Day trip to Cambridge

"Cambridge, 60 miles north of London, is world-famous for its prestigious university.  Wordsworth, Isaac Newton, Tennyson, Darwin, and Prince Charles are a few of its illustrious alumni.  The university dominates - and owns - most of Cambridge, a historic town of 100,000 people that's more pleasant than its rival Oxford.  Its the epitome of a university town, with busy bikers, stately residence halls, plenty of bookshops, and proud locals who can point out where DNA was originally modeled, the first atom was split, and electrons were initially discovered."

You'll have to excuse me for the above quote from Rick Steves, but he said it so well.  Now the Rick Steves London edition I own is 2008, so things may have changed a bit, so we'll have to verify things like timetables, and whether there are still plenty of bookshops.

Cambridge is an easy day trip.  We'll want to schedule a walking tour with the Cambridge Visitor Centre.  Ricky says that's an essential part of any visit and directs us to the Visit Cambridge website.  Surprise!  There isn't just one tour, but NINE!  Oh, but wait!  When I start selecting dates they don’t all appear.  I’m choosing Sunday, Sept. 16 because I would really, really like to hear evensong at 15:30 in Kings Chapel.

So, on that Sunday the first tour listed is Kings College and the Backs ( 2 hours/ 20 pounds) at 11 am

See the best that Cambridge has to offer in the company of an official Blue Badge Guide. This two-hour walking tour takes in some of the most famous city centre sights, with a specific focus on the magnificent 15th century King’s College and Chapel as well as the picturesque Cambridge Backs.

There is also a Cambridge Highlights Tour at 13:00 (90 minutes/12 pounds) which might even be better although I’d like an earlier hour.

This is the perfect tour for first-time visitors to Cambridge or those who are only here for a short time. See all the central, iconic sights in just 90 minutes: the Old Cavendish Laboratory where important scientific discoveries were made, the Corpus Clock, the Senate House and many of the beautiful central colleges* including Corpus Christi, King’s, Gonville & Caius and Trinity.

Official University and City Tour including King's College and Queens' College  (2 hours/ 23 pounds)

From the intimate courtyards of Queens’ College to the majestic beauty of King’s College Chapel, this 2-hour tour covers two very different royal Cambridge foundations.  Your route will meander through city streets and beautiful, riverside colleges, immersing you in the true Cambridge experience.

Any of these would be good although we should reserve before we go, and there appears to be lots of other things to do.
Here’s a list of 16 of the best things to  do in Cambridge, England from handluggageonly.co.uk
How about punting on the River Cam?  We can make a reservation for that, too, through the Visit Cambridge site.

But how do we get there?  Simple, take the train from King’s Cross.  Tripsavvy.comTripsavvy is happy to give us some options.  Looks like an off peak ticket is 17.20 pounds and it takes about an hour to get there.  And how do we get to Kings Cross?  My handy dandy London transit map says bus 414 and the Piccadilly line, and that takes about 45 minutes. 

 So, are you up for Cambridge?

Mary Berry

Who can resist a person with a name like Mary Berry?  We were introduced to her on the Great British Baking Show and have become quite fond of her.  She reminds me very much of Julie Andrews and is a refreshing contrast to Paul Hollywood.

Mary Berry and her hunk of lamb on the right

On YouTube, you can find 1970s cooking programs from Thames TV with a much younger Mary Berry who doesn't sound at all like the current one as she hurriedly chatters away showing the program host how to make Irish Stew.  (She shows how to take the fillett off the scrag end of the lamb's neck and shoulder "for them what doesn't like bones".)  Now after 40 plus years of practice, she has slowed her speech to a confident and comfortable drawl -- although I suppose drawl isn't quite the correct term to use with the English -- and she talks to the audience with a twinkle in her eye and not to her hunk of lamb.  The 1970s programs emphasize how to keep food costs low.  They mention that making your own steak and kidney pie is half the price of buying one.  Today the Great British Baking Show is profligate in its use of expensive ingredients.  We live in a very different time.

In any case, here are a few of the retro recipes, all I believe from Mary's Good Afternoon cookbook emphasizing the use of cheaper cuts of meat and cooking from scratch to save money, although she didn't come from a poor family.

1. Slade Pie.  This is a large rectangular Cornish pasty named after a woman she knew who made it.  The crust is half lard and half margarine.
2. How to Make Homemade Marmalade.  Mary uses Seville oranges and one pound jam jars with snap-on plastic lids.
3. Cooking with Lamb.  The lamb is from New Zealand and she stuffs a boned shoulder with bread crumbs, apricots, onion and parsley.  She'd serve it with layered potatoes and onions that she cooks in the oven along with the roast "to save a bit of fuel."  And she does a lamb breast with curry, saving the "free" drippings to fry the onions.

