If you lived here you would be home by now.

Sauces and sunshine.

What is the difference between these two bottles of HP sauce?

Is it…

a. the one on the left is British, and the one on the right is Canadian?

or is it…

b. the one on the left is lush and should be compulsory on all barbecue products, and the one on the right mings heavily and should be only put on things so the dog will not chew them?

The answer is both a and b, but also c:

c. the one on the left is room temperature, and the one on the right lives in the fridge.

It’s very, very hot today – the first time in the city this year. So this is an extremely important and timely question:

Why do Canadians, when they spend so much time behind a barbecue during the summer, smother their meat or veggie burgers with condiments that are ice cold? Doesn’t it, well, make the food no longer piping hot?

There might be a thing going on there with hot food and cold food together tasting good, like cold ice cream on hot apple crumble. Which is understandable. But burger is not dessert, and I find that to taste something, it needs to be at least close to body temperature.

But most Canadians would disagree. This country has some strange ideas as to what temperature things need to be consumed at.

To illustrate, I have illustrated the temperature of a selection of common items I eat for breakfast, after painstaking research and months of careful observation. [1]

I have already explained brown sauce, so let us take the rest in turn:

Beer in Canada is only served just as its about to freeze. Coors Light even comes in cans that turn blue if it’s very cold. This is because if Canadian lager is cold enough to numb your tastebuds, you suppress the gag reflex, and you can drink it. Myself, I actually take beer out of the fridge and leave it in the sun for an hour so it is warm enough to taste: Black Sheep Ale, for instance, has a recommended drinking temperature of 11C.

Eggs, for some reason, have to go in the fridge here. In fact, in supermarkets, they can only be found in the fridge, a fact that utterly confused me for a full 20 minutes on my first shopping trip. Unless all the chickens [2] in Canada live in giant refridgerators, this makes no logical sense. Another reason this doesn’t make sense: you generally have to apply heat to eggs to eat them.

Toast must never be served or eaten at anything less than steaming hot. Not even Canadian birds will eat toast that has gone a little bit cold. And raccoons will only use warm toast to wipe their arses with.

Coffee is similar. Drive-through coffee is normally served at the temperature of lava, and the lids are usually spring-loaded. We laughed a lot in the UK about the story of the woman who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot, but liquids in confined spaces at 3,500C are no source of amusement.

In the UK, if the coffee in the machine has been standing around for a while developing a sweaty bouquet, it’s delicious.

The final, and most important thing I have marked on this map is the Zone of Pain, which exists between 10C and 80C. In Canada, any consumables that enter this zone are immediately unpalatable and must be thrown away.

This sometimes causes problems in our kitchen, particularly when I am making tea. After I pour the tea, brew it for the requisite ten minutes and add milk, the temperature sometimes dips into the Zone of Pain. The Canadians with me politely drink this tea, and then water the pot-plants with it when my back is turned.

You will notice that all of the British breakfast products exist within the Zone of Pain.

I’m off to suck on a couple of ice cubes, and burn my tongue off with a chai tea latte.

Next week: a Canada Day roadtrip diary special!

Related links

Warm beer v cold beer
CBC: Toronto calls heat alert
Firebox: The Condiment Gun

[1] This blog, like all blogs and everybody’s opinion on the internet, has been subject to peer-review, and you should take it as seriously as you would any academic journal. [back]
[2] I am fully aware that this is the third time on this blog I have talked about chickens, and I promise to stop eventually. [back]