What food do you miss when you're away from home?

This thread was in today's Guardian. It's dominated by British people, so it's interesting for me, but might be a bit lost on a lot of you.

Tastes of home: what food do you miss the most? | Life and style | theguardian.com

I can get most British food in Australia very easily. But when I lived in China, these were the things I really missed.

- Meat pies
- Scotch pies
- Decent cheese (not so much now, but when I first lived in China 20 years ago, there was nothing).
- Cider (alcoholic cider, not the fizzy apple drink some Americans think of as cider)
- Indian curries

Australia is pretty good for all of those, except for curries. They're OK here, but just not what you can get in Britain (and, Grumpy Cabbie, I hate to admit it, but this is an issue on which Yorkshire beats Lancashire. Your curries are fantastic.).

When I'm not in China (which is about 7/8 of the year now), the thing I miss most is mapo tofu (tofu with chilli, pork and Sichuan pepper): you just can't get a decent one outside of Mainland China, and it's usually the first thing I have to eat when I get to China. Hui guo rou (double-fried pork with chilli) would be next on the list.

My British friends who live in America usually say that it's savoury pies (meat pies and chicken pies) that they miss most.

So, what do you miss when you're away? What do you rush to have when you get home?

 

Blackberry cobbler in particular sounds like a very fine thing indeed.

 

Mmmm.

You can get pasties here, but they're not very good. It's one of those things that only seems to work in Britain.

 

My love of Sichuan hua jiao far exceeds most people's.

Back in the olden days, when I first lived in China, you couldn't get foreign food, obviously. But it was also hard to get food from other parts of China. I had friends in Tianjin - mainly students - who were from Sichuan. They actually got properly depressed because of the lack of Sichuan food. Doctors told them that this was quite a common problem among Sichuan expats: there's some sort of dopamine release or something triggered by chilli and Sichuan pepper, and if you can't get it, you suffer from withdrawal. They were getting their parents to send them parcels of chilli and Sichuan pepper so they could cook for themselves.

Like you, my experience of Chinese food growing up in Britain had no relation to Chinese food in China. In fact, in Hong Kong there's a restaurant targeting the British expat market that sells "British-style Chinese food" for the people who miss sesame-prawn toast and luminous orange sweet-and-sour pork.

And yes, you're right about American food in China. If I'm being taken to lunch by a Chinese company, my heart sinks when I realise they've decided to take me for a "Western" - usually some dire steak at SPR Coffee.

 

There used to be one place in Hong Kong that did them, but it's definitely an American thing. There are a couple of places in Australia that do them.

 

I've never really been a mushy peas person.

I'm lucky in that Australia we can get excellent fish and chips. ftl, have you ever found decent fish and chips in America?

I have never had a proper pork pie in Australia. There are good Scotch pies at a butcher about 10km from me, though, so that's a good thing.

 

No proper fish and chips is a terrible thing. Given how many British people there are in NY, I'd have thought there would be someone willing to help you through your suffering. It's dreadful.