As a comparison, here are some of Mary's recent TV programs.

1. Fish pie with soufflé topping - Mary Berry's Absolute Christmas Favourites: Episode 1 - BBC Two.  Mary uses smoked and fresh haddock along with leeks and dill in a cream sauce with plenty of pepper.  She tops it with hardboiled eggs and a "soufflé of bread cubes and parmesan cheese.  This could be one of our seven fishes!
   
2. Mary Berry's Foolproof Cooking Episode 5.  Mary cooks home made tomato soup and bacon/tomato/broccoli pasta with pesto.  She still believes in "waste not, want not" and chops up the broccoli stem.  Then she makes a salmon, fennel and pea risotto and finally a passion fruit "pud".  I'd like to try the last one if only I could find passion fruit.
   

I might have to go back to the 1970s videos to get some real old-fashioned British recipes.  These days even the English have more sophisticated tastes.

You can learn more about Mary's ancestry (her great great grandfather was a baker) in Who Do You Think You Are: Mary Berry.

Yes, but will we be able to understand them?

I was watching some of the Roberts's posts that Cathy recommended and realized how focused I was on understanding what he was saying.  Admittedly the video quality is distracting, but I was really having to pay attention to understand what he was trying to communicate.  It was even worse than last week when John and Diane from New Zealand visited...admittedly the visuals were better.
So I though I would explore the varieties of English, especially since, after London, we are headed into the heartland where locals are supposed to have kept more of the dialects.
A Google search shows I'm not the only one exploring it.  In fact, it seems like an entire academic discipline, with lots of linguistic description I don't understand one bit.

Due to my limitations, I'll begin with a British Library site

The new British Library is a great place....near Euston Station, but it certainly won't be open when we rush to catch our train to Manchester, so we'll have to schedule another time to visit.
But for the time being, let's look at this one section of their website "Sounds Familiar."
From here you can listen to 71 sound recordings and over 600 short audio clips chosen from two collections of the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. You’ll hear Londoners discussing marriage and working life, Welsh teenagers talking with pride about being bilingual and the Aristocracy chatting about country houses. You can explore the links between present-day Geordie and our Anglo-Saxon and Viking past or discover why Northern Irish accents are a rich blend of seventeenth century English and Scots. You can study changes in pronunciation among the middle classes or find out how British Asians express their linguistic identity.

In Regional Voices you can explore the differences that exist in spoken English as you move across the country, while Changing Voices gives you the chance to hear how English has changed in different parts of the country over the last fifty years. The Case Studies section provides an in-depth look at three specific varieties of contemporary English: Received Pronunciation, Geordie Dialect, and English as spoken in the UK’s minority ethnic communities. A selection of suggested activities and research tasks will help you investigate speech in your own community. Your Voices offers you the exciting opportunity to contribute your recordings and language investigations to the site, as part of the BL Sound Archive's ongoing survey of speech patterns across the UK.

OK....was that a bit much?  How about an article from Babble Magazine, "The Royal Family of British Accents:  the Amazing Variety of  Accents Across the British Isles."  "What does a “British accent” sound like? It depends who you’re asking and where you are in the British Isles. Here’s an overview of 7 regional varieties of British English.  If you ask people what they think British English sounds like, most would probably mention the Queen, or Harry Potter at the very least. However, across the British Isles there is a massive variety of accents and dialects; so, in actual fact, most Brits do not speak like the Queen."  Well, what do you know!
And if you want to zero in on Yorkshire accent, there is a amusing, youthful video and article on that.  And a You Tube on London Accents.  And one can really fall down the rabbit hole watching all the other videos running in a list down the right side of the page.

Now for a bit of fun:

Quiz: Do You Know The Proper Names For These British Food Items?   Britain may not be exactly famous for its food, but it is for its food names. 

 And before I loose you completely, you must practice up on the Pronunciation of Popular Place Names in London.  Just in case you get lost, your phone dies, and you have to ask for directions. 

 Hidden London has a more extensive list in case you want to practice some more.

Roberts London

Roberts is a Londoner who shoots his own selfies in video format: usually the camera is focused (or out-of-focused) on him.  But he gives us an opportunity to listen to Cockney English and to learn a little bit about London.

Portobello Road Market
Saturday morning are the busiest times to go to this market that stretches a couple miles along Portobello Road.  Robert advises going early to beat the tourists.  He also makes side stops at The Tabernacle, St. Luke Mews (featured in Love Actually and visited by all the tourists), and the Electric Cinema.


