As most people know, British food has improved a million times since the days of Fanny Craddock on black & white TV. British people know about food now, watch endless foodie shows, they can cook, and the UK supermarkets have great ingredients. The influx of people from what was the empire helped open everybody's horizons.
You get the weird situation where the Indian food in Britain is the best in the world, for example.
> the Indian food in Britain is the best in the world
Got about a billion people here who'd like to disagree. In fact, of all the crimes against humanity the British visited on India, I think that assertion might just be the worst.
You’re being heavily downvoted but I can’t imagine by who or why. Certainly not by people who’ve eaten Indian food in both India and the UK.
While there are a few good restaurants, most Indian restaurants in the UK are bland beyond reason, catering to the common palate. There’s nothing wrong with liking bland food or restaurants catering to that preference, but let’s not make this extraordinary claim that it’s better than the food in India. For most part the food is plain and plays it safe. For example, it’s rare to find Indo-Chinese, a cuisine nothing like Chinese or Indian but a staple of cuisine in India.
This isn't an argument over say Italian vs French cuisine. That's undecideable.
This is an extraordinary claim that by taking Indian food to the UK, stripping it of it's spice to suit the locals somehow made it better. It'd be like claiming Italian cuisine became better without the tomatoes or Mexican cuisine better without the beans.
TBH I am sick to death of this website and am therefore clearing this comment. Apologies to the commentor responding below - I posted a response to your comment in a previous edit of this comment. Somebody please invite me to the land of crustaceans.
The comment doesn't appear downvoted now, but it was possibly because "No it's not!" isn't much of an argument.
Maybe you find British Indian food too bland, too dry, too sweet, to have a lack of variety or to use low quality ingredients. Whatever it is, it could more usefully continue the discussion.
However, I think even people who've tried food in both countries (I haven't) will often find themselves arguing, based on their experience. The majority of "Indian" restaurants in Britain are cheap -- a step above a takeaway. Like similar restaurants in Britain, they have a menu based on combining pre-prepared ingredients/sauces to lower costs. There are also middle and some high-end Indian restaurants. I can easily imagine people experiencing "takeaway+" and assuming this standard of food is universal in Britain, or (especially on HN) someone on a business trip to London being taken to a high-end restaurant and generalizing from there.
Indeed. The combination of the class system and the war rationing absolutely wrecked British cooking in the 20th century, but from about the 1980s the middle class became interested in improving this, largely by importing cuisine.
Nowadays the top end is a bit self-parodic with too much emphasis on weird visual presentation, culminating in Heston Blumenthal, but the middle rank of available restaurants are great.
> The combination of the class system and the war rationing absolutely wrecked British cooking in the 20th century
I don’t think this explains it. Being the first place in the world to get processed food has more to do with it. Britain’s been importing a lot of calories for a long time and canning and other flavor destroying methods of preservation really didn’t help. Rationing is unlikely to be relevant. British food was widely considered dreadful long before WWII. See any description of boarding school food or just consider the paucity of decent cheese in the UK in the 50s. The US didn’t have post war rationing and food in DC was terrible well into the 70s going by restaurants. Anglos have never beg known for great food culture like the Italians, French or Spanish.
The impact of the Great Depression on food in the US cannot be overstated. The Depression followed by the war was a relatively long period of time and for an entire generation the food of this time became what they were used to. Additionally prior to WW2 the middle class was fairly limited and most people in the US didn’t have lots of money. Industrialized food was simply less expensive and kept for long periods of time.
I had plenty of great food in the 70’s and 80’s just not usually in restaurants.
I’d imagine in the U.K., they probably didn’t have enough farmland to feed everybody given a rapidly growing population during the industrialization period. If you have to import food, it had to be preserved and again you acquire a taste for poor quality food because that’s what’s available.
Italy, France, and Spain did not industrialize anywhere near the scale that existed in Britain or the US.
> Italy, France, and Spain did not industrialize anywhere near the scale that existed in Britain or the US.
???
Northern Italy has been among the richest, most developed parts the world non-stop since the renaissance. They didn’t achieve that without industrializing. France was so rich that it conquered half of Europe after 1800 and then it got richer with the Industrial Revolution. Paris was one of the biggest cities in the world for over 200 years by any standard. No history of the West, or the world would make any sense without France since the Revolution. You do not manage to acquire imperial possessions on every continent without industrializing early and fast. Spain, sure. It, Portugal and Southern Italy did not do as well as most of the rest of Western Europe.
When you read about the British with their rationing bringing about a near-starvation diet during WW2, and then reading what delicacies and their amounts that Churchill was eating and drinking at the same time, it's a wonder that he wasn't lynched from the nearest lamp-post when the British public found out.
I'm the last person to wave the flag for Britain but I've never understood this meme about our food being bad, when so much of it is inarguably world class. For starters, so to speak, the Full English is obviously the king of breakfasts, a traditional Sunday roast cannot be beaten, we have the best cheese in the world by some considerable distance, and as for puddings, pies, crumbles, custard... well need I say any more?
It's all a matter of taste of course, but it's hard to take the statement that Britain go the best cheese in the world seriously. If we only look at Europe: France, Italy, Switzerland are a lot more famous for their cheeses than Britain.
