Vanilla Cheesecake and Festering Flesh.

The supermarket I use had packs of ‘New York Vanilla Cheesecake’ on special offer this week, so I bought one. It made six perfectly adequate portions (two, I suppose, if you’re American, but I’m not) and is proving highly enjoyable. Whether there is anything quintessentially New Yorkist about vanilla cheesecake I wouldn’t know, of course. Maybe one of my special people from over that way will tell me.

It did, however, bring to mind something I was saying to somebody recently – that Americans have a far more varied cuisine than we poor Brits do (although it’s getting better; we do have curry, pasta, quiche, pizza and bean sprouts these days.) This is obviously due to the fact that America is still a relatively young culture with an immigrant base, and so the fruits of the earth have been handed to them on a lot of different plates.

But then I discovered today that it goes back a little further than that. It’s now finally been proved that early settlers in Virginia were moved to dig up human bodies and eat them during the killer winter of 1609-10. So there you have it: the American taste for a varied menu goes back at least four hundred years. The report didn’t say what they had for dessert.