Separated by a Common Language

Outside my history, but I think there was a bit of a meat revolution in the 19th century. Butchers went from being a local shop of fresh meat to being a nation-wide network of aged meat. (wiki "Gustavus Franklin Swift"). New cuts were invented and old cuts modified to facilitate economy of scale. So it's no real mystery why we'd end up with two different vocabularies.

The one that still maeks me boggle (BrE speaker living in the US) is baby back ribs. I mean, where do they get the babies?

Well, you see, the_sybil, when a Mommy Pig loves a Daddy Pig very, very much....

I think that American pig diagram is a bit incomplete -- or perhaps (likely, even) they are talking only about primals and not about market cuts. Pork shoulder, as every Alton Brown fan knows, is for some reason normally referred to as "butt". But the two cuts on the pig's belly are often enough known as "belly" here too, as any commodities trader will know.

And that's not even getting into "bacon", which I think you've covered before, but just to recap: "bacon", in AmE, is always cured and smoked, and always from the belly. Back bacon is "Canadian" or "Irish" bacon (although it apparently can't legally be sold as "Canadian bacon" in Canada).

I remember pork shoulder being called "Boston Butt" many years ago, but now I mostly see it called "pork shoulder roast."

A fryer is 3-4 lbs, and they're hard to find in California any more. The usual chicken that we can buy is about 5 lbs. But when you buy fried chicken, it seems to come from a smaller bird, under 3 lbs.

I thought "baby back ribs" was a trademark of the Chili's restaurant chain.

It's easy to get "shortening" in the UK, shortening just being the generic term for fat used in making pastry: butter, block margarine, or lard. It might be hard to get US brands of shortening, though.

But shortening in AmE isn't generic for butter, block margerine or lard. Lard is probably the easiest to substitute, if that's all you can find, but shortening is specifically a vegetable oil version of lard.

"I've also discovered that you can bake a ham in AmE but not BrE."

Au contraire. In BrE "bake" is a perfectly normal term for doing to a ham that which would be roasting if done to beef, lamb, etc. (viz. putting a large piece of meat in an oven and cooking for an hour or so).

I don't think that myself I've ever heard roast used of ham.

Roasted ham isn't always gammon. It could be smoked pork loin, which my family always called Canadian bacon.

Oh, the embarrassment when we said to some American friends (in the presence of their parents) 'Last time you were here for Sunday lunch we had a joint' - meaning a roast(BrE) or roasted(AmE) meat meal, such as a leg of lamb or beef, or indeed pork.

Gammon joints appear to be more readily available in the autumn, probably a sign of seasonal fluxes in pig-rearing that I am not familiar with - these are better quality meat than a bacon joint in my UK supermarket, and each can be 'green' (unsmoked) or smoked. Gammon is commonly boiled with peppercorns, herbs, onions and carrots, but can also be part-boiled, smothered with some floury-sugary gunk and then cooked in the oven to make a nice 'Virginia baked ham'

I'm a Brit in the US and I wonder what a "London Broil" is. The closest thing I've found to gammon here is a "ham steak". Crisco and lard, while similar, are not interchangeable and I beg to differ with you over sultanas being the same as golden raisins. A golden raisin is definitely not a sultana and for that reason I have my guests bring sultanas over from England when they visit!
Great blog, by the way!

I'm no expert but I've oftenheard of "baked ham" in the UK. Also roast ham, or at least honey-roast ham.

Thanks for the comments so far...

@Anonymous: Yes, I should have said that the images are only primal cuts. I haven't found good info on the market cuts, so I've only given some random info about the market cuts where I knew something about them.

@another Anonymous: As others have said, in AmE, 'shortening' and 'lard' are different things...'shortening' refers colloquially to vegetable shortening...which we use for lots of things, not just short pastry. I've never cooked with lard in my life, and until I moved to the UK, I had no experience of suet as anything but something to make treats for wild birds with...

@Sir Watkin et al.: Will take your word for it on baking hams, and will strike out the line in the post. I came to this impression after several years of teaching Adrienne Lehrer's semantic field analysis of cooking terms in my undergraduate semantics class. There's a point in the diagram where 'roasting' and 'baking' overlap, and I would say "You know, like baking a ham" and my students would say "You can't _bake_ a ham". But they're mostly 19 and living in student accommodation, so their ham-baking experience is probably wanting.

