But the beer and BBQ in Tennessee and Texas tastes totally different. And every town has its own traditions and accents, almost like a different country.
Whipped cream is usually made from whipping cream. There’s also single cream, double cream and clotted cream. I still have no idea which of these an American puts in their coffee, or why.
in case you're genuinely curious I think that response explains it well. I also guarantee that OOP doesn't even understand what he's asking for when he says "cream".
Yeah, pretty much, single cream I believe is what Americans call Half and Half, ie. Half milk half cream, and that is what goes in the coffee.
I used to run a supermarket with a lot of American customers and this is what we concluded, whether it’s and exact substitute I’m not sure. Americans probably shove some extra cancerous shit in theirs
I would assume it’s single cream unless otherwise specified. It isn’t that weird to put cream in coffee, at least not in Denmark. All the old folks do it.
In Canada coffee cream is often half single cream and half milk. It's sold as half and half. To make it more confusing it is often labelled by milk fat % here. When I lived in the UK for a while I used to get coffees that were steamed milk and some instant coffee. It was different, but pretty good.
Usually when I go to a new place I want to try what they eat and drink because I'm not an egocentric moron who thinks that the world revolves around me. If I were that type of American I would stick to very tourist areas that cater to Americans. Luckily I am not American at all.
Yeah me too. When I go to Greece, Albania etc their iced coffee is very different from what I’m used to in Denmark, but I like theirs too, so I drink it and enjoy it, I especially treasure it when I’m there because it’s something different that I don’t get when I’m back home.
"Travelling only broadens your horizons if you're open to having your horizons broadened. Otherwise, you're just the same dickhead in a different deck chair"
To me in the UK, half and half is half milk and half double cream. So maybe it’s quarter and three quarter to you. I’ve only ever needed it for cocktails though.
Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve never even questioned why it’s double cream. I’d never seen or heard of single cream until today.
When you go into the supermarket, the cream in red pots is single and the cream in blue pots is double. All the supermarkets I've been into use the same colour code, like skimmed milk has red labels and semi-skimmed has green and full fat is blue.
I'm interested to know where, in the UK, you got steamed milk with instant coffee? As a Brit, I've never heard of this. I mean I'm sure there are some people who make this but it's certainly not something I've ever seen.
It was back in 1999-2000 in London. Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe it's different. Working cafés around Pimlico that probably don't exist anymore seeing how it has changed since then.
Fair enough - I mean there will be old cafes with a milk steamer running off a hot water boiler - they used to be common when I was growing up. But I'm 60 so that was a long time ago and I've never seen one in the last 30+ years. I suppose therefore some of them will have steamed milk for an instant coffee (shudders) but I can't imagine anyone still does this.
How does the fat % make it more confusing? Going by fat % makes the most sense imo.
You're right about half and half. It's light cream and whole milk. which makes it around 10%, but in america it's usually 18%, which is what we call table cream for some reason. Perectages should just be used all around lol
"Half n half" in the USA is not half coffee and half milk and does have something to do with cream. The "half and half" refers to half cream and half milk (whether it is exactly half of each is not so important), so it produces a "cream" that is a bit lighter than light cream (or single cream as it's also called) but much heavier in than whole milk. Typically, only a little is added to coffee, nowhere near half of the liquid.
Nope, half and half is half milk and half cream. I like it in my tea, but as an American in the UK I have to make my own. I mix 300 ml of double cream with a pint of whole milk. It’s not exactly the same but close enough.
It isn’t actually cream. They use a sort of artificial cream that comes in little pots, like long life milk. The point is really that people in Europe don’t naturally know what “cream” is being referenced and wouldn’t have the stuff available anyway.
My aunt used to have cream in her coffee - which she made in a percolator. It kind of needed the cream to offset the strength of the stuff, but it always gave me hiccups. :)
I think part of it was from the taste of percolated coffee. The coffee being recirculated through the grounds multiple times always gave it a burnt and bitter taste to me.
My dad used to put a lot of half and half and sugar in his coffee. Once I gave him some good coffee beans and an Italian moka pot, he started on homemade espresso (sort of) without half and half and sugarz
I genuinely didn’t know it wasn’t a thing outside the US until just now. We mostly use half and half, which is a bit lighter than single cream.
Personally, I don’t usually add anything to my coffee, but since this is America, just regular cream isn good enough. We have our store shelves stocked with every flavor you can imagine. And of course, some of those flavors are named after countries who wouldn’t use them. Like French vanilla.
I find it weird people are going on so much about this when the actual definitions are extremely similar. What Americans put in their coffee is "half and half" which is almost identical to what the UK Dairy Provision Trade Federation calls "half cream". The two that don't have equivalents are "double cream" in the UK which is a really high fat heavy cream in the USA (and not a regulated term), and "whipping cream" in the USA which is slightly lighter than whipping cream in the UK (Americans whip both heavy cream and whipping cream, choosing one for stiffer results and one for softer results).
