Is British food dull?

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British food has a reputation for being—sorry, folks, I’m just reporting—somewhere between dull and inedible. Google “British food reputation” and the entries fall into two categories: 1) why British food deserves a bad reputation and 2) why it doesn’t. There’s no 3) why it has a great reputation.

Or none that I found, anyway. Dig deep enough and you can almost always find a contrarian, probably funded by Vladimir Putin or a pair of aging billionaire brothers intent on destroying the world’s sense of taste.

Why do they want to do that? It’s just one of those things you do when you become an aging billionaire, your every whim has already been satisfied, and you’re bored silly. People need challenges. That’s what life’s about.

The people who argue that British food deserves its reputation love making lists of the foods they hate most: baked beans on toast, overboiled vegetables, bangers and mash (that’s sausages plonked on a plate of mashed potatoes). On some lists, fish and chips are part of the problem. On other lists (because the people who defend British food make lists too), they’re the solution. Ditto yorkshire puddings. Ditto a whole bunch of other things. So we’ll skip the details, because if we don’t, we’ll end up arguing over them when we could so easily argue about something more worthwhile.

Although if you want to argue, don’t let me stop you. I’m happy to host (almost) any argument as long as we’re not taking ourselves too seriously.

Irrelevant and not-quite-in-season photo: Primroses. They should be in bloom soon. Photo by Ida Swearingen

One word that comes up a lot in this discussion is stodgy. In British English, that means food that’s “heavy, filling, and high in carbohydrates.” (I’ll skip the link; it’s one of those unattributed definitions Lord Voldemort—sorry, Lord Google—likes to supply.) The synonyms are “indigestible, starchy, filling, heavy, solid, substantial, lumpy, and leaden.”

Yum.

As usual, Lord Google offered to translate that into French. It’s lourde or indigeste.

Why French? Why not French? Hell, why offer to translate it at all? I reset the offer to Spanish and got pesado (heavy) and indigesto (indigestible). I had to check my Spanish-English dictionary to be sure of indigesto, because it’s not a word I’ve had any reason to use and although it sounds convincing you can get into all sorts of weird situations relying on words that sound like words you know in your home language.

Do I distrust Google translations? You bet your mistranslated ass I do. Sadly, my dictionary doesn’t include the Spanish for stodgy, so I ended my research there. The dictionary’s a paperback. It’s missing lots of stuff. On the other hand, it doesn’t weigh much.

I’m off the topic, aren’t I? How does that happen?

The word stodgy comes up a lot in connection with British puddings. Before we go on, it you’re American, write your definition of pudding on a slip of paper, crumple it up, and throw it out the window. It’s not helpful here.

Done? Good. Now: In this context, pudding means (I think, but don’t trust me on this) more or less any dessert, although a pudding can also be an unsweetened non-dessert. Dessert also means dessert. So, if you’re still with me, dessert means dessert and pudding means dessert as well as non-dessert, and dessert includes what Americans know as pudding, which (and we’re talking about pudding here) can include non-dessert.

And with that level of confusion, you wonder why British food has a reputation problem, right?

What does stodgy mean in the U.S.? Dull and uninspired. I can’t remember ever hearing it used about food, but if it was it wouldn’t stretch far enough to mean an entire category of food, it’d just be a description of some one thing.

Anyway, all I want to do here is establish that British food has a reputation problem. Whether it’s deserved or not doesn’t matter. At least for the purposes of this post, because we’re not actually going to eat anything. We’re online. The technology that would make eating together possible doesn’t exist yet. What matters here is how British chefs respond to their reputation problem.

Now, by way of (even more) background, I read recipes in the newspaper. They extend the range of my cooking, they amuse the hell out of me, and they’re entirely nonfattening. Plus the recipe section of Saturday’s paper is one place where, reliably, nobody’s being run out of their country or left to freeze in a refugee camp while the world says it’s all someone else’s problem, and no one’s being sent back to the country that ran them out in the first place because they didn’t say, “Mother, may I?”.

It’s not that I don’t read the news, it’s just that I need a place to hide from it now and then.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of British chefs work hard at being interesting. It may keep them from being stodgy and predictable, but their recipes tip over into the strange very easily.

