The Langham Huntington, Pasadena

Afternoon Tea at the Langham

Back in June 1865, Americans were reeling from the end of the Civil War, Charles Dickens was recovering from a near-fatal train accident at Staplehurst, and in London, the Langham opened its doors. The Langham was Europe's first grand hotel to serve afternoon tea, a tradition, it says, that began in 1840 when Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, hit the 4 p.m. wall and served tea and snacks "to ward off hunger pangs in the long hours between lunch and dinner." Amen.

As it happens, this year is the 60th year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, or the Diamond Jubilee. To mark both its founding and the Diamond Jubilee, the Langham Huntington in Pasadena will celebrate on June 10 with its Jubilee Anniversary Tea: 80 people will be chosen, via lottery, to attend an afternoon tea served at 1865 prices. That would be a mere shilling and sixpence, or 15 cents in 2012 U.S. dollars, which is considerably less than the Langham's present-day prices of $39 to $59 per person for the privilege.

More >>

Dominic Wilcox

The Queen on a coin

When McVitie's, manufacturer of the immensely popular British snack called Jaffa Cakes, asked artist Dominic Wilcox to creatively use the snacks to celebrate the upcoming London Summer Olympics, he took a little inspiration from his friends. Or, more specifically, how his friends eat their Jaffa Cakes. The cake (which, depending on who you talk to, is actually a biscuit) has a spongy base layer topped with orange jelly and covered in chocolate; with all these components, there are, apparently, at least as many ways to eat a Jaffa Cake as there are to eat an Oreo Cookie.

As Wilcox explains on his site, Variations on Normal, he took note of how his friends "described their strange and unique methods of eating them. I started to nibble and pick away, going through 30 boxes of Jaffa Cakes to try to get shapes that fitted with my British-themed ideas." He ended up nibbling the cake/biscuits into the queen, the Union Jack, Stonehenge and our personal favorite, the Loch Ness monster, which is perfectly plated on a sea of blue. Typical of many who work at the intersection of food and art, Wilcox ran into a little bit of trouble: "One problem I had was when I got distracted by the radio and then looked back to see I had eaten the Loch Ness monster."

A few more photos of the Jaffa Cake art, courtesy of Wilcox himself, after the jump.

More >>

T. Nguyen

Venn Diagram of English Cuisine

In honor of Downton Abbey's season-two finale on Sunday, we decided to cross the pond to explore English food with two overlapping circles that compare what Angelenos believe the English nation eats with what English folks say they actually eat.

Moral of the story: Apparently, the collective gasp heard around the Western world when poor Oliver Twist asked for more gruel was not just a reaction to the fact that this young boy had the gall to ask for seconds -- no, it was that he would want seconds at all. Despite the great work of Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay, most Angelenos still have preconceived negative notions of what English food is and isn't. Indeed, they were more likely to respond to our survey with an unkind adjective -- "bad," "ugh" and variations thereof -- than specific nouns. What a load of bollocks, the English respondents replied.

More >>

Jodi Louie, via Flickr

The United Kingdom has such a confusing culinary reputation. At once birthplace to a few of the world's blandest dishes, and yet the same place that brought us Gordon Ramsay and some of the most hilariously named foods imaginable.

It's those foods that we honor today: The oddly named, the somewhat vulgar and the just plain perplexing from England, Scotland and Wales. It was hard to narrow it down to just five, and to ignore that old favorite, bubble and squeak, but we did. Turn the page for the best named British food, past and present.

More >>

Steven J. Baule

Sticky Toffee Pudding at Animal

Sticky Toffee Pudding just sounds like an awesome dessert, doesn't it? While it's actually steamed date cake moistened with a hot butter-sugar sauce (hence the stickiness) that's served with vanilla ice cream; calling it something more evocative is a smart sales move. Not that it needs it. It's already on most sweet-lovers list as a contender for the best dessert in the history of ever. No matter what it's called though, a truly authentic -- read: good -- serving will test of the limits of sugar an adult can endure without requiring a trip to the dentist.

A standard of British Sunday dinners for the last hundred years or so, sticky toffee pudding is a winter menu staple. Thankfully, there are several restaurants in L.A. that offer it for when the chill sets in or the mood strikes. The two that piqued our interest were Animal in mid-city and downtown's The Gorbals. We assumed their versions wouldn't be basic or boring. They boast the same $7 price tag and offer the dessert year-round, making it a fair fight from the start. Indulging in both in one night --because we're gluttons -- we compared and contrasted to bring you our STP food fight.

