A hearty (New) English pub lunch

As part of our goal of not wasting yet another summer sitting around (and then spending the fall bemoaning the fact that we did nothing all summer), The Boy and I came up with a plan to take a few day trips and see some new places.

Our first ride was back to Portsmouth, NH. Okay, that wasn't a completely new place, but I hadn't been able to get the scotch eggs out of my mind. So the real point of the trip was to have lunch at the Coat of Arms pub.

The Coat of Arms is a pretty fair approximation of the real English pub experience: it's a dark room with a long, solid bar, a snooker table, dart boards, footie on the telly and the pervasive odor of stale cigarette smoke. It also has a good selection of beer on tap, including Old Speckled Hen, McEwans, Courage and Tetley.



And, of course, our main reason for visiting: a menu that includes such traditional, artery-clogging delicacies as scotch eggs,



a surprisingly good steak and kidney pie,



a sausage, fish and chips basket meal that renders future visits to the rather overpriced A Salt and Battery in NYC unnecessary,



and a treacle pudding and custard that wasn't quite perfect--the treacle had soaked into the sponge instead of sitting on top, and the "homemade" custard tasted suspiciously like the canned Ambrosia version--but certainly nostalgically lovely enough under the circumstances.



It's probably not the healthiest thing to be an hour's drive from such greasy, stodgy, salty temptation. But it's good to know that, when the urge strikes, there's a place to indulge occasional cravings for the food of My People.