The meme is funny :)
That being said, the only UK foods I’ve had were made by expats here in the states. None of it was bland, with the exception of breakfast beans, “because they’re meant to be mild to start your day” as I was told by a lovely liverpudlian.
She would do fish and chips, and the batter was well seasoned. Not heavily seasoned, but some pepper, a little paprika, and a bit of onion powder to give it some aromatic kick. Well balanced, and imo, as good as any of the southern fried fish recipes I’ve had.
The chips were obviously just salted and vinegar used per person.
But when we did pot luck at work, she would bring in what she called “good english food”, which included some curry a few times.
But her shepherd’s pie? Holy hell, that was some great stuff. She said it was really cottage pie because it was beef usually. But it had the usual pepper, onion, garlic, and herbs.
And the other expats I ate with were similar. Maybe different amounts of a given herb or spice, but it was in there.
I think the UK food thing is a meme in itself, and likely arose the way things usually do, with the majority of cooks just being bad cooks, rather than representative of a cuisine or the way things are done properly in that country.
The reputation comes from the US military being stationed in the UK during the height of WW2 rationing when there was an extremely limited list of ingredients to cook with. They were unable to associate a country under an attempted siege from U-boats with a reduced supply of food.
We do have a love of beige food at times, but it’s essentially our version of chicken tendies.
Ahhh, that makes sense. Kinda rough that the rep hasn’t gone away yet, though.
Boomers made that bland war time food linger. They were children during and just after WW2 so it was part of their childhood nostalgia and they fed it to their own kids. Also we’ve had Indian/ Chinese restaurants in the UK for a while but they were mostly just in major cities at first so the average person still had little exposure to foreign or exotic food until the late 1970s/ early 1980s.
Boomers weren’t children during WWII. Boomer means baby boomer, as in someone born during the baby boom. The baby boom happened after the war ended.
Good point. But rationing continued in the UK until 1954 so it did affect them.
Literally by definition boomers would have been born after WW2.
Yeah this one was the silent generation
My ex mother in law and her mom both can’t eat any food that’s not a certain level of bland. Too much of any spice at all and they set it aside like an autistic kid with arfid. Which… come to think of it…
Yep, this sums up everyone I know over 60 that is descended from British -immigrants- sorry expats.
Actual British people coming over now that still sound British seem to have much more refined taste. BIR-style curries are indeed very popular vs bland British “stew” / casserole
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Also as an American we don’t really have room to talk. Yes there’s the iconic southern foods but even then, grits are bland and meh. But for the most part a lot of traditional American food needed to have spices rediscovered. It seems like for a long time our attitude was to use sugar, pre ground pepper, and maybe salt as seasoning for something that had any good texture cooked out of it.
I went to the the UK when I was a teenager pre 9/11 and I remember the food being amazing imo.
But honestly I love savory food that just needs a pinch of salt to make it pop so maybe I’m the problem too.
An aside here: but why is it that people from major cities aren’t considered average? In many cases major cities are major because they have a lot higher density of people leading to more development and resources.
We also had rationing for a good while longer than other countries after the wars (right into the mid-50s), so we have a whole generation who were pretty much raised with limited food options. That kind of national trauma sticks around and took a while to shake off.
It’s the same with English beer. On the continent, people keep saying that Brits drink their beer lukewarm. When I was there, they actually had temperature displays at the tap in most pubs that usually showed something around 4°C (~39°F). For reference, that was in the Huddersfield area (between Leeds and Manchester) around 15 years ago.
Well in this case the reputation for “warm beer” is true and I’m willing to die on this particular hill.
Proper cask ale should be served at between 8 and 12C, AKA cellar temperature, cool but not cold. Nothing beats a traditional pint of ‘best bitter’ in an old pub!
Plenty of people in the UK drink lager and other styles of beer that are more highly carbonated, stronger ABV, and served colder. Personally I’m not a fan but each to their own.
I live about an hour from London in a rural area with loads of great pubs but I find it difficult to find a nice beer in most parts of London. It’s much easier to keep a keg of carbonated beer under pressure than a cask ale that you have to finish within a few days of tapping, which is why when a certain proportion of a pub’s clientele start drinking other styles it just isn’t worth it for the pub to keep real ale. Hopefully it won’t become a niche thing.
I’ve home brewed a lot of English ales and I agree that those ales should be served warmer. If you don’t, the cold mutes and kills the subtle and rich flavors.
Lagers are good, but a good British Ale is something to savory with good friends.
That’s because of a lot Englishales are drunk at room temp/ slightly below though not as cold as refrigerated.
