Each week, one of our favorite writers is drafting a list of every instance their favorite food saved their life. From slices of pizza to bagels, tacos to tamales, these emotional eats remind us that food is so much more than fuel.
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Since living in New York as a English expat, I’ve become a caricature of Britishness: my accent sounds like a Monty Python spoof, I drink inordinate amounts of PG Tips; I harp on about good manners (no starting dinner until everyone is seated!); and I seem to be on a one-woman mission to introduce the crumpet to every American I meet.
Let me explain what a crumpet is – apologies if you’re up to speed on this, but most people seem baffled, and no, it’s not a pancake or an English muffin or a biscuit or anything else you find on the baked goods shelves here. It’s a crumpet: a one-inch thick flat disc with a soft porous surface and a chewy, pliable texture, made with a thin yeast batter and baked on a griddle. It is imperative a crumpet is toasted and then doused in such heart attack-inducing lashings of butter that it drips through those holes, leaving your fingers sticky.
Incidentally, crumpet is also old school British slang for an attractive person. You could say, (though no one really would): “Oo-er, he’s a nice bit of crumpet, isn’t he?” This works because everyone in England understands the inherent desirability of a hot buttery crumpet. It makes less sense in America.
British crumpet-y goodness. Photo by Jenny Lianos
The Nostalgic Crumpet
This isn’t one specific incidence, but childhood would not have been childhood without crumpets. An after-school crumpet is the elementary school equivalent of a stiff after-work drink; at six years old I thought about that crumpet with the same bleary-eyed fixation as I think about my first gin & tonic now. Before I discovered gin, it was the buttery baked goodness of a crumpet that gave me my kicks. School let’s out at 4 p.m., which gives you just enough time to get home, make a cup of tea, and pop some crumpets in the toaster before watching Neighbours , an Australian soap opera that was once compulsory viewing for every kid in the UK, as well as all University students; it also launched the careers of Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, and Russell Crowe. Guy Pearce could also be described as a nice bit of crumpet, though the only person who’d say that is your elderly auntie Cheryl, who’d say it with a wink.
The marmite makes it. Photo by Jenny Lianos
The Hangover Crumpet
I keep emergency crumpets in the freezer for hangovers. It’s not just about the crumpet at this point, but also the Marmite, which I admit, is a weird British fetish. I don’t know what it is either (yeast?), but it’s salty and rich and peaty and addictive. It’s also packed with B vitamins like thiamine and niacin and other things that sound like they’ll kill you, but in fact are essential to health – and, I’m sure, have some as-yet-undisclosed hangover benefits.
Many years ago now, I was at a Glastonbury Festival. I hadn’t stumbled back to my camp until it was already light, and I woke in that insulated sweat pit of a tent in the midday sun, like an ant under a magnifying glass (if that ant had also indulged in huge amounts of mind-altering substances the night before). I crawled out gasping for fresh air, and realized it was only a matter of hours until I was meant to be working a shift and that required me to be quasi-upright and capable of communicating with other quasi-upright human beings in something resembling English. My ears were still ringing from the night before, and I felt (and looked) like I’d been wrestling with a giant glitter-covered rabbit on a trampoline, which wasn’t far from the truth.
I needed help. I needed normality. I was a wounded soldier on the party battleground, when in the distance I saw a row of lampshades and a giant steaming teapot and in red letters the words: Strumpets with Crumpets . My heart melted. I would have run if it wasn’t for the knee-high mud and the throbbing headache. Inside this flamboyant food truck contraption was a lady in a corset, pearls, and a top hat, looking like the courtesan of the crumpet, the high priestess of baked salvation. “You serve crumpets?” I said hopefully, probably stammering, and she smiled and pointed up to the sign. I couldn’t quite believe it. She made me a buttery crumpet and a mug of hot tea, to which she added a stealth shot of rum from under the bar (I obviously needed it), and she told me that everything was going to be okay.
Photo by Jenny Lianos
The Transatlantic Crumpet
I’ve lived in New York on and off for two years. At first it was just a filthy affair behind London’s back, and then I realized I’d fallen for the city hard, and I packed up a giant red suitcase to make my home here. In my first few weeks, I lived on dollar slices and ate fried chicken for brunch and followed people talking with Brooklyn accents just to hear it; I crawled dive bars, knocked back boilermakers, and went to speakeasies in bookshops and bookshops in school buses; I was often drunk and I was usually happy, but sometimes, when I was hungover and homesick, I would open and close my freezer hoping some crumpets would magically appear. I scoured supermarkets to no avail: apparently Whole Foods sells crumpets, but I’ve never found them.
That all changed the day my best friend Blondie arrived from London to see me. In her suitcase, like a little piece of packaged home, she had smuggled three whole packets of crumpets. That’s 24 crumpets in total, which at two crumpets a time, if I rationed myself, would give me 12 crumpet hits when I needed them most. Those crumpets are long gone, alas, but I know their powers are as strong as ever (even after a transatlantic flight).
