Meals

Daily meals usually start with breakfast. An English breakfast is different from ours. Traditional British breakfast consists of a glass of fruit juice, cornflakes with sugar and milk and toast with marmalade or jam or honey. Quite a lot of British people eat müsli for their breakfast or some other ready-made cereals or porridge. In the morning they usually drink tea or coffee.
The second meal is lunch taken between 12 and 1 o‘clock. People usually have their lunch in the factory or school canteen or in a restaurant. It consists of some soup, a main dish, something to drink and salad or dessert.
Soups are either vegetable soups (potato, tomato, pea, bean, carrot, parsley, celery, mushrooms) or meat teas (beef tea, tripe, chicken or goulash soup etc.). Some people cook fruit soups (e.g. strawberry soup).
The main dish can be either sweet - e.g. strawberry or plum dumplings, pancakes with jam and cream, baked yeast dumplings, doughnuts etc. Or we can have some meat or fish or poultry with some vegetables such as potatoes, chips, rice, Czech dumplings, pasta or bread. We distinguish the following types of meat: beef, pork, veal, mutton, lamb, game and we can prepare it in various ways - roast it, grill it, boil it, bake it or stew it. Poultry means things like chicken, hen, duck, turkey, goose. The fish most often cooked in our country is carp (it s a traditional Christmas meal - battered carp and potato salad).
Typical Czech meals include: Tripe soup, potato soup, "kulajda" soup, roasted goose with sauerkraut and Czech dumplings, Moravian sparrows with and dumplings, Spanish birds, potato pancakes, fruit dumplings with cream, baked yeast dumplings, fried cheese etc. Traditional Czech cuisine is however a bit unhealthy and people can get fat. Many families prefer to cook more vegetable meals, they become vegetarians or try some kind of foreign food.
After the main dish we may drink tea, lemonade, cider, juice, Coca-Cola, mineral water, syrup and water, while the adults like beer and black coffee after their dinner.
While cooking we may add various spices so that the meal will have an unique flavour – for example garlic, sage, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, curry, pepper, ginger, red pepper, mace, cinnamon, clove, cumin, bay leaf, allspice, ketchup, Soya sauce, Worchester, sugar, vinegar, mustard, peanuts, onions, flour etc.
An evening meal may be either warm or cold. Cold and quick supper may consist of some paté on bread or rolls, kippers or some spread. We can cook a ready-made dish from a tin or have soup or potato pancakes.
Fast food is a typical feature of both British and American life styles. The Americans call fast food restaurants "cheapies". These places - McDonald s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken (in America also Mrs. Winner’s) usually offer beverages (Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, tea, coffee, milkshakes...), some solid food like roast chicken and chips, hamburgers, sandwiches, pizza, salads or deserts. The oldest type of fast food is seafood stalls or shops - usually fish and chips. Another typical feature of British and American lifestyle is popcorn. You can buy it when you are walking the streets.