@Janibach: While I take your point that golden raisins sold in the US aren't like the sultanas sold in the UK, my experience of BrE use of the word 'sultana' is that it's used rather indiscriminately. If it's a dried grape and it's baked into a bun or cake, people tend to call it a sultana. But you're right that a proper sultana is made from a different type of grape than a golden raisin (which I think are made from the same type of grape as a regular California raisin--they just do something to keep them from going brown).

An aside: you can buy something at Waitrose called Vine Fruits. It's a mix of exotic raisins, and some of them are just incredible. Not inexpensive, but highly recommended.

Baby back ribs isn't a trademarked. "Baby" in this context means that it comes from a hog (male) and not a sow

@Janibach: According to Alton Brown, "London broil" is a post-war application for flank steak (a cheap cut of meat that was hard to sell); the name was just marketing, to make it sound more sophisticated. You used to see it in school cafeterias and the like, because the school-lunch subsidy program was originally designed as a way to use up surplus agricultural products. I think it's now largely been relegated to very-low-end restaurants and TV dinners. (But there are other, better and more popular things that can be made from the same part of the steer, like fajitas.)

On the word 'gammon'. You may be interested to know that in the Northern Territory (Australia), 'gammon' is a word used to denote something which is 'fake' or 'false', and occasionally, even 'rubbish' (nonsense). Apparently, it derives from the British cut of ham referred to in this article.

We always used the word "shortening" in North Carolina to mean any semi-solid fat used in baking biscuits, cookies, quick breads, pastry, etc. It could be butter, margarine (which is a form of vegetable shortening), lard, hydrogenated vegetable fat (Crisco, etc.) I think people have started to associate the word exclusively with Crisco-like fats nowadays.

I'm surprised about "broiler". In Ireland, "broil" does not exist; it's subsumed into "grill".

I (American) was brought up with "shortening" being Crisco (artificially hydrogenated fat that comes in a cylindrical tin), but when I started baking as adult, I ran into the more general use of the word as fat solid at room temperature used to create a certain texture in baked goods. So I think both meanings are widely known, but that the Crisco meaning is more widely known.

(I've also never lived in the South; many food terms are different there )

Gosh, I'd been feeling old recently, but after reading this I'm all youthful again ;)

I cannot believe that you can still buy Trex! The first I ever heard of it was when Martin Amis tried to introduce it as an ironic adjective in a novel and I had to ask a middle-aged person what it was.

So what's broiling when it's at home?

Also, I'd agree with your 19 year old student types, I'd have said you couldn't bake a ham. Or any kind of meat, meat gets roasted. Incidentally, I've only ever heard of a ham in AmE. My BrE experience would just be 'ham'. But I'm not from a particularly carnivourous clan.

I agree with Solo wrt "a ham" being American. My family in Australia will buy a leg of ham (as opposed to a leg of pork).

"Roast dinner" and "baked dinner" are used interchangeably in Australia but ham is not often heated in such warm climes. My father says "roast" far more often but I've tried to err on the side of "bake" since I saw a show on the history of cooking that declared that "roast" means specifically cooked over an open flame.

One think I've noticed about the word "bake" is that Americans use it a lot more often than I would. Whenever I make a cake, they always say, "You've been baking!" where I would have just said "cooking". Don't know how this compares with the UK.

I agree that baking refers to oven-cooking while roast used to mean spit-roasting (when the fat dripped off the joint into another pan with the spuds or a batter pudding = Yorkshire pudding).

In the days before White Flora (UK) lard was indeed used to make pastry - or butter - such a lot of animal fat! But of course our houses were colder then and we needed the calories and the comfort.

Buying pre-packed sliced pork products: in the UK, bacon refers to the rashers (streaky or back bacon, smoked or unsmoked) that will be fried or grilled for brunch or English Breakfast. Ham is already cooked (could be gammon - same name as jamon in Spanish?) and is sold thinly sliced for sandwiches or salad. Some good buffet tables will offer a ham joint carved as you wait, and in thicker slices - much the best way of eating it.

