Okay, a few points.

Spotted Dick – I’m sure the instructions will point this out, but if you do microwave your spotted dick, you remove it from the tin first.
And always serve it with Custard. This goes for all british steamed puddings with the exception of chocolate ones. (Treacle tart should be server with a toffee sauce ideally though.) Spotted dick isn’t as good as a Jam Roly-Poly to my mind, but to each their own.
Also, it should be noted that the “in a tin” version is never as good as the proper home-cooked one.
We don’t get to eat these often, as we don’t own a microwave, and boiling these puddings takes ages. We used to eat them at Uni quite frequently though.

Brain’s Faggots – and I think faggots generally just comes from meaning bundles of anything much. (Which is pretty much what they are.) are just kinda meaty balls of stuff… The contents are going to be no worse than the average sausage, but I still haven’t eaten these since I passed 11 years old. (Although they just kinda tasted like gravy, even then.)

Toad in the Hole – again, depends on the quality of the product, but generally it’s a delicious dish. You get all the meatiness of your sausage, and a nice cakey batter instead of having to have potatoes or something. Can be quite greasy though. Also I should add a side note about yorkshire puddings, which are savoury batter cakes, usually served with a roast dinner (generally beef.) They’re an excellent absorber of gravy, and because they usually form little cup shapes children love to fill them with gravy, and wait for them to start leaking.
Both of these dishes are staples of British cooking, and many families don’t consider Sunday to be complete without a roast dish and yorkshire puddings.

Black pudding – or “blood sausage” apparantly for colonial types. Are delicious, horribly bad for you, and eaten by the french as well. French black puddings tend to have chunks of white in them, which is fat. British ones will have oats or wheat in them, I can’t remember which. Much like haggis, black pudding is meaty and spicey and an excellent addition to a friend breakfast.
These are commonly eaten by anyone who has their breakfast at a “greasy spoon” style cafe. (Pronounce caff by the people who frequent them, generally builders.)

Regarding the british need for sausage variations, you ain’t seen nothing yet. There’s a sausage shop just down the road which servers about 30 different kinds of sausage, and that doesn’t even include the more common regional sausages. Basically everyone everywhere makes their sausages differently (and out of different things), nothing beats Pork and Apple though. Although I’m quite fond of the sausage they sell which is made of pork and maple syrup.

I’ve never eaten Brawn though, I think that’s a myth.

It should also be noted, that the two most popular dishes in Britain are Indian Curry (usually actually versions of Bangladeshi or Pakistani curries invented in Britain, such as the infamous Balti) followed by Fish and chips. We’ve become so good at curry that we export them back to India.

All that being said, at home most of the food we eat is of Italian derivation, or Thai.

Also, I’d like to point out that I meant “fried breakfast” when talking about sausages and haggis being excellent additions.

How often do I eat sausage? Well, sausage and mash from the sausage shop has become a tradition on Wednesdays, so at least twice a week. I don’t have a fried breakfast normally as my brain doesn’t really start functioning until much later than breakfast time, and I don’t want to risk setting fire to the house.

I would point out that combining such things as maple syrup with pork is not something normally done in the UK (and the sausages mentioned don’t have very much in them). Generally we think you yankees are extremely odd because of the way you combine sweet and fatty. It is also held as a sacred belief in the UK that having maple syrup on sausage or bacon is the major reason Americans are reputedly all obese, and when we start doing it over here it’ll be the downfall of society as we know it.

Which reminds me, those adverts for “Chilli’s” which we managed to get on TV in Belize while I was lying indoors with sunburned scared me, because of the way they proudly pointed out their bacon was roasted with sugar. Seriously…? Generally speaking British food is much more savoury than the US versions, even down to our bread. (US hamburger buns are practically cake for heaven’s sake.)

Anyway, on the subject of UK foodstuffs, organic, local and fairtrade food has become an obsession across the country in the last year or two. As such British food is generally reaching a pretty high quality. We’re not quite up with France yet, but give us a few more years.

Oh, and as for how we live without a microwave, that would be because we cook almost everything from scratch at home. I’ve become a bit of a foody and control freak, whereas my wife grew up quite poor and she always had to cook everything from scratch. About the only thing we routinely eat that isn’t prepared from raw ingredients (aside from sausages that is) is stuffed fresh pasta. (and Ice-Cream I suppose.) A microwave would only be used in our house as a rapid de-frosting machine, and as such we can’t be bothered sacrificing the precious work-surface to have one. We don’t even have a toaster for heaven’s sake.

We have very little work surface in our kitchen. A toaster would literally take up too much room.

We use the grill, it’s slow and inefficient, but there you go. We don’t actually eat a lot of toast, so it’s not a major problem.

“We use the grill, it’s slow and inefficient, but there you go. We don’t actually eat a lot of toast, so it’s not a major problem.”

Is there any advantage to grilling? I find when I make a grilled cheese it’s much better if I put it on low heat and fry it for what seems like an hour.

“It has a Pop Tart setting which I find amusing. There’s another ‘food’ I’d be embarrassed to associate myself with.”

LOL. I actually just set up a subscription with amazon to get my pop tarts delivered (brown sugar UNfrosted). I can’t find them here anywhere, only the frosted kind, ewww. I don’t toast them though, I eat them with my coffee. They’re like 1000000 grams of sugar a pop though, so I usually only get through half of one before I have to put it aside.

“Do you put sugar in your coffee too”

I only drink sugar in my coffee if it’s some fru-fru starbucks thing. Otherwise just black.

“I’m getting a good idea of what a British blog post about American food would be like…”

Grits

Going along with Massif’s complaint: https://www.jimmydean.com/sitecontent/pancakes-sausage/2007/10/10/pancakes-and-sausage-on-a-stick-chocolate-chip.aspx

Fruit flavored snacks (and every other kind of “convenient sugar in a box” snack that appears good for you).

pickled eggs

velveeta / cheezwiz

spam

beef jerky

Doesn’t seem fair to go into chitlins, burgoo, sweetmeats, etc, even americans think that’s bizarre.