True and thats because they were invented before refrigerators.
It hasn’t gone away because countless students from across the globe have moved there and found it to be true. While there is good food available in the UK it seems as if the average Brit is content to eat very badly and then supplement a terrible diet with copious amounts of alcohol.
What else would you supplement a terrible diet with?
Coffee? Tea? Illicit drugs.
(They do all the above).
I don’t think I’d recommend chilli peppers with your user name.
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Case proven, all the good cooks left.
My favourite “traditional” English meal is a good Steak and Kidney pie, made with an ale sauce. Seasoned with lots of pepper, Worcestershire sauce (anchovy sauce), onion and stock. Absolutely delicious.
I think the issue is mostly in the visuals. When you look for traditional English food, it is usually a plate full of beige stuff, sometimes paired with really unappetizing boiled carrots and beans. The gravy being on the side instead of part of the dish doesn’t do it any favors either.
Also I’d argue England has pretty low standards for what counts as “food”. I’ve had to work in England for a month, and finding something fresh, healthy and tasty to eat was a real challenge. I’ve never been as fat as when I came home.
The epitome of the wasted potential of English cuisine is the fact that it’s an island full of the best fishes in the world, yet the only fish you can find is battered cod. Why is it so hard to get a salmon fillet? You have Scottish salmon ffs!
We do have a lot of very bland food over here, but a lot of us like that.
It’s a lot more about the texture sometimes, some of us (not me) can do some amazing roast vegetables and everyone seems to have their own ancient tradition for how to make them
Shepard’s pie is Irish btw. Not a surprise a scouser would be able to make a good one when Liverpool has a large Irish community.
Common myth, not true.
First recorded recipe for Shepherds Pie is from a Scottish cookbook from 1849. First recorded use of Cottage Pie is 1791 by an English clergyman.
Cottage Pie was used for both lamb and beef varieties until recently and was a way of eating leftover meats.
I’ve heard that food in the US is generally bad, so maybe not the best comparison 😜 😂
He’s Canadian.
You cant trust those frozen tree suckers
How rude (although it was a clever insult and I literally laughed. I needed that. Thanks)!
Are the trees frozen or the suckers?
Depending on the time of year, yes.
They clearly never had soul food or Gullah/Geechee food.
I like the safety third crew but they’ve also ate dog food and didn’t find much issue with it.
That’s a really good point 😂
Lmao!
A lot of people everywhere don’t know how to cook. They don’t even bother to try and learn, so they rely on corporate packaged foods and restaurants. That’s a separate thing from the cuisine of a given place, or the cooking of people that do know how to.
That may seem like sophistry, but it is an important point to remember when talking about cooking when not joking around for fun. You can’t really use people that aren’t actually doing a thing, or have never learned how to do it as an representative example of what a country’s core is. It’s like athletics, you can’t say that Ethiopians are bad ice skaters if the average person can’t access time and equipment to ice skate in the first place. (Not picking on Ethiopia, it was just the first country that came to mind as not being very present in the world ice skating stage).
It’s legit to say that the US has a major food education problem, as does the UK from what I’ve heard, but that is a different issue than the national cuisine.
True, it’s not American cuisine that’s bad, apparently McDonald’s hamburgers taste better in NZ than the USA too, probably because all the beef here is grass fed.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
heard that food in the US is generally bad,
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Meanwhile yanks with their two spices - butter and sugar
“Our food is the tastiest in the wuuuurld”
Aye but yous can’t afford that coronary eh mate 😂
Is this where we pretend that Brits don’t consume obscene amounts of sugar and butter?
No, there’s no point pretending they’re not fat cunts as well
But we’re pretending they don’t consume vast amounts of spices too. They’re fat smelly cunts tbh
pretty sure you mean canola oil and hfcs
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You are clearly making a poor joke, but… Butter is literally what the French are known for. Sugarcane is from the South Pacific and sugar itself originated in India.
Southern and Creole cuisine originated in America however, and that uses a ton of spices on par with native Indian cuisine.
Industrial use of high fructose corn sirup is all American Capitalism, though.
… And southern france hardly uses butter btw.
sugar itself originated in India
Lol, what? Also: it’s not about where the stuff came from but rather what the cuisine does with it. Italian or German cuisine doesn’t become south american all of a sudden cause of tomatoes and potatoes.
Just curious, but what does Southern France use as their fat to cook with, then? I’m visiting in a month.
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Olive oil, just like any other mediterranean cuisine. In that climate, butter goes rancid in a heartbeat.