Lynne: "If it's a dried grape and it's baked into a bun or cake, people tend to call it a sultana." Noooo!! Such people could only be the sort who refer to all 4x4 vehicles as "jeeps"! Sultanas taste quite different from raisins and currants.

Note that the Guardian has recently had many passionate letters about Eccles cakes (which involve baked dried fruit) - e.g. this . You therefore need to tread carefully in this minefield, for there are sensitive souls around.

Also, Solo, I (British) would speak of "a ham" to mean the sort of substantial piece of pig that hangs from a hook in the ceiling of a bar in Spain.

But, David, the reason that some people get pedantic about sultanas is because some people are using the term generally. My observation was (as observations are) descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

"Ham is already cooked (could be gammon - same name as jamon in Spanish?) and is sold thinly sliced for sandwiches or salad. "

Non-Brits should be warned that pre-sliced ham is almost always either reconstituted or injected full of water and preservatives - it's utterly disgusting, in my opinion.

This Wikipedia article is relevant to the raisin discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raisin

Something else I noticed in America (The eight days of my life I've spent in the country) is a far greater tendency towards adding sugary coatings to meats, expecially chicken. Everything in KFC had this sickly aspartame-based 'honey BBQ' coating I seem to recall. [I'd also like to publically distance myself from any association with vile corporate establishments such as KFC, I do know better now] but even inplaces you could acually call restaurants, sugary meat seemed to be par for the course. Maybe that's just Michigan.

I know I'm missing the focus on language, but the decision to use weights when baking is actually a good one, even if you're not translating recipes. Thanks to the advice of the King Arthur Flour Co., I have been using weight entirely for cookies and have gotten much better results. Kitchen scales are not expensive and (at least here in the US) offer the option of metric v stupidamerican weights.

I am reminded of the phrase "Eating high off the hog" for doing well financially (chiefly Southern US?). I would guess one could afford the blade and loins rather than the spare ribs and hocks.

@Solo: If you found out that Blogger is owned by [the vile corporation known as] Google, would you stop posting?

Was interested to see that you used the word Frosting without a BrE translation (Icing)

@NickCaulfieldUK: When I first got here, I thought frosting was AmE, but then I started seeing the word everywhere here in the UK, so I concluded that I had been wrong about that. But, checking the OED, I see that they don't actually have the 'icing' sense of frosting (they have it as a dusting of sugar on a cake--they haven't got(ten) up to F yet in their current revision, so I expect that this will change) and in this article, we can see a UK newspaper marking frosting with "scare quotes", indicating its foreignness. So, I'll update the entry with an (AmE). But--and here we're straying into another potential post--for my AmE dialect, we have both frosting and icing--but they're not exactly the same thing. (Icing is somewhere between a glaze and a frosting in terms of texture/consistency.) But I think that varies regionally in the US...as I say, I'll keep that for another post.

Wait--now I reali{s/z}e why I hadn't marked it as AmE--because it was from a Nigel Slater recipe in the Observer! An example of my experience of frosting acting like a natural fit in BrE. Incidentally, in AmE I'd call his cake gingerbread. In BrE people only use gingerbread to refer to the (AmE) cookies that are typically shaped like people. A word of advice: don't bother buying them in coffee shops or typical bakeries here--they are practically tasteless. I keep getting psyched up for a bit of gingerbread with my coffee, and then I waste my calories on that...

Before you get into icing/frosting as a poster suggests, you might want to read the Great Icing War: http://community.livejournal.com/hp_britglish/355512.html

nineveh_uk

The point about baking a ham is that the ham has been pre-cooked by being boiled first (preferably in a 3-to-one mixture of [hard(AmEng)] cider and cider vineger - mmmm - ) and then baked for only 30 minutes or so after being smothered with the delicious honey-based dressing of your choice. So it's not roasted, although sometimes you will see this referred to as "honey roast ham".

Great post. Love the diagrams. I am a scale convert, but don't find it difficult at all to get Crisco in the international food sections of the local grocery stores (in Brussels, anyway). I also recently saw it in the Selfridge's food hall in London. Not that one could go there every day. Baking aside, I am in the market for the equivalent of a "standing rib roast" for the holidays. Nothing like a challenge! Coincidentally, I just posted a list of cross-cultural baking equivalencies ... Might come in handy.