As you can see from the photos, Portobello has all kinds of stuff: bread, vintage cameras, clothing, fruits and vegetables but it does get a bit busy on the weekends.

Full English Breakfast + London Borough Market = Best Traditional Recipe
Saturday is also the busiest time at the Borough Market on the south side of the Thames (it is closed on Sunday). Roberts takes us there during the Christmas season to buy ingredients for a full English breakfast.  Previously he took us to the greasy spoon Regency Café as the best place for a full English breakfast but this time he is cooking it himself.  His coverage of the Borough Market convinces me that we should make that our destination on Saturday.

Lovely Mushrooms

The Full English

On another Saturday, Roberts goes to the Broadway Market in London Fields where he visits F. Cooke's Pie and Mash Shop, which he calls the original surf and turf meal (eels and beef).  If you don't want to eat them yourself, you can always watch Roberts eat them.  Or you can watch F. Cooke make them in The Life of Pie.

Roberts does visit Chelsea but the Chelsea Market isn't very interesting, except for the flowers -- he goes there for a duck sandwich.  In his stroll down King's Road he mentions what was there in the 1960s when Chelsea was a happening place.  He ends up at the Stockpot for another Full English Breakfast (wiff coffee), although the place specialized in Anglo-Italian dishes, past tense since it has closed.  He also mentions the classic Peter Jones department store which appears to go by the name of John Lewis now...  It looks like nothing is the same as it was in the 60s.  Unfortunately he doesn't make a trip down Fulham (Fullum) which is where we'll be staying.

Roberts has several videos on Chinatown, one is the Chinese Mid-Autumn Moon Festival on September 15, 2016, but this year it looks like it is on the 24th so we'll miss it.  Some of Roberts' videos are long but others are short and he often visits a specific pub or café, like the Café in the Crypt of St. Martin in the Fields, "tranquility beneath Trafalgar Square" with "beautiful 18th century architecture brick-vaulted ceilings, historic tombstones beneath your feet and delicious home-cooked food."  

Simpson's Friday Specials

Fortunately for us, the restaurants that he visits are cheap: no high-falutin' dishes for him; he even visits Five Guys, Chipotle and McDonalds.  He does, however, visit London's oldest chophouse: Simpson's Tavern, which he calls a "hidden gem" but which I have already visited with Rick Steves and one of the Two Fat Ladies so how hidden can it be?  First he passes Mary le Bow Church and mentions its bells and also that you have to be born within earshot of the bells to be considered Cockney.  At Simpson's he orders the Friday special of Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding with sides of roast potatoes and cauliflower cheese (I wonder do they use Velveeta).  Most of the customers are guys and Roberts says "the guys come in here, they're let out of the office, you give them a sniff of alcohol and they turn into little boys."  It's raucous in the "grill room" with shared tables and Roberts likes the atmosphere but there are quieter rooms in the restaurant upstairs and there's a wine bar downstairs but who wants wine when you can have ale?

There are many more videos from Roberts in case you are looking for some specific location or want to watch the Royal Wedding.

The Great British Baking Show: Pies

We've been watching the Great British Baking Show since PBS aired the first season.  Of course we are way behind the British seasons.  The latest episode was pies and for the British a lot of pies are savory so that's why they started off with a "Wellington".  I've only heard of "Beef Wellington" but the bakers did several takes on it, with lamb, pork, fish and vegetarian fillings.  This was followed by a little feature on the historic eel pie among the working class in London which, of course, I appreciated tremendously.  Shall we have a Beef Wellington when we are there?

This week's "technical challenge" was a hand-raised pie which was also a savory pie and historically interesting, using wooden dollies to shape the pie pastry, which was then filled with chicken, apricots and bacon.  The results were uniformly disastrous since no one had ever used a dolly before.  In case you are ever chosen by Paul Hollywood to make one, here is a nice recipe that uses a dolly to make a pork pie.  There's also Paul's recipe for the chicken, bacon and apricot pie on the BBC.

Finally, the "show-stopper" was to make an "American" pie. Paul Hollywood doesn't care for American pies because he says they are all way too sweet for his tastes.  Hmmm, I don't suppose he's had a Treacle tart, a Gypsy Tart, a Sticky Toffee Pudding, a Banaoffee Pie or a Bakewell Tart recently...

