Standing in the line at the supermarket the other day, I watched a man unpack a variety of cheeses, crackers, a bottle of red wine, some pate from his grocery basket. I'm not usually so forward but for some reason, this evidence of a celebration brought a smile to my face on a difficult day. "A feast!," I said. He answered in a lovely British accent that it was his anniversary and the spread was to share with his wife. We then had a chat while our purchases were rung up and just the sound of his BBC-perfect accent caused me delight.

I am an Anglophile. Have been since I read my first British fairy tale as a child (or perhaps when it was told to me, even before I could read).

I have said for years that God made a little mistake when I was born, like mixing up the pieces when setting up a chess game. Some poor miserable Englishman (or woman) was supposed to have been born in sunny Hawai'i and I was supposed to have been born in drizzly England, preferably in Cookham-on-Thames, near Cliveden (the beautiful stately house where the Profumo affair took place; I'm glancing up at a photo of on my wall even as I write). I only hope that person got to visit Hawai'i as I have visited England a half dozen times.

I love everything about the country, even the silly things, like their tendency to lie in the sun fully clothed on a warm day. I even love the food, much maligned as it has been. I told the gentleman in the supermarket line that the thing I missed most was pork pies. He looked up in surprise. "You really DO know England," he said.

There's nothing quite like a pork pie in this country: They are tall raised pies about the size and shape of a small saucepan or maybe an old-fashioned coffee pot, filled with finely textured pork — more along the lines of SPAM than ham — and the pastry is industrial strength. They are so exactly what your arteries do not need it's as though they'd been invented on purpose to make work for coronary surgeons. They are delicious beyond belief. They are found in every bakery and supermarket and you eat them cold or at room temperature. If I came within two feet of one right now I'd mow down my mother to get to it. And even though I've seen recipes for them, and tried them, they just can't be reproduced here, something about the nature of the flour and the pork.

The breakfasts at English B & Bs are heaven and totally predictable, almost invariably the same: streaky bacon (more like Canadian bacon than our fatty stuff), perfectly done fried eggs, grilled tomatoes or mushrooms, toast with marmalade. The toast comes sitting in these darling little upright racks and it's usually cold but that just makes the butter taste better! (I bought a Georgian-era silver toast rack there and it's one of my proudest possessions.) The racks, sensibly, are so the toast doesn't get soggy; each piece is separated from the other. Wish American restaurants got it that stacking great piles of toast on a plate makes for the texture of cotton wool.

I love the cheeses, the country breads, the incredibly sweet butter with its slightly acidic tang. And don't get me started on the decadence with which they actually pour thick cream over cake! As if the cake weren't rich enough! Yow!

And I love their homely meat-and-tw0-veg diner plates, their equivalent of our plate lunch.

One of my favorites is sausage and mash because it's easy to re-create here: "banger" sausages, a fine-textured white pork sausage, grilled or fried, and served in a continent of mashed potatoes. Talking to my new British friend made me decide to have an English evening and tonight I made sausage and mash with peas. It was "topping," as the characters in frivolous British novels like to say.

You can find bangers at some Safeway stores. They're mildly spiced, rich without being fatty and delicious. (My top three sausages: Portuguese, of course; Louisiana boudin, which is made with pork and rice, and bangers.)

It was lovely to have a few minutes of feeling as though I were in England again.

P.S. I also had the best Indian food of my life in England but the Chinese food was dreck.

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