When I was last at the grocery store, I was wandering down the cereal isle and decided to buy some Weetabix. As I am the type of person I am, this has led me into an incredible period of moroseness.
For those of you who don't know, Weetabix are these wheat cake cereal things that come from England. I used to eat them as a child, when we would visit my Grandfather and Nana in Cross Keys (a little farming town outside of King's Lynn). I had good memories.
While they still taste fine, they are texturally weird. They are the biggest absorbers of milk I have ever seen--and when they get milk, they revert to a mush state, so you can't just put them in a bowl of milk like with normal cereal. No, you have to put it in the bowl, pour a carefully measured amount of milk around it, and you have to have just enough milk so that it will absorb halfway up the cereal cake, thus balancing mushiness and sawdust textures. It makes eating breakfast much more of a ritual than it should be, and is frankly a bit of a pain in the ass.
Maybe the existance of such a product reveals some deep, cultural insight about the British character; maybe Eoin can lend some insight. Frankly, however, it just sort of bums me out.
1 comment:
Like you say, add just the right amount of milk- a tiny amount, and they are fine. Then put sugar on top, which sucks some of the milk back out of the bix and forms a sort of sweet crust. Yum.
I believe they are some kind of wartime standard preserved food thing, born of rationing and general blandness of diet. They must be carefully treated.
They can be used in cooking- add a crumbled one or two to bolognese for a healthy treat, etc. They arent just breakfast cereal.
-eoin
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