In characteristic British fashion, the "American" pies they chose were not American as Apple pie, or blueberry or huckleberry pie, or strawberry/rhubarb pie or even Concord Grape pie.  They were those cloyingly sweet pecan pie with chocolate, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie with peanut butter, and banana pie.  I don't know how they missed the Boston Creme Pie!  The two Paul and Mary liked most were a key lime pie, followed by a blueberry/raspberry chiffon pie.  And they all had sweet crusts, which is not as common in the U.S. as it is in Britain.  Camila, when you do the Pie book for Cook's Illustrated, send a copy to Paul Hollywood and make sure it has a recipe for Concord Grape pie!!

Is there a British Japanology?

Before traveling to Japan, I must have watched more than a hundred Begin Japanology and Japanology Plus programs from Japan's NHK television station.  They aren't travelogues but cover the everyday culture of Japan and I wish all countries had similar programs produced by their public television stations.

So I'm trying to pull together videos on England that cover similar territory.

BBC: A People's History of Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.  Unfortunately this series is no longer available at the BBC site but only as a lower quality video uploaded on YouTube.  It is narrated by Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the Two Fat Ladies, and concentrates more on historic meals of the nobility than those of the common man.  And Clarissa Dickson Wright doesn't quite have the reserved charm of Peter Barakan.

• Episode 1: Breakfast
• Episode 2: Lunch - Clarissa does mention Simpson's Tavern as a traditional London chop house and of course she talks about the "sandwich".  The second half is more about what the common man ate covering rationing and supermarkets (the packaged sandwich) and she ends with the Sunday Roast.
• Episode 3: Dinner  - Confusing here.  Is it "dinner" as the biggest meal of the day or "supper" in the evening.

History of English Language. Four hour-long episodes by LWT,  London Weekend Television.

1. Birth of a Language   Beginning with the invasion of the Germanic tribes from Friesland in 491 AD, after the Romans left, and the subjugation of the Celtic tribes. Then the addition of the Latin alphabet from the Catholic church in the 600s, the addition of Norse from the invading Vikings and Danes in the 800s, and the defeat of the English in 1066 by the Normans, speaking Old French and concentrating the wealth of the country in fewer hands.
2. English Goes Underground.  The 300 years when English is a subjugated language as were the English-speaking people, when the Normans occupied all positions of power.
3. The Battle for the Language of the Bible
4. This Earth, This Realm, This England

The Worst Jobs in History.  A British television series from 2006.

1. Series 1 Episode 1: Roman and Anglo-Saxon (up until 1066)
2. Series 1 Episode 2: The Middle Ages
3. Series 1 Episode 3: The Tudors
4. Series 1 Episode 4: Stuart Times

That London Life: Walking London

These are YouTube walking tours done by Eleana, who speaks very fast but offers some very interesting tidbits about architectural landmarks in London.

1. City of London
2. Lesser Known London Walking Tour from Chelsea to Fulham

Afternoon Tea and Tea Etiquette

1. Visit London: Afternoon Tea in London (Ritzy tea parlors are featured without much tea but with champagne, fancy cakes and sandwiches.)
2. English Cream Tea Etiquette (Learn how to place your napkin, hold a cup, stir your sugar, and open your scone -- no hamburgers, please.)
3. Chateau des Fleurs - Tea with Adam Gottesman (This is the same tea etiquette advice but from a guy.)
4. Victoria's Insider Guide to London - Episode 4: The Best Afternoon Teas in London (If you like exquisite afternoon teas, check these out.  From Expedia.)

1000 Londoners

Each week, a profile of a Londoner is posted on https://www.1000londoners.com/ with a 3 minute film that gives an insight into their life.

1. The woman keeping traditional London alive through a Pie & Mash shop: Jacqueline, Londoner #161  (This is a very interesting profile with lovely shots of a historic pie & mash shop.  We'll have to go.)
   

Peter Ackroyd's London

Ackroyd is a prolific writer and biographer.  He has an 800 page biography of London which was also turned into a TV Series, uploaded to YouTube by various people.

1. Episode 1: Fire & Destiny
2. Episode 2: Crowd
3. Episode : Newgate to Tyburn (A colourful journey from the site of London' old Newgate prison to the site of the Tyburn Tree)
4. Episode :  East versus West

BBC: The London Markets
Hour-long programs on the wholesale food markets in London.  I can see why they are dying institutions and I hardly think women will miss them. Even the Fruit and Veg market doesn't have a woman in sight, except for a Romanian woman serving tea.  The market men are responsible for their own demise, I'm afraid.

1. The Fish Market Inside Billingsgate
   
2. The Meat Market Inside Smithfield
   
3. The Fruit and Veg Market Inside New Spitalfields