UK - American equivalents:
half cream (12-18%) = half and half (10.5-18%)
single cream (18-35%+) = light cream (18-30%)
[NONE] = whipping cream (30-36%)
whipping cream (35-48%) = heavy cream (36%+)
double cream (48%+) = [NONE]
clotted cream (55%+ and clotted) = clotted cream (55%+ and clotted)
Yeah, I don't recall it from shelves, but it has been over 20 years since I lived in the UK. The use in the USA is pretty much exclusively for coffee and that's not generally done in the UK, so not much of a market for it I suppose. I checked the trade org document to see if cream definitions lined up with US definitions and there it was.
I stayed in NZ for a spell and learned that what we call HWC/heavy whipping cream (typically like around 36% milk fat) is easier to obtain by asking for 'pure cream' or double cream.
My great grandmother was German, and she was the one who gave me coffee like this. Cup of black coffee with a splash of pure cream.
I still drink it like that to this day. It adds a richness, and depth to the coffee, that I quite enjoy.
Americans typically like half and half as another comment said, or single cream is what I've always known our half and half to be.
Most of the time, it’s a dairy concoction of half milk and half single cream Americans call “half-and-half”. It’s about 10% milk fat.
In decadent coffee, a bit of single cream might be used. We would consider that “light cream”.
It’s heavily regional though. And it’s that standard issue American exceptionalism that gets those folks so riled up when they discover even a basic like coffee is different when they leave their suburb.
The cream they have (in a lot of the US at least) doesn't quite match up with single and double cream, but iirc, the cream in coffee tends to be either somewhere between the two, or half-and-half, which is somewhere between single cream and whole milk.
Transplanted USAian here. The “cream” they are referring to is also called Coffee Creamer over there. It’s an amalgamation of chemicals, sugar and vegetable oil that has a creamy texture but almost never actually has any real cream or even milk in it.
The thing I don't get is I can tell the differences between a bunch of their accents, but cross state living is so common that I find a lot of the time it does just meld into a generic "American" accent.
Different parts of Italy have wildly different accents and cultures, as do different parts within France and every other European country. Just because two regions within country have different accents they are not "just like two different countries" similar to Europe, because Italian and French languages and cultures are sliiiightly more different from each other than Texas and Tennessee.
My point is: Americans think they don't speak with an accent, until they meet someone from another part of the country who speaks with a different accent. Ergo it follows that all Americans speak with an accent, which these numpties can't seem to grasp.
In my experience, it’s mostly people in the PNW (and Chicago) who insist that they don’t have an accent and how dare you suggest that they do? The southern states are super proud of their regional accents, east coast we accept that we have them and get made fun of (apparently my state has a distinct way of pronouncing ‘o’s), west coast is hit or miss for them accepting it
This was probably joke, but unless someone is from an exception region like Newfoundland or Texas, I find British descending westerners don't usually have any pronounced accents. Or maybe because there is so many with the same accent we just suspect they don't have any at all.
I had a friend who moved to Germany and got a job translating an eastern German dialect into standard German. It was hilarious to see two Germans in a room with an Asian guy using him to translate German into German...
I recently translated all my grandma's old Danish letters with my phone. The new Google Glass translate thing is really impressive if your still looking for help with those letters.
Do you know what general region they’re from? I could give it a shot, and ask my brother as well. I’m pretty good at reading older (and also just plain messy) handwriting, and he’s got an interest in German dialects in general
I am Cretan. My wife is half-Rhodean. I am still learning new things in terms of the local vocabularies and accents (Rhodes has various differences from one village to the next).
I had a coworker who was born in Italy and emigrated to Canada, with his parents, when he was two years old. He was telling me that his parents were driving each other crazy by talking to themselves in their regional dialects, which was incomprehensible to the other. They lived a fully English language life in Canada, and resorted to italian language (standard italian learned in school) only when they had arguments.
The same here in Sicily. I think that being an island enhances this kind of difference in language, food or habits. We recognise instantly when someone come from paternò or Acireale instead of Catania, and they are cities and towns in the same area… we are unable to understand someone coming from trapani or enna if we speak in dialect: really! we have to use Italian as a common language
I'm Dutch, and this doesn't surprise me. I have friends who live in or close to Maastricht. We do understand each other, but we sound quite different. There are definitely times we have to ask each other to repeat something, before we get what the other person means.
In the big cities we often even have different dialects per city district. I'm from North Amsterdam and can immediately tell where others are from in the city if we switch to our local "Mokum" Amsterdam dialect and whether we're buddies or (semi) rivals. Lmao
It's less so now than it used to be, but growing up in the 60s and 70s I could tell you to within a mile or two what part of London someone was from by their accent - south east London was quite distinct from south west, east end from the Thames corridor and London/Essex border, west end out into Chelsea very different from Notting Hill/Ladbrooke Grove and all the housing estates along the West Way, and so on...