Look I feel sorry for the Italians and the Germans but their food is American now. It’s just the way the world works. :)-
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Jamaican curried goat is divine, and it must be Jamaican curry, and added water must be tricked very slowly down the side of very hot, cast iron Dutch oven and simmered quite a while. I was fortunate enough to have a Jamaican neighbor show me the trick. And to my American compatriots, sweet potatoes are not yams.
Thank you Indians
Most popular dish in the UK is Tikka Massala.
But:
Fat, carbs and protein do not come purer than fish and chips.
And vinegar so vinegary that it blows the taste buds of your descendants for 500 years
Exactly. Many people have an ignorant view of British cuisine, as though only foods grown in the British Isles are British. All kinds of foods and dishes from all over the world have been shipped, used, and adapted in Britain since at least the time of the Roman Empire. Heck, most of what a British, European or North American person would see on the menu of their local Indian restaurant is not traditional Indian food at all, but rather Anglo-Indian.
Yes, there have been a few comments mentioning Tikka masala, but can you name another British dish with flavor? I don’t think so.
None with flavor, plenty with flavour
Cornish pasty, apple crumble, scouse, trifle, haggis, rarebit, Sunday roast, shepherd’s pie, tatty scones… you can see why this “no flavour” joke is getting tiring.
Even shitty store brand haggis has a great flavor profile for a sausage. Yes, its a sausage: its meat, salt, spices, and other fillers in an animal casing. Fight me.
But its scottish food
I don’t eat animals myself but the vegan version is very good I have to say. Likewise with the vegan Cumberlands you can get, or at least could about five years ago from the Co-op.
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How do you feel about thanks giving dinners and apple pie?
Edit: because they’re both British.
Turkeys are native to the Americas.
Now that I think about it, so are potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, corn and cranberries. Thinking about my own Thanksgiving dinner table, the only thing I can identify as an Old World food are yeast rolls.
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Its almost as if they just swapped out the chicken for turkey, having discovered and been using potatoes for years beforehand.
Nothing on the apple pie then? Just the one you thought you could refute, it would seem.
By your wild “logic” that would make every pork dish ever Chinese and Southern fried chicken Indian, as the pigs we eat today and chickens come from China and India respectfully.
Yeah, apples aren’t native to the New World and apple pie wasn’t invented in the Americas. It’s not specifically British, either; it seems to have emerged independently across Western Europe in the middle ages, and was first brought to the Americas by the Dutch rather than the English. Hell, not even the quintessential American pie apple was invented here; the granny smith is Australian.
The British invented roast turkey about as much as they invented roast bison. You want to get into more specific recipes, I’d say chicken tikka masala is British and chicken parmesan is American, but I’m not letting the British have right of way over “get bird, add heat.”
Pumpkin pie is kind of a strange one; the first thing you’d call a “pumpkin pie” was more of a savory soup eaten by Dutch settlers in Massachusetts in the 1600s; the first pumpkin served in a pastry crust was French, and the modern pattern of “sugar pumpkin puree in a shortbread crust” was invented a few minutes after the US Constitution was ratified.
Sweet potato pie is less ambiguous; it seems to have popped into existence fully formed in the American south in the 18th century.
Basically all corn products including popcorn and cornbread were known to the Native Americans for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.
The first known recipe for cranberry sauce as we would recognize it today was written in 1796 in the United States.
Green beans are native to Central America, green bean casserole was invented in New Jersey in 1950…
Again, what of this is particularly British? An American thanksgiving meal is as British as pizza.
Beast of a comment. Found all of that really interesting 👍
Apple pie is from England, even if you don’t want it to be. Its not even about it not being American but it having flavour and being nice to eat.
They swapped out chicken for turkey and used the exact same recipe and cooking style. Declaring it unconnected changes nothing.
Green beans is a substitute for the exact same green veg you get with a British roast meal. If I put peas into a stir fry, it doesn’t make the meal not Chinese lol.
Again, how can you not see those mildy adapted British things as British?
Because I’m from a country with an actual national identity of its own, not some washed up little island whose national museum has on display a lot of things stolen from elsewhere and not much of its own, because their national culture has extremely little to show for itself.
I don’t have to pretend we invented (checks notes) cooking food to feel like have any kind of national identity. You do, and it’s hilariously pathetic.
Yes, there have been a few comments mentioning Tikka masala, but can you name another British dish with flavor? I don’t think so.
