What to Eat in London, Episode 2

Mushy Peas
I can see adding mint to English peas but why mash them into a mush?  Is it so that you can smoosh them onto the back of your fork and eat them more easily?  Mother always told us about the time in 1956 when they went to England and she saw this man eating peas off his knife.  I can see mixing up peas with your mashed potatoes so they don't run all over your plate, like we do with corn at Thanksgiving, but not mashing them.  Wikipedia, however, tells me that mushy peas are made with Marrowfat peas which are mature peas that are left to dry in the field, and not with frozen green peas.  So it's kind of like refried beans I suppose.  Here's a recipe if we want to try it ourselves, otherwise we can order them with our fish and chips or meat pies.

Meat Pies
Goddards at Greenwich has a bit more on the history of Pies and Mash.  Originally in the 1700s the pies were filled with eels but when eels became too expensive, they filled them with meat.  If we take a trip down to Greenwich (preferably by boat), maybe we can stop at Goddards for lunch, as pies and mash are very reasonably priced.  And we can have a fruit pie or crumble for dessert.  Unless we want a sticky toffee pudding...

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Puddings
We always had persimmon pudding for Thanksgiving and Christmas at home in California -- do you think it was the influence of our British ancestors?  But we didn't have "sticky toffee pudding" which appears on an awful lot of menus in London.  There's a website called Great British Puddings,  and although their English isn't the best, they do have a great variety of sweet and savory pudding recipes, and even some videos. 

Often "puddings" is another term for "desserts".  You can make your own sticky toffee pudding with this recipe from the BBC -- containing dates in a sponge cake with a caramel sauce, which you can make yourself or buy it canned from Carnation.  And then there is always Spotted Dick.  Years ago I picked up a little book called The National Trust Book of Traditional Puddings at a book sale and the author says that King George I was a lover of puddings and known as "Pudding George", probably being the Georgie Porgie of pudding and pie.  Some of the dishes in the book have charming names like 'Pears in Nightshirts', 'Moonshine', 'Poor Knights of Windsor'.  And then there are flummeries and fools, cobs and clangers, crumbles and humbles, snows and syllabubs.  Is it Leena that likes her desserts?

Moving on to more substantial food, The Telegraph has an article on the 15 most British foods ever and one of them is:

The Full English Breakfast or the Full Monty
We don't need to go to a fancy restaurant for this, the neighborhood Chelsea Bun should do just fine.  Serious Eats has a guide to let you know what is in it or you can check out this recipe from the BBC containing sausage, bacon, black pudding, mushrooms, tomato, eggs and bread (fried).  They forgot the Heinz baked beans.  I think it would be easier to eat out with this one than to prepare it in the apartment and I don't think we could eat it every day, although TimeOut London has a list of the best full English breakfasts in the city if we want to try.