Dairy products

Cheeses that I do like include Cheddar, Cheshire, Leicester, German Raucherkäse, La Vache Qui Rit or Kraft Dairylea cheese spread. I also occasionally eat something like Edam, though I would never buy Edam and only eat on average a tiny amount of it — perhaps one helping every few years, at most.

I put fresh, very cold pasteurized milk on cereals such as corn flakes when I occasionally eat those. I used to drink milk as a child but stopped when aged about 20 as I was suffering from chronic-to-permanent catarrh, and avoiding milk stopped that. Since then (1970) I have occasionally ordered a stawberry “shake” in Macdonalds; I'd only drink it through a straw (this makes a difference) and I've only had one of those in about thelast five years anyway. Otherwise, I don't drink milk — as a drink — at all and have not for over 35 years.

I cannot stand the taste of “real” cream, as in “real fresh cream”. I have in my time been invited to summer occasions celebrating the dessert ("pudding"), only to find that all twenty varieties of dessert on offer — from the cakes to the trifles — featured large quantities of whipped cream already all over them, so there was nothing for me to eat at all. The runny cream that people pour on summer desserts instead of proper custard (made with custard powder) is equally horrible (indeed, even more so), and is certainly no comparison with proper custard. To me both kinds of fresh cream taste sickly and nauseating.

What bizarrely is called in England crème fraîche (French for "fresh cream") but is in truth not fresh cream — dictionary.com says “slightly fermented cream that has been thickened by lactic acids and natural fermentation” which means it has started to go bad and my mother would have poured it down the sink and rinsed out the bottle quickly — is even more disgusting than actual fresh cream. This is just another example of Gallic gastronomic mendacity and delusion, and the morass of yuck that surrounds French food.

Another French misnomer is to call custard, the proper sort made with custard powder (cornflour, yellow colouring, and vanilla flavouring), crème Anglaise. Custard is not cream or anything to do with it. It is milk pudding.

The sort of custard made with egg (as opposed to proper custard powder) is, of course, beyond the Pale. Never mind the origin of the dish or the etymology; Mr Bird's custard powder (or a supermarket's own brand equivalent, though these seem to have dissapeared as of 2007) is the only way to make custard, and I have a painting that says so.