Luckily for Americans, most restaurant servers in England know what we mean when we ask for an order of fries. They don't think we are being rude or "cheeky." They can tell a Yank when they hear one, and simply serve us what they call chips, short for "chipped potatoes." But these days, with more Americans renting (hiring) holiday cottages (self-catering), it helps to know what to ask for at the greengrocers or even in the supermarkets. In the UK, shelves are stocked more often than in the U.S. The stores are smaller, and displays are cleaned out pretty quickly; if you don't see what you want, however, there is abundant staff to ask about it...as long as you can speak the language.
Here, then, is a primer on British food terms "catering for" the American traveler:
Oatmeal or Porridge?
To begin with breakfast, in the UK, lots of people eat porridge; in the US, it's oatmeal. On UK supermarket shelves, look for porridge.
In general, bacon is referred to, in the UK, as rashers. It is, however, different from US streaky bacon (what they call that sort of bacon in the UK), and is more similar to what Americans call Canadian bacon. Sort of.
Don't look for half-and-half for your coffee; they don't have it. But you might buy single cream. (Double cream, in the US, is roughly equivalent to heavy cream or whipping cream.)
Lunch and Dinner Foods
In the US, we ask for string beans, or sometimes green beans. In the UK, they are haricot (pronounced ha-ri-ko) beans.
In the US, we buy yellow turnips or rutabagas; in the UK, they buy swedes.
In the US, some people eat lima beans. In the UK, they eat butter beans. (To be fair, one sees cans of butter beans--as opposed to lima beans--on US supermarket shelves. There are subtle differences between these large, mealy kid-unfriendly legumes...but this is a primer to get you started, not to make you into a UK culinary terms expert.)
In the UK, treacle is the equivalent, if not exactly the same substance, as molasses in the US. You might also find 'golden syrup' there, roughly equivalent to corn syrup here.
Field mushrooms, in the UK, are ordinary round mushrooms, grown in mushroom houses there and here, so there is really nothing "field" about them either place. But field mushrooms, as opposed to wild mushrooms and chanterelles, is definitely their UK name. In the US, they are simply mushrooms, or sometimes button mushrooms. In the UK, they do call wild mushrooms wild mushrooms, and chanterelles are chanterelles, just as in the US.
Frenchified Terms in Common UK Use
Among the most evocative food names are aubergine (pronounced oh-ber-jean) and vegetable marrow. If you've ever read Agatha Christie's novels starring the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective working in England, you will know of his attitude toward vegetable marrows. To him, they were what we would call, in the US, a pumpkin. And he didn't like them, tossing one over his back fence in a fit of pique in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
There's also a recent UK-published Italian cookbook available in the US that makes reference to pumpkin in a pasta recipe, and they really do mean American pumpkin. however, most people in the UK use the term vegetable marrow, these days, to refer to smaller forms of squash, such as pattypan. Other forms of squash, though, are not vegetable marrows; for example, the humble zucchini in the US is a courgette in the UK.
Food for Fun Times
In case you plan on going to the movies (seeing a film, or going to the cinema, as it is called there) and buying a snack, you might want to remember to order crisps to go with your Coke (yes, Coke is still coke.) Few theatres (UK spelling) will have a fry cook to whip you up a batch of chips (chipped potatoes), but the crisps come in packets....that is, bags.
Bon appetit!
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