Union Jacks, Spider Coffee and Puppy Ice Cream

I’ve been nattering on about my recent efforts to feed British culinary delights – something Americans might call an oxymoron – to our children, especially in light of our newest kitchen acquisition, “The National Trust’s Complete Traditional Cookbook.” Suddenly, the kitchen is a hive of activity with bubble and squeak, toad-in-the-hole, and Welsh cakes making an appearance. If my Sunday roasts have always been accompanied by Yorkshire puddings, they are now getting a shot in the arm with some traditional sides and puds, many with recipes dating back anywhere from the nineteenth through fifteenth centuries. I’m not likely to bake a giant pie from which birds or frogs will burst forth – something ancestral Brits apparently found absolutely hysterical – but I do appreciate the sense of familiar that permeates the book’s recipes from the stodgy dumplings of school days to hearty wine-soaked stews, or hydropathic summer puddings, sweet syllabubs, flummeries, and fools.

For a good part of our trip home to the UK, I was on a mission having had my heart set on a Jan Constantine flag teapot and cake comport for the better part of a year. Moreover, another British designer, Emma Bridgewater, has an equally covetous line of china, and both Jan and Emma have been fueling the UK’s current love of anything embellished with a Union Jack. It might be hard for Americans to imagine a country where the countrymen typically shy away from any products emblazoned with the national flag. Until quite recently in the UK, such articles would prompt wrinkled noses, and were left solely for tourists or people of dubiously nationalist tendencies. Conversely, America is nation of flag lovers. At the apex is the July 4th holiday, where flag adornment spills over from decorating the occasional house and spawns chains of bunting and entire families clad head to foot in glittery flag regalia. In the US, stars and stripes and the national anthem are flown and sung at every opportunity from ball games to morning school assemblies. And I, for one, will always associate my nerve-wracking trips to Immigration and Naturalization appointments with the presence of heavy weight, heavily-tassled American flags standing imposingly in every office.

Landing in the UK on this trip was something like a step back in time. First, I haven’t seen so many flags aflutter since the Queen’s Jubilee or Chas and Di’s wedding. So with another royal wedding in the offing and the 2012 London Olympics heating up, the UK appeared to have caught national fever. Streets were strung with Union flag bunting, and every shop window in town was kitted out with royal flags, street party scenes, commemorative china and even a bath-time saucy royal wedding display in Agent Provocateur. So my simple hunt for platter and teapot was now horrifically complicated since retailers were simultaneously pumping out Union Jack dishware at every turn and price point. And after working out the gob-smacking shipping rates necessary to dispatch my selections, I settled for a Union Jack cake stand neurotically-wrapped, Michelin-man style, and stashed in my luggage.

Nothing is as quintessentially English as afternoon tea and luckily my parents treat it as a high point in any day. Thanks to gorgeous spring weather, we took tea outside in a bucolic scene straight out of a Famous Five book, and while the teapot warmed, cake was sliced, cups and saucers were distributed, and my daughter asked for stories of my childhood. Typically these tales involve my brother’s spectacular spills falling out of tree houses or ending up in hospital. Lacking such scrapes, I was left with more pedestrian events, such as the spider coffee incident. In the 1980s, when Britain practically ran on granulated instant coffee, I presented two cups to my parents in the cups and saucers left overnight on counter. As she drained her cup, my mother screamed and there, scorched to the bottom by the scalding water, was a huge English house spider. Long before people were buying expensive coffee beans cycled through the digestive systems of Indonesian monkeys, my mother had consumed spider coffee.

The gravity of this tale trumped all others, and I was asked to repeat it ad infinitum on the flight home. But its supremacy was short-lived. Back in the US, we heard a new tale involving my two-year old son and Frosty Paws ice-cream. Undeterred by the Purina pet food packaging, my in-laws had picked it up as a tasty after-dinner treat for their son and grandson while I was away. My son gobbled them up. And it wasn’t until my husband read the tagline, “Frosty treats for cool dogs,” that anyone actually twigged.