More >>

It's hard to be tough on a guy who means so well. After crying his way to school lunch reform in West Virginia and Los Angeles, Jamie Oliver now invites us to Great Britain as part of the country's new "You're invited" tourism campaign . In the wake of newspaper scandals and city-wide rioting, it's a pretty noble cause.

But take a look at this video and tell us what you think:

More >>

That circumstances change the way we approach our lives is hardly a revolutionary statement -- on Saturdays, farmers' market shopping feels like a luxurious escape, on weeknights grocery shopping quickly becomes that dreaded after-work chore. And so with those 405 homebrew-friendly roadblocks ahead this weekend, Try This: Traveling the Globe Without Leaving the Table by Danyelle Freeman, a first-person food "memoir" (personal essay, really) that we dismissed when it first passed our desk a few weeks ago, sounds entirely too housebound-relevant to discount this weekend.

Freeman's book is touted in promo materials as an "adventurous and accessible guide to eating out in the twenty-first century, perfect for anyone who loves food but wants to break out of a restaurant rut." (She is the founding editor of restaurantgirl.com and the former restaurant critic for The New York Post.)

For those of us lucky enough to live in L.A., where cultural diversity and tacos collide on an everyday basis, the idea of reading a book to teach us how to break out of a dining rut is pretty hilarious. But hey, it's Carmageddon weekend. So what did we think?

More >>

With dozens of cookbooks, the River Cottage series should be nails-on-a-chalkboard tired by now. And yet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an uncanny knack for making his cookbooks something we actually want to keep opening night after night, hoping to find something new to toss in the sauté pan. In his recently released River Cottage Every Day cookbook, we do.

In part, we admit, we are drawn to his books for that fantastic British kitchen sensibility (sarcasm?) that reminds us cooking need not always be a one-sided American opinion.

And so rather than proclaim that the honey-baked rhubarb (p. 30) and baked breakfast "cheesecake" (p. 44, ricotta thickened with polenta) will please every picky brunch eater in your family, as so many American cookbooks claim on their glossy covers, Fearnley-Whittingstall reminds us that "of course, not everyone has the same appetite for breakfast, or indeed feels the same way about breakfast from one day to the next." Yeah, he has three kids.

More >>

Flickr/webponce

canapes, of a sort

If you've been up all night watching the royal wedding coverage on CNN -- which seemed a lot like a cross between the Oscars and an episode of Masterpiece Theatre, circa 1972 -- and are now collapsed on your fainting couch, having called in sick to work, you may be getting hungry. You can go find a good English breakfast at a pub and watch soccer instead of the NBA and continue your monarchist episode, or you might try your hand in the kitchen.

To help with that, Buckingham palace has released the menu for its lunchtime reception. This lunch, served to the some 650 guests, is a selection of canapes, plus a bit of cake and Champagne. Very nice. Very un-Tudor-feast. Some of this you can easily duplicate at home -- poached asparagus spears with Hollandaise sauce, for one -- and some you might just want to enjoy vicariously. Although making bubble and squeak with confit shoulder of lamb sounds like as decent a way to spend your sick day as any. Turn the page for the menu, courtesy of the AP and The New York Times:

More >>

Pieminister

Kate and Wills pie

The British do so many things better than us: Table manners, diction, the drug-addled teens-gone-wild television series, Skins. One thing we can beat them at hands down? Pop culture exploitation. Here, something as minor as Charlie Sheen losing his mind happens and suddenly all you see are Tiger Blood t-shirts, bumper stickers that announce I'm Not Bipolar, I'm Bi-Winning, and the Edison starts featuring the His Extremely Highball cocktail. (Full disclosure: bartender Joseph Brooke invented this head-spinning combination of Whistlepig, Cointreau, Ginger syrup and fresh-squeezed lemon juice at the request of Caroline on Crack for Squid Ink. But, as reported in the post, they were already serving Adonis DNA. and Tiger's Blood drinks in New York and Chicago.)

American dominance at crass gravy train-jumping commercialism was never made so clear as during our recent visit to London. There, Royal Wedding fever seemed primly contained to tabloid headlines and kiosks in Convent Garden whose racks held a meek offering of Wills and Kate emblazoned mugs, a couple of commemorative plates, a tiny ceramic bell with Prince William's coat of arms stamped on it. Pie? Turn the page.

More >>