That's really helpful, Jeannette!

I have always grown up with gingerbread as a "cake" type object to be sliced OR in the sense of gingerbread man. Are you now telling me that is AmE/ScE? If it is, we probably brought it over from movies WAY back. That has happened quite a bit I think: Glasgow (specifically; don't know about elsewhere in Scotland) was famous as a cinema city; I believe Saturday morning serials such as Flash Gordon, and also westerns and Laurel and Hardy, were particularly popular.

@Cameron: My link to the OED is down, so I can't check, but my suspicion is that gingerbread used to be the cake-like substance in all Englishes, but the English may have lost touch with that sense...

So is what you call gingerbread, the same as what I'd call ginger cake? Often prefixed by 'Jamaican'

@Solo: Yes, that was the point I was trying to make about Nigel Slater's recipe.

I may do a separate post on this in a Christmassy way...

Well what do you know? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/dec/02/how-to-cook-christmas-ham

'How To Cook A Christmas Ham' in the Guardian. Further down they refer to it as "a baked gammon" too.

I am a little surprised that nobody has mentioned this, but Crisco-type "vegetable shortening" was specifically designed to behave like lard in cooking, while being more shelf-stable.

My grandmother always used lard in her baking, and her pie crusts were more flaky.

Anyway, if lard is available, you should be able to (re-) substitute it in any baking recipe ("re" because if it's an old recipe, it likely originally had lard, anyway).

You may not want to tell your vegetarian SO, though :)

Suet and vegetable suet, UK types of hard fat useful for making dumplings etc. It's a hard fat from around the kidneys of a beast.

Just yesterday enjoyed a huge 'lardy cake' in a bakery in Salisbury. It's a very sweet fruit bread made with lard - you can feel your arteries closing up as you eat it - eaten slightly warm. Gorgeous! The wikipedia article is worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardy_cake

My father was a butcher, born in England, but lived his adult life in both Canada and the UK. We always had the dilemma of "What do they mean by ..." when it came to meat and cuts of meat. The marketed cuts of meat certainly follow the general guidelines from the piccies above, but as time has gone on, butchers have found better ways of cutting meat to get better value out of the cuts and modified the names of the cuts or even added new "cuts" to the list. I am reminded of cooking the use of French language vs Cooking French!

Shortening was historically hydrogenated vegetable oil ... yup ... the one that is worse than saturated fats for our arteries. Is it any wonder we have so much heart disease in the Shortening generations? It has been available since the 1960s in England ... but it came in small packets unlike the huge tubs of Crisco! The English preferred lard and animal fats for cooking until recent years. Now it's up in the air as to which is best.

A few other thoughts ...

Gammon ... from the French jambon ... ham ... or if you wish the good part of the leg (the hock and feet or trotters being poor quality except for maybe flavour!)

Bacon ... You CAN get green bacon in Canada ... it's rare.

In the UK for sliced bacon rashers you get

Streaky
Back
Long back
Collar
Gammon

in Canada we get

Bacon
Peameal Bacon

Streaky is exactly what it looks like and in Canada (and the US) it's just Bacon

Back is the loin (eye) with a very short tail of streaky.

Long back is the loin (eye) with a nearly full length of streaky attached

Collar is generally not available in Canada as a type of bacon

Gammon is also generally not available in Canada as a type of bacon, but just occasionally you'll find it if you go to a specialty shop.

Bacon as above is Streaky

Peameal bacon is the eye of back bacon (usually from the larger part of the loin), without ANY streaky attached and rolled in peameal (ground peas). Peameal has tended to go out of fashion in favour of the more golden coloured cornmeal.

Baby back ribs - also known as loin ribs come from the upper part of the back where the loin meets the spine. They are named "baby" because they are shorter than conventional spare ribs. ... nothing to do with the age or gender of the pig. :-)

Mince (UK) is ground beef or hamburg ... and is generally of relatively high fat content. Minced steak is usually higher quality ground beef with lower fat content. Fat content is now usually on the label shown as a percentage.