Let’s kick off with curries! We’ve been eating ‘curry’ since 1598, so longer than a lot of other countries have existed. As well as chicken tikka masalla, we’ve adapted or invented a few, such as:
- Madras curries
- Jalfrezi curries
- Balti curries
- Phall curries
For other British dishes with flavour, try (in no particular order):
- Any Sunday roast; beef with Yorkshires and horseradish sauce, pork with applesauce, lamb with mint sauce.
- Full English, full Scottish, Ulster Fry, Full Welsh
- Kedgeree
- Steak and kidney pudding
- Cream tea
- A proper ploughman’s lunch
- Sausage, mash, onion gravy with English mustard
- Cullen skink
- Shepherd’s pie / cottage pie
- Fish pie
- Irish stew
- Lancashire Hot Pot
- Marmite on toast
- Bacon sarnie
- Kippers
- Sheffield fishcake butty
- Welsh rarebit
I saw that marmite on toast in there, it’s my favourite breakfast
Clearly you’ve never had rich friends, they’re notorious for having everything and never using it.
“Oh man, I didn’t know you play guitar. That’s a beautiful Orange double stack and Thunderverb.”
“I bought that when I tried to learn guitar, haven’t used it since.”
Money can’t buy you taste 😉
Well, the whole spice trade was literally wealthy people buying taste.
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Hey, they also needed more people to play cricket with.
Tell me you haven’t had proper British food without actually telling me.
Don’t blindly believe everything you hear.
Beans on toast can be done well also.
my favorite is when they serve it hot! yum
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That sounds good. I’ve never seen Heinz chipotle beans though (in Canada). I’ll have to keep an eye out.
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That bloke is gently handling those pies.
My father is British. My grandmother was British.
There is no way to make British-style beans on toast palatable to people outside of Great Britain. I’m sorry.
There are plenty of British foods I will absolutely defend as terrific. I will murder a wedge of caerphilly cheese and I sometimes import Rowntree’s blackcurrant fruit pastilles, I love them so much… but beans on toast? I can’t go with you down that road. Also, Daddies Sauce. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Including my father. How do you put that shit in your mouths?
And don’t even get me started on Marmite.
I like the little flag. Classic move claiming fish fingers for the empire.
Fish don’t have fingers, dolt.
Embrace; Expand; Extinguish
We use a lot of herbs, garlic and mustard traditionally.
i was told by a brit that american biscuits were “salty scones”
and i have never wanted to complain more in my life. Especially given the american propensity to make shit sweet as fuck.
It’s true, the “biscuits and gravy” biscuits are closer to scones than what a Brit would think of as a biscuit.
Also, biscuits and gravy, wtf
What’s wrong with biscuits and gravy?
Biscuits with sausage gravy doused in hot sauce and a couple fried eggs make a great breakfast
In this case I prefer fresh cracked black pepper to hot sauce. No other notes.
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That fresh black pepper makes biscuits and sausage gravy killer!
Oh of course, I load up the gravy with more pepper than most folks like
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do the brits not have bread?
That’s pretty much what a biscuit is here. Also what do you mean wtf biscuits and gravy slaps.
Also, biscuits and gravy, wtf
I may lose my Yank card for this, but I’m not a fan myself. That said, it’s just scones and bechamel sauce. Hearty, meaty, salty and what you can do with the rendered fat from greasy breakfast sausage*. It’s basically hangover food that caught on.
(* There’s a subset of traditional American food that stems from doing a lot with very little, while having a complete disregard for cholesterol and calorie intake. Assuming that wheat and dairy are the cheapest things in your pantry, you get stuff like this. See “scrapple” for another example.)
I had the distinct pleasure of explaining what biscuits and gravy were to a confused 6th Doctor Who actor Colin Baker. To his credit, he said he’d like to try it.
ah, it’s you again. Anyway. Gotta hate, i mean love the brits, and the wacky shit they get up to.
I’m everywhere!
judging by the amount of posts/comments, yeah, makes sense.
Ain’t nothing wrong with fish and chips
I actually went and had some last night and jesus christ my palate was offended. Even when swimming in malt vinegar and tartar sauce, I just couldn’t stand it. I can fix this:
- Salt, pepper, paprika, garlic, cumin, and cayenne in the dry dredge
- A dry stout in the wet dredge mix instead of a lager or a pale ale, anything with a body really
- Maybe a layer of panko breadcrumbs I toasted beforehand
- A far more flavorful fish than cod, i’m thinking salmon fingers
The sun never set on the British empire, and they never used the spices they stole.
That kind of just sounds like you went to a bad restaurant.
No true…Englishman?
100%, they did. Good fish & chips doesn’t need fixing.
