[joshvm]

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.

A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.

[unwind]

Yeah, it's like people who spend time around campfires and have watched American media are all going "let's make s'mores" [1], and then they realize that "graham crackers" [2] are a mystery ingredient that nobody knows anything about.

Digestives [3] are the typical substitution in my experience, but again nobody knows how close they're getting. They look thicker, to me ...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%27more

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestive_biscuit

[joshvm]

Well also that you can buy graham cracker crumbs, for making things like pie crusts. My friend gave me a weird look when we went shopping and I picked up whole crackers. And then the revelation that graham refers to a type of flour and is not in itself a brand. And Kelloggs sell the crumbs? Wild.

A biscuit base in the UK would usually require a pack of digestives and a rolling pin. I suppose some supermarket sells crumbled biscuits but...

As an aside, Golden Grahams used to be popular in the UK and I don't think anyone stopped to ask what the name meant.

[dolmen]

Golden Grahams is popular in France too, but as a foreign name, nobody ever looked it up.

[dpflug]

Digestives are a bit thicker, but the ones I had while over there weren't substantially so. You're less likely to get the shared experience of dealing with the goopy mess all over your fingers because your graham is shattering at the first bite.

[bigmanjon]

Digestives actually is a pretty good sub! Yeah theyre thicker but I think the most substantial difference is that graham crackers are significantly harder and less crumbly.

[MrWB]

If you’re in the UK/Europe, the best alternative I’ve found are Bahlsen’s Milk Dark Chocolate Leibniz.

Still has the issue of what is this branded product really though.

[joncrocks]

I think another option is chocolate 'malted milk' (in the UK) - depending on your preference for ratio of biscuit to chocolate to marshmallow. Leibniz will have more/thicker chocolate, but malted milk will break a bit easier in the mouth (softer/crumblier biscuit).

[rtpg]

I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.

But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.

We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.