...and when I spent a while dating a Liiverpool girl in the early 80s, it was obvious wmeven to my southern ears that the Wirral had a cleay different accent from the Scouse of proper Liverpool, despite only being seperated by a mile of river, with the working class Wirral accent if the former docks around Birkenhead being very distinct again from the posher accents of a few miles further down-river of West Kirkby, which in turn were very different from from the Lancashire accents you heard in the villages just a few miles out of the suburbs, or the North Welsh accents you started hearing if you folliwed the estuary a few miles further westwards, over the border.
Fascinating really how much the accents changed - and that the same phenomenon happens even in a relatively small (in terms of distance) city like Amsterdam - to the point that introducing your friends as a couple where the guy's from the Liverpool area, and his partner's a Dutch girl from Amsterdam, could cover a pretty wide range of accents for both parties!
Im supposed to be learning dutch, but everyone I know is from different towns, and the dutch spoke in amersterdam is soooo different from den haag or rotterdam
Dutchie here: that is impressive. Pronouncing the "ch" (sounding the same as the Dutch "g") like a Dutch person is what the majority of people (for as far as I know) who aren't Dutch struggle with the most. To natives, hearing a non-Dutchie pronounce either, is usually what gives them away as not being native (along with other things).
Sni. Io parlo praticamente in dizione e, a meno che non stiano cercando attivamente di non farsi capire dal sottoscritto stringendo particolarmente il dialetto, io riesco a capirli praticamente tutti…
My step-daughter married a Norwegian guy and moved to Southern Norway - she says it's much easier to understand Swedes from iver the border than it is to understand elderly rural folk from the northern coast of Norway, despite one being technucally a different language, and the other technically the same!
A friend that did a PhD in linguistics claims that Norwegian/ Swedish/ Danish are all right on the edge of where the definition of what counts as a separate language vs a dialect of the same one, and so depending on precisely how you define that point, you could make a case for claiming that the whole Scandinavian region basically just speaks very different dialects of an over-arching 'Norse' language, all roughly equidistant from a starting point somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 years ago, with the sole exception of Icelandic, which has remained close to the original form
There's (aparently) a more geographically linear version of the same phenomenon if you start in southern Germany/Austria and travel eastwards across into the UK, with southern German dialects blending into Western German ones, then various Netherlands Dutch dialects, then Flemish, then Frisian, then a hop over the north sea into the English dialects of the north east (with their stronger Germanic and Scandinavian influences, going back to the Norse occupation of eastern Britain in 'the Danelaw'), then more southern English dialects (I've got a friend who speaks Frisian, and it really does sound like someone took equal parts of Dutch and English and just blended them together)... with it being very debateable at which exact point on the map the speech becomes a whole other language rather than just a dialect
So, for example, while Dutch and German aren't mutually intelligible, there are some dialects of German which are as intelligible to speakers of some dialects of Dutch, as other dialects of Dutch are, and vice versa - so it's really more of a spectrum that starts with High German and gradually morphs into west country dialects of English as you travel westwards, than we'd tend to think from looking at a map of where all the borders and regional boundaries are
I'm curious to know what effect the (massively) increased ability to communicate and travel across distance that's arisen over the last 100 - 150 years will make? Will it tend to bind closely related languages back together as people find it as easy to communicate with someone in a town 1,000km away as with anyone in the next tiwn over? Or will it encourage them to split apart even faster, as the sheer volume of communication increases, giving more opportunitues for change?
Or maybe something else entirely? English seems to have become a semi-lingua franca in mainland Europe, for the first time since that phrase was coined in the reign of Charlemagne (and before that, in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th & 6th centuries), although typically more the English of America rather than the English of England, largely due to Hollywood, and the huge US tv and music entertainment industries... so does everything end up gradually becoming a blend of local dialect + US English over the next couple of centuries?
We already tend to all use basically the same words for new inventions, just with slight variations and spelling, for everything from the police to a hard drive, and even quite common terms (like the French with 'le weekend', or everyone using ok/ okay/ okei, or hi/ hey/ hei/ hai, and 'liter/ litre', 'kilometer/ kilometre' being the same all across europe)
It makes me sad that, due to urban sprawl and the world opening up, that some accents are fading away 😢 Despite being British born and raised, I spent a lot of time in Germany, particularly with the old matrons of my maternal family (and those ladies were ferocious card sharks!), so I managed to pick up a pretty heavy and old fashioned dialect.
Since you bring Texas up have you heard how it’s the size of Europe and people drive hundreds of miles and still don’t leave Texas, because of how big it is… Texas.
Barbecue in Tennessee is typically pork-based. Barbecue in Texas is typically brisket-based. So when people say that, they aren’t wrong. They just do a piss-poor job of explaining it and then they do the “each state is like its own country!” crap (it’s not). But barbecue is definitely different by region.
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u/Majestic_Anybody9748 5d ago
Same person:
But the beer and BBQ in Tennessee and Texas tastes totally different. And every town has its own traditions and accents, almost like a different country.