The fact that almost all British cheeses are pasteurized is a clear indication that having great cheeses is not part of the British mainstream culture. That being said, there is also some high quality cheeses in Britain, but in my opinion, a lot less than in those other europeans country, by production amount and number of cheese type.
I was always surprised as a child that mint sauce was singled out in "Asterix in Britain" (or at least the English translation!) as the very worst of English food - as I think it has a delightful subtle taste!
There really can be no objective universal king of breakfasts. Tastes are set in childhood and vary across the world.
Speaking subjectively as a South Asian person, there is not a single thing I find appealing about the Full English, visually or tastewise. However, your sweet dishes and desserts are very good indeed.
Huh? It's the worst way of preparing meat combined with the worst way of preparing vegetables, managing to destroy both flavour and texture of both. Having grown up in Britain, the memes are on point when it comes to traditional British cooking (though no reflection of the wealth of cooking that actually exists in Britain today).
Roast potatoes, cooked in the fat of the roast, till they are crispy. Carrots and onions roasted to caramel. Juicy meat that falls off the bone. Pork crackling!
I don't think every family in Britain automatically has a good chef. Now if we're going to talk about leaks. Ewww. And boiled brussel sprouts. FML.
I would cook them in the oven with everything else though, and only very slightly brown the top of the cheese. They then make a good contrast to the roast vegetables.
(On houses, there is a line in The Xenophobe's Guide to the Swiss about how swiss abhor drafts. According to my father, this observation, albeit made in a book nominally about the swiss, says much more about the british.)
Full English, great hearty breakfast to start a big day. Not everyday though if being kind to the heart.
Sunday roast, great hearty filling meal after a big day.
Pudding, chips, peas, gravy, a great filling chippy tea.
Ploughman lunch with pork pie, yum.
Agreed they are some good foods, I wouldn’t say we have fine foods, we have simple foods and tastes. I live overseas now and sometimes miss the simple foods when feeling hungry and craving a big feed. A northern English chippy tea is especially hard to find, going out to a restaurant for Italian, French, Greek, Indian etc etc doesn’t hit the same spot when craving chippy tea although I pretty much love all food and mainly eat non English cuisine
I’ve eaten the Full English. I’ve also eaten Idli-Vadai-Pongal-Chutney-Sambhar and I prefer the latter. There’s nothing objectively better here. We prefer what we grew up eating.
It's just a stupid stereotype/meme, like the French being cowards and many others. The best and most varied food I've had was in England, and I wasn't even in London with their variety. And I'm counting all the foreign foods adapted to the local palate, I think that's fair.
Btw, German sausages can't hold a candle to British ones, change my mind :D
No no no - the Full Scottish Breakfast is //clearly// the King of Breakfasts!
Seriously though - the freshness of ingredients available in the United Kingdom makes a huge difference, if you ignore British-Chinese food and can track down real Chinese food in the UK - it's genuinely world class
I agree English breakfast is good, but not the best in terms of variety and quality. The king of breakfasts award in terms of variety and quality (that would suit the widest range of tastes) would go to either Turkey or Iran.
If you go back forty years it was really bad. Home cooked food was bland and unappetising. People didn't eat out that much, I was 14 when I had my first restaurant meal. We've never really shaken that image off.
It's not just the dishes themselves, some which really are pretty great. It's also how they are prepared. I suspect the standard has risen substantially over the last 50 years.
https://youtu.be/kunuXThp51E
1975 Fanny cooks Turkey. Cradock was a lodestar of how weird the British class system and the BBC were in the 70's, along with BBC A list characters like Jimmy Savile. They had little to do with real life and were extremely weird.
British cuisine these days is amazing, all the old cliches no longer apply IMO
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." (ascribed to Charles V)
That was the sixteenth century. For the twenty-first, what should it be? "I speak english online, russian for scientific sources, chinese for datasheets, and french quand nos aînés n'y seront plus ?"
Is any cuisine, or any aspect of culture for that matter, ever not derivative? I doubt it.
The Portuguese may have been early European consumers of potatoes, but they likely got that from the Spanish, who in turn got it from Central or South America, where human consumption of this tuber originated thousands of years ago. There is no telling how many cultures it may have passed through that have been lost to the ages. And even the first potato consumers may have been inspired to eat potatoes from a prior culture of eating other sorts of roots.
Interesting, wouldn't have expected that given the relative lack of spice.
As an aside, if you get to Greenwich, go get some fish and chips from the Golden Chippy. Best I've had in England.
In jest I like to describe British native food as follows:
When people are starving, they're willing to eat things they otherwise would throw away. Unfortunately the British decided the PREFERRED those things, and attempt to make every dish taste accordingly.
> Meat, potatoes and two veg might be mocked as unadventurous and bland but it's a decent balance and gets the job done.
I think you have neatly summarized the usual criticisms of British food.
Much of it is easily improved, but many British people (including my parents) don't bother with even the smallest improvements to the most basic recipe. Just garnishing with some fresh herbs would be a good start, or adding some herbs or spices during cooking. Then we can talk about sauces.
