I never saw these kitchen items before moving to England
When I first moved to the UK, plenty of differences surprised me. Pants were trousers, roundabouts were terrifying, and I discovered that tea was actually good. I hadn’t expected quite so many differences in my own kitchen.
After eight years here, some things I’d found strange had become second nature. A washing machine in the kitchen no longer surprised me, and English mustard had become part of my Christmas routine. Others had required me to admit I’d been wrong. Kitchen scales, I’m looking at you.
I changed my mind about scales
When I arrived, I complained about recipes that used weight measurements. I’d grown up with measuring cups, and that was all I knew. Changing to scales felt frustrating and annoying because it wasn’t something I’d ever done, or even thought about doing.
Eight years later, I could say I was wrong. I thought scales were more efficient and effective, and I preferred them. I still had a set of measuring cups that a friend bought as a little reminder of home, but I used them infrequently. Cups and spoons had been what my mum and grandma used, so they were what I used too. It took moving for me to change that habit.
Yorkshire pudding tins explained a family meal
Before moving, I’d never seen Yorkshire pudding trays, with their shallow round wells. I already knew the puddings, though. When we visited one set of grandparents, Grandma would make a wonderful meal that typically included roast beef, mashed potatoes, vegetables, gravy and Yorkshire puddings. Her house was the only place I’d had them, and I hadn’t watched her making them.
At the time, that was a special meal Grandma cooked, rather than something we called a Sunday roast. Once I moved here and encountered Sunday roasts, I realised that was what she’d been making us. I understood it as something her mum, who was from the UK, would have taught her and she then passed on to us. I’d been eating it without knowing that connection.
I bought my own tins for a video in the kitchen at our old flat and made Yorkshire puddings myself for the first time. They became part of our Christmas tradition. My partner is a really good cook and handles pretty much everything else, while the Yorkshire puddings are my responsibility. I love them. They’re one of the best parts of a roast for me.
The kettle came out of the basement
I did know what an electric kettle was before moving. What changed was its place in everyday life. Growing up in Canada, my mum had an old kettle we kept in the basement. We might use it about once a year to make Jell-O, the jelly dessert that needs boiling water, and otherwise it was largely forgotten.
Our kettle in England was a different story. My partner and I had coffee in the morning, so we boiled the kettle for that. Then there might be tea in winter or a sleepy-time tea before bed. We used it all the time, sometimes two or three times a day. It had become a staple of the kitchen.
Laundry moved in with the cooking
I’d seen plenty of washing machines before moving, but never one in the kitchen. The different Canadian homes I’d lived in, including my own apartment and a student house, had laundry rooms. Typically that meant space for the washing machine, dryer and somewhere to hang things that couldn’t go in the dryer, often down in the basement.
Our washing machine here lived in the kitchen. Homes were smaller than what I was used to, and we had to use the space we had. At the time of this tour, we didn’t own a dryer. We’d previously had a combined washer-dryer, but I thought the drying function was poor: it ran for ages and things still came out wet enough to need hanging up.
So we had a washing machine and a drying rack in the kitchen. A nice dinner party could come with laundry drying in the corner. Having it all there had been unusual to me, but after years of living here, it had become ordinary.
New food became a Christmas habit
I hadn’t had a butter dish growing up, either. We were a margarine family, and I knew that might simply have been us rather than everyone in Canada. Here, I enjoyed cooking with actual butter and bought a dish because I was tired of dealing with its sticky wrapping.
Sausage rolls and English mustard were another change. I didn’t think I’d had a sausage roll in Canada before moving, and I’d never tried that mustard. Together, I loved them. On Christmas morning, we’d have little sausage rolls warmed in the air fryer with some English mustard. Alongside my Yorkshire pudding responsibility later in the day, that had become part of Christmas here. Things that once seemed unfamiliar were now things I did every year.
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