Andy Capp by Reg Smythe for May 17, 2010

Andy can’t get a job he needs education and higher learning especially on manners. But then Microwaves are great we use them after we get what foods needs to be cooked. Andy Flo’s mum has to prepare the food to go in the microwave to cook.

Andy, that is such a silly thing to tell Flo’s Mum about the supper meal. That is bad compliment.

Hey, on some microwaves that’s a difficult task!

It was difficult, but he did it!

Poor Andy! Why does Flo have to put him on the spot like that? He just does not have the cast iron stomach that Flo must have inherited and has to suffer through these miserable diners.

How many more times does Andy have to compromise like this just to keep Flo happy?

jtpozenel, how do you know the meals are miserable? Have you ever eaten Flo’s mom’s cooking? Have you ever been at one of her meals (as depicted here)? The only thing you have to go on is Andy’s and Flo’s opinions. She likes it, he doesn’t.

Andy, considering what tou think of your in-law, it was surprising she could do that. My food preparer always looks for one word at the supermarket, “Microwavable”

Don’t forget, she also opened the cans.

How would Andy, Flo, or any of them know what good cooking is? They live in England. There, good means it isn’t as bad it could be.

@Iris: I thought so too as I’d heard that so much, and my sister and her daughter thought so when they visited London, but at the Radisson near the British Museum where I stayed there was superb English food, especially breakfast. In fact the only “not as bad as it could’ve been” food I encountered was the fish and chips at London’s oldest pub. However, the excellent beer made up for that, and it’s hard to go totally wrong with fish and chips.

There are days I think the grace upon me could take me through a mine field unscathed, provided I didn’t know i was walking through one! :)

Some have remarked that after WWII many people who had staff to cook for them, no longer did, and they didn’t know how to cook for themselves. They were stuck with the notoriously weird prepared foods that somehow have gotten an oppressive foothold in England. I look at them in the special section in the local US grocery stores and wonder what madmen created these things. (Weetabix and Marmite are happy exceptions.)

In that light, being able to cook something more or less palatable with a microwave might be a relatively high culinary achievement. :)

It might have been jellied eels, in which case I would hope she COULD NOT find the start button and just sent out for a pizza.

Er…. jellied eels are unlikely. This is a regional thing confined to London and Essex and Kent, and doesn’t travel well.

Andy Capp is a north-Easterner from Durham ( ie, Scottish border.)

Regional food here is different again. Try

http://www.mydish.co.uk/recipe/7667/Parched+Peas+%28black+Peas%2C+Carlin+Peas%2C+Pigeon+Peas%29%2C+A+Geordie+Recipe+For+Carlin+Peas

http://www.southshields-sanddancers.co.uk/geordie_stotties.htm

http://www.mydish.co.uk/recipe/2195/Cumberland%20Sausage

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-geordie-gourmet-1324018.html

Note the remark:-

“The nitty gritty is that there is no Geordie cuisine,” says Terence. “North-east cuisine is primarily poverty cuisine. Nothing refined; it was cooking for men who worked in shipping or down a pit. They needed fodder, lots of energy, and it had to be cheap.” ”

Flo and her mother will come out of this cooking tradition.

Flo’s mother is likely to have lived through World War Two, a time of stringent food rationing where the fact any food at all was there was a reason to give thanks - considerations like how well it was cooked, or how it tasted, would have been a long way down the priority list. Wartime scarcity crippled the cooking ability of a whole generation of British women, and they passed this lack of talent to their daughters! It took a long time to get the British as a race into the idea that food could be cooked differently and made into something more than just fuel.

(Indeed, in the first Andy Capp cartoons, Andy had only just been demobbed from the Army after national service - he is still, in the 1950’s, wearing his British Army greatcoat with the regimental identifier “DLI” - Durham Light Infantry - on the shoulder. Goodness knows what his Army service was like…)

Of course, over the past few years, Asian cooking has really taken off in Britain, and the North-East has its share of great imported food.

http://www.curryhell.com/#/rupali-curry-hell/4533703288

Any American who only stays in London is not really seeing the true Britain. This like me advocating that having been to New York, I’ve seen the whole of the USA. The Andy Capp strip is set in the north-East: as far away from London as you can get whilst still being in England. Things are different there!

Indeed, and it’s good to hear a perspective from a native who knows his own country. (Although in New York City, I say with some exaggeration, if you can’t try anything worth trying in the whole of the US, then you’re neither staying nor looking long enough. You can’t catch anywhere near everything regional there, but what you can catch is astounding.)

I hope you realize that I wasn’t claiming to understand the whole of the “true Britain” simply by staying in London. But your much broader perspective clarifies what I did experience and had heard about from other Brits as well as visitors from here before I went there. I can now say with some small authority, you can find excellent English food in London if you know where to look (or are lucky enough to encounter a place that knows how to make it).

(And BTW: your chocolate is severely underrated.)

Johanan Rakkav said, about 5 hours ago

(Weetabix and Marmite are happy exceptions.)

Exceptions to what, food?? I’ve tasted marmite, just like vegemite. How on earth does that qualify as food? I can’ t figure out why anyone ever ate that to begin with!

Marmite and Vegemite are acquired tastes, true, but I’m glad I acquired them (and it didn’t take very long…hm, what was it, about two tastes?).

Actually I think they started out as B-vitamin supplements, which is still one of their major selling points. The torula yeast extract on which they’re based is a common flavoring agent these days, adding a meaty taste to everything from nacho cheese flavored tortilla chips to taco meat.

That’s a lot more than you can do, Andy.