June 2005                                                               The Megaphone                                                                   Page 6

The American Way With Cake

    by Julie (Stout) Crim

Some time ago, during my years living in England, we made good friends with Tony and Ginny Burton. They were English, living in the town of Windsor. Yes, where the castle is.

We got into the habit of having dinner at each other's home once a week. We each tried to fix foods that were either unfamiliar with the other or a food that might be cooked a differently. 

The list was so long neither one of us ever ran out of ideas. The English are known worldwide as the worst cooks in the world although they are slowly improving.

It was easy to think up new ideas each and every week. The English idea of food is very different than the American way of cooking and serving.

One time I brought a new Sears and Roebuck catalogue with me to one of our dinners at their home. As Ginny leafed through it, she commented on how much bigger most things are in America. She was right, we have bigger houses, bigger appliances and bigger cars. We don't shop as often so need bigger storage places along with bigger refrigerators and freezers and pantries. The size of our country is bigger and everything about our lives reflects that.

A good example in a typical English kitchen is the refrigerator. It can be found under the kitchen cabinet top, built in like our dishwashers and about that size.

On this particular evening I had decided on angle food cake for dessert, served with fruit cocktail spooned over it and a bit of Reddi-Whip on top with a cherry. Pretty, I thought.

I'd made the cake shortly before they arrived and it was sitting on a dinner plate in the kitchen. Their youngest, the baby, was sleeping so Ginny went straight to the bedroom to lay him down as Tony came into the kitchen to talk. After a minute or two his eyes lighted on the cake and he froze, mid-sentence. In a stage whisper he said, "Ginny, come here."

"What's wrong," I asked? He didn't seem to hear.

"Ginny, come here, hurry!" he said again, as she came running. With eyes as big as saucers he said in a voice dripping  with pure English astonishment, "Did you ever see such a big doughnut?"

Later in the evening, he was delighted with putting whipped cream on everyone's dessert after watching me fix one serving.

The things we so easily take for granted can be unusual and sometimes surprising to others. That goes both ways. Just try eating haggish sometime, and then politely smile as you're being told what it is.

JJ/Julie (Stout) Crim '57
Yuma, AZ

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