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No13: Helen George, actress, 30 or 31, 5'7 (?), ran a marathon in the Spring.

Joanne is the pro who will not be assigned a celeb as per her Twitter. With three more celebrities to come, there have been sightings arriving at group rehearsals of a blond woman (Helen George?) and Iwan Thomas (Athlete turned telly person). Both could be good signings, I think.

http://abc.go.com/shows/dancing-with-the-stars/news/updates/08252015-victor-espinoza-dancing-with-the-stars-season-21-cast Victor Espinoza

Brendan's wife has tweeted that there are two more women and one man still to be announced, so that suggests one of the female pros is not getting a partner. Unless there's a twist...

No 12: Jamelia, singer and TV personality, 34, about 5'7. Looks to be in good shape. Courts controversy as one of the hosts of Loose Women (think it's a bit like The View). Divisive character, I think.

It seems, from the Strictly Facebook page that there are only four more celebs to be revealed, so one of our 16 pros will be celeb-less. No idea if it was always planned this way or if someone has dropped out at the last minute.

It's all coriander. You'd say coriander seeds or ground coriander for the spice and you'd say fresh coriander (or dried) for the herb. If a recipe just said chopped coriander, it would be obvious it meant the fresh herb, I think.

No 10: Jay MacGuiness, 25, member of boyband The Wanted, 6'1, may have some dance background No 11: Anita Rani, 37, BBC journalist/presenter (another!), slim, attractive

We do! Well, I do (so long as it's the crunchy stuff). It's not as popular here as jam, but you'd find a jar in most homes. Something very popular to have on toast or bread here is Marmite (a yeast extract). It's a love-it or loathe-it ingredient (so much so, that to say something or someone 'is marmite' is an everyday way of saying there's no neutral ground on this). To me it tastes like a dog's breath smells. (Comes in cute jars though!)

I had no idea a flapjack was a kind of pancake in the U.S.! Pancake covers a broad spectrum for me, but the first thought that comes into my head is of thin ones made without any raising agent (crêpes, I suppose). The thick ones, I would call 'American pancakes'. I'm hazy about where a pancake stops and things like griddle cakes and drop scones start...

Ha! Sorry. Just assumed treacle was known. Treacle is a thick, slow flowing liquid sugar with the consistency of thick, but not set honey. You can buy black treacle - which I think has lots of molasses in it - or (most commonly) golden syrup. Both used in cooking. Golden syrup is sometimes used like honey on toast or bread and often used to sweeten porridge.

To me, pudding and dessert are the same thing - the sweet course at the end of a meal, although I invariably call it pudding. (Delve any further and you are into tedious and arcane class-based etiquette! Posh folk would allegedly never say dessert, sweet or afters for that course, always pudding. Dessert apparently refers to the fruit course which you might eat after pudding and for which you would have a knife and fork...)There are puddings (desserts) which are actual... erm. .. Puddings, of course. And those which are not. .... but....but...whyyyy?!

I've followed Artem pretty closely since he joined Strictly in 2010 and never heard a whiff of a rumor about him and Jesse J. I feel sure the British tabloids would have made a meal out of it if there had been something between them, given he was in a relationship with his 2010 partner the whole time he was in the UK. Can you remember where you read it? I'm intrigued! He was pretty anonymous in the U.S. for his first season, so anything's possible then, though I don't see him with Jesse somehow. Maybe he and Julianne went for drinks or something fairly innocuous?

I'm not a meat eater, so gravy isn't my thing, but here in the UK it's supposed to be something you make lovingly from the meat juices. The goop mentioned by shandy up thread was probably made from 'gravy browning' which is something you buy as granules in a tub. Just add boiling water for an utterly disgusting, slightly gelatinous cheat version. *shudders*. My mind is truly boggled by the idea of white gravy made with sausage... Golden Syrup is pale treacle made from sugar cane or sugar beet. I think in America you probably use corn syrup which I've never seen here, though it's sometimes listed as an ingredient on things like shop bought biscuits/cookies. I'm deeply suspicious of it! Golden syrup comes in the best tin ever (if you buy Lyle's, anyway). When the tin's empty, you wash it out, make a hole in the lid and keep a ball of string in it. That's the law.

One of my food heroes Richard Bertinet is a guest on this week's Extra Slice. His books are great and one day I'll treat myself to a bread course at his school. He mentions his love of frangipane and I can vouch for the deliciousness of his recipe - he's transformed my mince pies for ever! (From 'Pastry'). Dorret was very sweet and good natured, but she really needed a bit more oomph.

Do the biscuits you serve with gravy have sugar in or are they a savory?! My favorite scones are cheese and herb (that would be herb not 'erb!) eaten warm with butter. I think you can put savory scones on top of a meat stew and bake in the oven. (A cobbler? Or is that something else?) It's about 25 years since I visited the U.S. but I don't recall if things were much sweeter, but perhaps I just didn't have much of that stuff. Brits I know who live in the States do whinge about the bread and the bacon being sweetened though, so perhaps Americans are a bit more sweet-toothed in general. Raspberries are in season from about June through to October. Yum-scrum, diddly-bum.

