This Side of the Pond

I have jumped up a level on my American initiation, and I managed it all by myself. This weekend, I cooked my very first tater tot casserole.

To understand why I set myself this challenge, we’re going to need to rewind the decades. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was young, my life was saturated with American culture.

Movies, shows, books, music – you name it, we imported it. We had plenty of our own, but we were still gluttons for American entertainment.

What we didn’t import was the things that the people in those stories were doing. We remained bereft of roller derbies, proms and tailgate parties. This wasn’t a problem with most concepts, because you could understand what the characters were just by looking at the screen.

Imported shows educated me as to what a homecoming is, for example, or a drive-through window. They taught me that taxis are always yellow, that kids always travel in school buses and the difference between a policeman and an FBI agent (aliens, right? I learned that one from Mulder and Scully.)

It worked because I was given a name and an explanation at the same time, and in most cases the two were aligned (except with the aliens. That one turned out to be a lie). The people on my television would announce what they were about to do, and then they’d go ahead and do it.

But there was one aspect of American culture that couldn’t be conveyed via the screen: your cuisine. It was equally frustrating when your foods were mentioned in books, because authors don’t generally describe things their readers are already familiar with. And thus we Brits heard about endless edibles that made no sense to us at all.

Cornbread, funnel cakes, chowder and Twinkies – none of these were available in the UK, as far as I could tell. My generation grew up desperate to know what curious delights were eluding us.

There was no such thing as internet shopping, so we didn’t have the means to import them. We had no choice but to remain ignorant, which meant one of the biggest perks of my move to Wyoming was that I’d at last have an opportunity for enlightenment.

Since I landed, I’ve tried all sorts of once-mysterious foods. I’ve fallen in love with hash browns, brats and Eggos; I’ve discovered that that the pre-packaged cakes my teenage self wanted to try actually taste like packing foam, but you still can’t stop eating them once you’ve started.

I realized last week that there was an item left on my younger self’s list: the mythical tater tot casserole. I’ve been Stateside a while now, but I still wasn’t sure what it was.

I asked the husband if he could whip one up for the sake of my culinary education. Unfortunately, he hadn’t even eaten tater tot casserole since grade school, let alone made one, so he was no help at all.

I was going to have to make this happen myself, so I tapped a couple of friends for advice and scoured the internet to find the most basic of basic recipes. It turned out to be a lot easier than I was expecting; 45 minutes in the oven and my gooey, crispy, cheese-infused creation was complete.

My first thought upon trying it was: I hope there’s plenty of acid reflux chews in the bathroom cabinet. My second: where has this been all my life?

The next time I come across a Brit who has always wondered what tater tot casserole is, I think I shall describe it as “the fast food version of a cottage pie”. This is exactly what I was planning to say to my mum when I told her all about it.

Sadly, I had to stop before I got to my explanation, because she’d already been stumped at the first hurdle. We still don’t know the name “tater tots” in the UK, so she was missing the whole point of the exercise.

I was going to need to explain the main ingredient before she’d be able to offer the praise I so richly deserved, which meant it was time to turn to my faithful companion: the internet. It took some sleuthing to narrow it down.

At first I thought a tater tot was the same thing as a “potato croquette”, which would have made sense because we Brits seldom pass up an opportunity to make ourselves seem posh by talking French. Unfortunately, it turned out that a croquette is mashed potato in a breadcrumb casing, which isn’t the same thing at all.

I knew we’d imported the idea of a tater tot (probably after we saw them in a movie), but it turned out we only did so via one particular brand – and we didn’t keep them around for very long. Apparently we prefer croquettes, which is almost certainly because we think they sound fancier.

They couldn’t call them tater tots without revealing they were being copycats, so the manufacturer went for “oven crunchies” instead. This is neither descriptive nor appetizing, so it’s no wonder they didn’t stick around for long.

The name change explains why they didn’t take off in the motherland, but it also reveals a sad truth: our two worlds were never as far apart as we thought. All those years spent pondering the mysteries of your foods, when if that company had only admitted they were peddling exactly the same potato product we were hearing about on television, we could have been dining on American entrees all along.