Mince should not be confused with mincemeat which today usually does not contain any ground meat! It is a compote of dried fruits, distilled or other highly flavoured alcohol (sherry, port, fruit wine). Not so many years ago it also contained beef suet, but it will normally say so.

Oops missed ...

jambon ... jambe = leg, bon = good

The "British" diagrams are English, not British. Scotland uses cuts vastly f=different from England. When I married my English wife and took her to Scotland (which she had never previously visited) she was completely at sea in butchers' shops. she also didn't know how to cook some of the cuts - I had to teach her. She was shocked by the prices (higher than she was used to) until she'd been there a few months, and then she declared it was better value than anything she could get in England. When we shifted back to England several years later she was not happy - didn't like English meat cuts any more.

Just to add some more confusion to this discussion: We here in Colorado think of “gingerbread” as a spicy loaf cake similar to banana bread or spice cake unless it is qualified as “gingerbread cookies.” These are usually human shaped spicy cookies with no similarity in texture nor taste to the gingerbread cake. We also make “gingerbread houses” at Christmas which are traditionally constructed of thin slabs of individually baked gingerbread cookie dough held together with royal icing frosting and decorated with candy canes, peppermint candies, etc.,. The royal icing is also used to simulate snow on the roof and grounds of the house. Gingerbread houses are now sometimes made of cardboard by the philistines among us.
“Gingerbread” is also used to describe the ornate curly-que decorations on Victorian/Edwardian era (Post U.S. Civil War to Pre WWI – 1870 to 1910) houses that became all the rage once the band saw was perfected.

How about a comparison for lamb, which is difficult to find in the US.

Attempting to compare "British" cuts is a bit crazy, as Scotland and England use different cuts.

When I was a boy in Nottingham, the mother of one of my school-friends would cross town to a butcher's (co-incidentally, our butcher's) which still used old-fashioned cuts that were once the local norm. This suggests to me that standardisation was well under way in England in the 1950's and virtually complete in the 1960's in areas that held out, such as Nottingham.

Buying meat in Scotland, I see the same cuts offered as I knew in England. Some have different names : gigot of lamb rather than leg; hough rather than shin of beef. OK, pope's eye steak was a surprise when I first came to Scotland, but I believe the cut is now sold in England.

[At least, I understood one source to define pope's eye as a thin slice of rump. But another seems to suggest that pope's eye is simply a local name for rump.]

I never got to know the traditional local cuts that our Nottingham butcher offered. Nothing we bought was different to what other butchers and supermarkets were offering. Presumably he did just a few alternative cuts for regular elderly/old-fashioned customers. I suspect the same thing goes on today in some Scottish butcher's shops.

The only difference I ever discovered in Nottingham is that the butcher once corrected me when I asked for pork spare ribs. No, he said, what I wanted was sparribs, not the same thing at all. I wish I'd asked him what spare ribs were to him. All I gathered was that spare ribs had more meat on them.

BrE, Scot, mid 60s. Like several others commenting, what I call gingerbread is what most people in the south call ginger cake. However, have none of our AmE speakers seen Shrek?

In New Zealand our meat cuts align mostly with the English English.
A ham here is generally cured and smoked leg of pig which is sliced and eaten cold (refereed to as “ham off the bone”, not to be confused with “ham” which is normally just extruded and sliced cured pork). We roast lamb, beef, chicken and pork for Sunday Lunch and all are just large cuts of raw meat cooked in the oven with root vegetables. We bake ham for Christmas, which is a cured ham (as above), glazed and baked in an oven, served hot. Gammon wasn’t something I’d heard of until I lived in England.
Silverside and corned beef (or even salt beef) are used interchangeably to mean a brined silverside cut of beef. Although in the Pacific Island communities, corned beef is normally flank that has been brined and sold in large buckets.

@shy-reply Your mention of Ginger Cake reminded me of an old episode of British TV humor. J.J.Jamaican Ginger Cake
https://youtu.be/wjKySkPrdyo
Any non-Brits may have a little trouble with some accents, but may find that of interest of course.

Personally, I find cups and spoons sensible and intuitive in recipes. I find it difficult to know how much eg 450g or 1lb of something is without having a weighing scales to hand.

I too would like a definitive comparison list of US/Canada/UK/IE/other cuts of meat.