of coffee or tea-strong, milk is added.
In the middle of the morning they have elevenses (morning snack), which is usually not more than a cup of coffee and biscuits.
The midday meal is generally called lunch and is usually fairly light. Now few people have lunch in canteens. They like eating sandwiches either prepared at home or bought in a bakery, sandwich shop, café or pub. The fillings vary. The popular ones include ham, beef, cheese, eggs and fish. At least one internationally famous fast food dish was invented in Britain. There is a legend that explains how the sandwich was invented. There is a town in Kent called Sandwich. The Earl of Sandwich was a great gambler and one night, when he was playing cards, he enjoyed the game so much that he decided not to stop for dinner. He asked his servant to bring him a piece of meat between two slices of bread and the idea caught on. Another well-known British speciality that you can have for lunch is fish and chips. The traditional image is fresh fish from the sea, steaming hot chips, served with salt and vinegar and wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. Now the fish is frozen and the containers plastic.
At around four or five o’clock it’s teatime. The traditional tea consists of biscuits, cakes or fruit pies and a cup of tea. In the southern part of England cream teas are popular. They eat scones (sweet buns) with strawberry jam and clotted cream (taken from the top of heated milk). Pies have a pastry case on the bottom and on the top, the filling is in the middle. They can be sweet (apple, lemon) or savoury (filled with meat, spicy).
The hot dinner is served around 7 o’clock. There is an increasing number of people who eat fast food or convenience food. TV dinners are more and more popular-you buy them frozen in the supermarket, keep them in freezer or in the fridge and heat them up in the microwave-it’s quickly ready. Many people go to restaurants and pubs. Britain is a multicultural society and there are many restaurants you can choose from. Greeks sell kebab (grilled meat served with bread and salad). Chinese food is usually eaten with chopsticks made from wood, bamboo or plastic. Eating with chopsticks can be quite tricky, so you might need to practise holding them first. The main dish in most Chinese meals is eaten with rice or noodles. The typical dishes are fried noodles or rice with meat or vegetables. Lots of Chinese cooking is stir-fried. All the ingredients are cut up into small pieces about the same size and then cooked quickly in a large pan over a high heat. They use soy sauce to add flavour and colour. Fortune cookies are given to you at the end of your meal-you break it and find a piece of paper inside where you can read your fortune. Mc Donald’s, KFC and Burger King sell hamburgers. Italians sell pizza of all shapes and sizes with a fantastic variety of topping-you phone and they deliver it to you in a special box which keeps it warm. There are hundreds of different shapes of pasta. They are usually served with sauces or stuffed with a filling. Green pasta is made with spinach. Spaghetti Bolognese is probably the most well-known dish. It’s served with a meat-based sauce that was first made in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Don’t overcook the spaghetti. It should be “al dente” (soft on the outside but still firm inside). You can find Italian delicatessens in many large cities around the world. They are usually stocked with a huge range of pasta, cheese, sausages and ham, as well as cans of olives and vegetables preserved in olive oil. Indian restaurants sell curry (ground meat mixed with curry, which is very spicy). The best rice for Indian cooking is Basmati.
Pubs (=public houses) are popular. People under the age of 18 can’t enter the bar section of the pub, only the restaurant or garden section and they can drink only soft drinks. If you want beer, you can choose from lager and bitter. Lager is sweet in taste and light in colour. Bitter is bitter in taste and dark in colour.
A ploughman’s lunch is a cold meal originating in the United Kingdom, commonly served in pubs. Its core components are cheese, chutney and bread. The dish can also include such items as boiled eggs, ham and pickled onions. It’s traditionally accompanied with a drink of beer. As it names suggests, it’s more commonly consumed as a midday snack. Shepherd’s pie is a meat pie with a crust of mashed potatoes. Bangers and mash, also known as sausage and mash, is a traditional British dish made of mashed potatoes and sausages, the latter of which may consist of a variety of flavoured sausage made of pork, beef or a Cumberland sausage. It’s sometimes served with onion gravy, fried onions, baked beans and peas. It’s considered bad in taste by many people.
There are two ways to explain the words “American food”. The first one is the food of native Americans (Indians. The second one is the food of many ethnic groups, who came as immigrants (America is a multicultural society). They all brought their own food, it’s true that it changed a bit from the original version thanks to the lack of ingredients. Americans adopted many kinds of ethnic meals but they use American ingredients.