Ha ha! Interesting discussion on basil here.. http://foodmuseum.typepad.com/food_museum_blog/2004/09/you_say_basil_a.html but no one seems to have any explanation for where the crazy bay-zul pronunciation stems from. Clearly not from the original Italian or French words! ;-) Someone asked about raspberries. Yes, they grow well here and yes, we love them. I'm having some home grown ones for my pudding tonight. That would be 'pudding' as in a synonym for dessert (the sweet course at the end of a meal). Athena - thanks for the sugar and flour synopsis. I read that muscovado sugar (which is very dark 'soft' and molasses-y) is named after a corruption of Spanish/Portuguese words meaning 'inferior grade' (because it was less refined and they liked their sugar white way back when).

^^^ Respect! I watched a few bits of the last German series just to have a look at the new pro dancer coming to Strictly and agree it was pants.

Crumbs! Can of worms... So. British definitions - to the best of my knowledge... Biscuit is the umbrella term for everything from a cracker to a cookie. A cracker, to me would be without sugar. The kind of thing you might eat with cheese. It would have to snap. At one end it might merge into savory wafer... A crispbread qualifies as a cracker. A cookie is probably a term that has seeped in from the U.S. and covers the bigger, chewy end of the biscuit spectrum, although they could also be crunchy, but likely to be fatter than a biscuit. You wouldn't call a thin, snappy biscuit a cookie. A digestive biscuit (something a bit like a Graham cracker, I understand) is a biscuit not a cracker. It isn't overly sweet but does have some sugar in. You might pair it with strong cheese, make it into crumbs for a cheese cake base or dunk it in your cup of tea. This recipe makes yummy, light, flaky digestives. Overwork the dough and they will be hard. https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/involved/involved/fundraise-events/teabreak/celebs/recipes/gary-rhodes/digestive-biscuits I use wholemeal spelt instead of wheat flour which gives a nutty taste. Back later for flours and sugars!

Thanks Athena! As a Brit, I know my biscuit is your cookie. And my cookie, is a lot like yours - but only the big chewy kind....But what is your biscuit? I read it was something akin to my scone. In which case what is YOUR scone?!

No 9: Anthony Ogogo. Boxer, good looking, 26 and just under 6' tall. The boxers on DWTS and SCD, as far as I recall, have been uniformly awful. Almost as bad as the tennis players. Am hoping for better things from Anthony!

Crikey! Legaleagle, how many iterations of the show to you watch?! I don't know the others, but Craig loves to be the villain on Strictly. I'd fear for his safety on DWTS.

Yes, I think that's the sort of thing I meant by sounding pretentious. The trouble is a huge percentage of our words come via another language and I guess it's just a question of how long before you assimilate a loan word. The two countries take a different approach, but I don't see either one as superior.Electricboogaloo, I'm afraid I'm going to stand by what I said about pah-sta/pass-ta. I don't think either is accurate and it comes back to how we hear the word differently (because of how we each generally pronounce A sounds in English) rather than any disrespect to the loveliness of the Italian language. Riz-ott-oh, anyone?! As for tacos... I'm now intrigued by the hard K kromm mentions. I listened to some Mexicans pronouncing it online and I can see (well hear) what you mean - it's sounded further back in the mouth with a little stop before it. But what of the T at the front? That seems to almost soften to a D. Oh, the pitfalls. http://forvo.com/word/tacos/ I like the sound of a separate thread to discuss food related butcherings. Or perhaps we could agree to call them 'differences' ;-). Perhaps that would be a good place for other food related confusions. I'd love to know what we all mean when we say biscuit and scone!

I'm British and winced at Paul's pronunciation of prosciutto - most odd. The 'correct' way to say scone is sure to raise an argument here. If you hail from the North (like me), you likely say 'skoan' (to rhyme with cone or drone), if you're from the South, or think yourself a bit posh, you'll probably say 'skon' (to rhyme with con or don). Seems illogical to me, but then how do we pronounce 'gone'...? As for foreign borrowings in general...well, for us it depends on how long they've been in the language as the general style advice is to anglicise them 'after a while' (or risk sounding pretentious) and the norm in Germanic languages is to emphasise the root syllable (hence GAT-eau). The French actually stress the two syllables equally. There's no set stress in French words, but the rhythm of the sentence dictates emphasis instead, so saying gat-EAU has no more authenticity than the way Brits say it (and it's no more wrong, either). I think that English speakers tend to hear a stress on the second part because we hear 'difference' more keenly, if that makes any sense. As for TAH-koh versus TA-koh (or PAH-sta versus PASS-ta), I guess it's a similar thing, in that both Brits and Americans hear a difference (from English), but the 'foreign' A-sound is actually somewhere in the middle and we've each chosen a version either side of it - neither of which is exactly correct! Beecham/beauchamp?! I can only hazard a guess that it came to Britain as a family name with the Normans over 900 years ago and how it was spoken then wouldn't be recognizable to either modern French or English ears and a corruption of the old way stuck. Place and family names are a minefield... Sorry for being off-topic!

No 8: Daniel O'Donnell. Irish singer, 53. I like a good range of ages and types on the show, but this cast is feeling very middle aged and middle of the road. They mostly seem to be good sorts, but hardly exciting. Hmmm.