The thing about spices in cooking is that - as great as they are, and as much as they enhance flavour - you shouldn’t need them to make good food.
Fish & chips is the perfect synthesis of the “Salt, acid, fat, heat” theory of cooking. Truly delicious food starts with the combination of those elements in exactly the right amounts.
There’s a lot of great things you can do with spices. I love, love, LOVE Indian food, Thai food, Mexican food, Spanish food, Chinese food, Cajun food, etc, etc, etc. But if you don’t understand how to make something delicious without spices, you’ll never really understand how to make good food with them. It’s always about fundamentals.
Edit to add: Here’s another really good way to think about this; people to bring up British food and complain about a lack of spices, but you never see the same complaint about aglio e olio or caccio e pepe, two dishes that contain, respectively one herb and no spices, and one spice and no herbs (parsley, and black pepper).
It’s exceptionally easy to do as a tourist. Last I visited, first we went to a restaurant and ordered and it was subpar. So then we were told “you have to go to a Chippy, if you want real fish and chips” so we did… they should have told us which “Chippy”, they are not all the same.
That was the worst culinary experience of my life. I have never had a more oily nasty fried fish. The wet breading just fell off, and it tasted like very old oil. I threw out 2/3s of it, as did basically everyone else.
We ended up eating at indian restaurants the rest of the trip.
Oddly enough, I had the exact opposite experience last time I was in London. Amazing fish and chips, terrible Indian food. Worst saag paneer I’ve ever had. By far. And that’s a low bar because I’ve had some really disappointing saag paneer.
Also, I was entertained when the South Asian guy at the Chippie asked me stuff like, “do you have a big car and a big house?” when he heard my American accent. I had to disabuse him of the notion that we’re all wealthy. I wasn’t even paying for that trip, it was an especially good contract work gig.
Are you a breakfast person? We normally just ate the biscuits from the hotel room and starved until lunch, but one day my dad and I was going to meet up with my mom and her sister for a traditional English breakfast. However we got lost and ended up in some tiny Cafe, God knows where. They were serving lasagna for breakfast, and it was delicious.
My mom and aunt actually found the place and had some beens and toast and blood sausage, they were not impressed.
I am definitely a breakfast person and a full English breakfast, minus the horrific beans on toast, is great. I’m not sure about lasagna for breakfast though. Seems like kind of a heavy breakfast meal.
To be fair, this is not helped by the fact that British people are often very bad at recommending good places to eat. A lot of people value familiarity over quality.
We were actually there for my uncle in laws wedding, so you would think we would have gotten better advice. But I guess weddings are busy…
The food at the wedding was amazing though. I can’t even remember it all, they brought out so much food. I think there was venison and duck, and fish I have never even heard of before, it was over the top. But his parents were like old money wealthy, so I doubt that’s common. It was also in like a minor castle, and the grounds were just gorgeous. I could have spent days just inspecting all the plants, so much variety of foreign plants and super cool hardwood trees.
That was the only great food we had, although the Indian food pretty good. Got old after a week though.
Counterpoint: some people eat food so covered in spices/herbs/etc. they lose the ability to taste more subtle flavours.
well, I gotta say, I lived in the UK, their standard for fish and chips is oily af; it’s hard to enjoy the toppings and use the thing as a vehicle for sauces etc when it’s super greasy from breading to fish. I’ve had better fish and chips in Canada and Belgium.
It’s almost like some people have different preferences. Wild.
I heard once that when spices became so cheap that even the commoners could afford it, the upper class in Britain started to claim that really good food doesn’t need any spices to taste good and that bland food is the best. This supposedly made the British cuisine way blander.
I thought it was cuz they lost a bunch of ships during wwii and then they had the rationing of foods, and hadn’t recovered their flavor palate since then.
A lot of the “bland” food is just food that was made during the world wars that has evolved over time after the fact.
But to say British food has no spices completely disregards the whole curry scene over here. It’s not just curry from India. A lot of “Indian” dishes were invented in the UK.
Aye like a lot of time that people are making fun of English cuisine they’re usually just making fun of meals that poorer families would make or that no one regularly makes in their right mind.
I mean it’s usually just cheap, lazy food. I like a good beans on toast every once and a while. Sometimes you just want a no effort meal.
I don’t think flavor palates degenerate that quickly. Especially with that many Indian residents.
British women and British cuisine… The birth of a seafarer nation.
The Brits took to the seas. The Irish took to the bottle.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read today. It makes so much sense now. 🤣
I’m sorry but star pie will in no way ever be a preference for me. I’ve never had it and do not wish to have it.