Cereals for adults are unsweetened, for children over sweetened (sickly), they are eaten with milk in a bowl. Oatmeal is boiled in milk, it’s eaten hot with a bit of honey or fruit on it. Granola is dried oatmeal mixed with chunks of chocolate, raisins and nuts. At weekends they eat later and usually outside. American brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch. They have three kinds of meat (fried bacon, sausages and lean ham) and three kinds of eggs (boiled, fried and scrambled with a bit of milk). Hash browns are grated potatoes which are fried until they are brown, they are crispy and with salt and pepper. Toast is made of 2 kinds of bread-wheat bread (white) and rye bread (dark). American pancakes are quite small, thick, stacked on the plate (they don’t roll them), eaten with butter and maple syrup. They have a glass of juice, a cup of tea or coffee. At the restaurant they pay just for the first cup and each refill is free.
Brown bagging is called the lunch brought from home. They put it into brown paper bags or they carry lunch boxes. It usually includes a sandwich and chips. PBJ sandwich is the most typical one. It’s a peanut butter and jelly or jam. Jelly is fruit cream, jam contains chunks of real fruit. Tuna fish sandwich is made of canned tuna fish mixed with mayonnaise and small pieces of pickles. Bologna sandwich contains smoked sausage inside. Chips were developed in the USA, The first were salted, later new flavours were added (barbecue flavour, salt and vinegar, sour-cream and onion, mustard, ketchup, cheese, etc.) Soda drinks are soft drinks (carbonated, non-alcoholic) and they include carbon dioxide and a lot of sugar and caffeine that’s why children become hyperactive after drinking them.
Fast food-hamburgers, it’s a ground meat in the bun with spices and vegetables. Mexican restaurants serve tortillas and chilli, Tortillas are Mexican pancakes, they dip them into salsa, chilli consists of ground meat, red kidney beans and salsa (sauce made of chilli peppers, tomatoes and spices). They give chilli on the tortilla and wrap it up. Margharita is a kind of tequila cocktail. Japanese restaurants specialize in sushi, which is a raw fish rolled into a circle and filled with rice or vegetables. It must be eaten fresh. Chinese restaurants offer meat, vegetables, pasta, rice, fried noodles with very spicy sauces. Asian restaurants are visited by many people, especially Thai restaurants are said to be delicious. They use chopsticks instead of the cutlery. The fortune cookie is brought together with the bill (it’s in the shape of an envelope), you break the middle and there is a piece of paper where you can read about your fortune. Convenience food is very popular, they it at home. It’s a ready-made food-they buy it in the supermarket, keep it in the fridge or freezer, put it in the microwave and heat it up. They call it a TV dinner because you can use the commercial breaks on TV to prepare this meal. (Sandwich=2 pieces of toast with filling, hamburger=2 pieces of bun, ground meat and spicy)
Junk food has no nutrition value, it’s not healthy and it’s very high in sugar and in fat (lot of calories), despite this many people really love it. Americans are often overweight because of their lifestyles. They love junk food, don’t walk as much as Europeans because they like to drive their nearly everywhere. They kinda remind me of my mother but that’s a different story. Also, Americans tend to eat large portions of food at each meal. In addition in restaurants they serve more than a person can eat and between meals Americans like to have snacks. Now some examples of junk food: We have elephant ears in the Czech Republic as well, however, we usually don’t eat them with cinnamon and sugar on top but with garlic, cheese and ketchup. Bagels with cream cheese are like a round flat bread roll with the middle cut out. They come in many flavours. From soft drinks Coca-Cola is only the begging, there are many more brands, such as Pepsi, Sprite, 7-up or Mountain Dew. Pancakes are served with maple syrup and stacked on the plate rather than rolled up individually. The most popular way to eat them is with melted butter and maple syrup, which is made from the sap from maple tree, mixed with water, sugar and corn syrup. Chocolate chip cookies are like every other ordinary cookie, only little bits (chips) of semi-sweetened chocolate are added. It’s said that once you taste one, you’d trade your little brother for another. Next is mom’s apply pie, pie is a standard dessert at Thanksgiving or Christmas celebrations. PBJ sandwich is prepared by laying out two slices of bread, then we spread a generous amount of peanut butter on one slice and of jelly on the other one. After that we should pick up one of the slices and lower it onto the other one, so the peanut butter and jelly meet. Chips and salsa consist of corn tortilla chips, which are usually cheese flavoured and crispy, salsa is a spicy hot sauce. Then there are all-you-can-eat lunches specials, people say that the best ones are at Sunday brunches.
Finally, some American specialists: Chili is a goulash-like combination of ground beef, red kidney beans and a special mixture of herbs and spices including cumin and chili-pepper. Chop suey means mixed fragments in Chinese. This is a preparation of meat or seafood combined with mushrooms, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and onions all served over rice. Jambalaya is a traditional New Orleans Creole dish made from rice, tomatoes, onions, peppers and poultry or fish. New England clam chowder is a thick soup made of clams, onions, potatoes and celery cooked in heavy cream. Shoofly Pie is a rich dessert from the Pennsylvania Dutch area of the US. Tradition has it that this pie was given its unusual name because its strong sweet smell attracted flies away from other food.