A while back the paper had a series of lasagna recipes, and before I go on, I have to tell you that when I looked for them online Lord Google, for no apparent reason,  offered to define lasagna for me in Hindi. Well, who could resist? It’s spelled लॉसॉन्य (unless I accidentally copied a word from an ad—I’m illiterate in Hindi) and it seems to mean “lasagna.” I say “seems” because neither of the two sites that offered to translate it for me were particularly clear about the whole business, and after two tries I kind of lost interest.

But—this won’t surprise you, will it?—we’re off topic.

Now I do understand that Italian lasagna (or maybe that should be plural: lasagne; British food writers like the E spelling, even if they’re talking about a single lasagna) varies from region to region. Having grown up with American lasagna, which has a limited range, I think this is wrong, wrong, wrong, but the Italians invented the stuff, so I guess they get to do what they want with it and I get to not argue.

The standard British lasagna is also wrong, but since they didn’t invent it, I feel free to complain.

The American version uses tomato sauce, ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan, plus either hamburger (that’s mince, if you’re British) or no hamburger (and possibly some veggies) to make it vegetarian. And, of course, lasagna noodles. The British version substitutes lots of thick, tasteless white sauce for the tomato sauce. It’s the perfect example of stodge, now that I think of it. I’m not sure what kind of cheeses they put in there, if any, because the white sauce overpowers everything. It’s basically noodles and glue.

Lasagna’s one of the things British pubs have figured out they can feed vegetarians, so periodically I get stuck eating it. It probably comes to them frozen, from a lasagna factory in Liverpool or some other Italian city. They all taste the same, which is to say, they don’t really taste at all.

But the lasagna recipes I mentioned went beyond the standard British version. That was the point: To be inventive and edgy and out-there and earn five gold stars. To not be stodgy. So what did they add? One had hazelnuts and dill and caraway seeds. Another had fish and coriander and feta cheese.

Is coriander Italian? Slices of Blue Sky quotes the New York Times as saying that it was used in the Roman Empire and foreign-born chefs are bringing it back into use in Italy. So it’s traditional in roughly the same way tattoos are (or may be) traditionally British, which is to say you can make a case for it but you’ll need to do a lot of warm-up exercises first, because it ain’t easy.

I’m working on a piece that makes the case for tattoos. It’s fun and may even be correct, but it’s not a simple argument–or possibly even a convincing one.

Feta cheese is Greek.

Italy is not Greece, something you’ll learn quickly if you go there and try to get by entirely in Greek.

Fish come from the water, and although all countries on this planet have at least some water, that doesn’t mean fish belong in lasagna. Most countries also have at least some grass, but that’s not a good argument for tossing it into lasagna.

The recipes were online and had a comment box, so I thought about offering my own let’s-not-be-stodgy take on lasagna. It involves dark chocolate, mayonnaise, half a cup of Coke, and one finely chopped bicycle tire, but someone with an Italian name had already written, “None of these recipes have anything to do with Italian cuisine,” so I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to make an international incident any worse, but the world is a poorer place because of my silence.

Enough about lasagna. The same thing happens with hamburgers. British chefs approach them as nothing more than a blank slate on which they can write their names.

In the U.S., a good hamburger’s made with ground beef and nothing more. You make it interesting by the way you cook it and what you put on it. And, of course, by using good beef.

In Britain, it’s the rare cook who’s brave enough to do that. One relatively simple recipe I found calls for egg, cracker crumbs, parmesan, and fried onions. You  mix all that together and set it in the refrigerator for two hours while it recovers from the insult. Another one asks you to mix in mustard, ketchup, egg, garlic, onion, and chili. I’m not sure what they mean by chili. Probably a chile pepper, but it could as easily be the sweet, gluey (c’mon, I’m being as neutral as I can manage) chili sauce sauce they sell here, or else that stuff you make with beans and meat (or buy in a can). Who can tell?

A third wants egg, bread crumbs, evaporated milk, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, and garlic.

Evaporated milk? Inspired addition. Would it be okay if I substitute whipped cream?

Someone else adds sun dried tomatoes—along, of course, with a whole bunch of other stuff.

You see what’s happening here? Every one of those recipe writers is screaming, “I’m not boring!”

And they’re right. They’re not. But they’re also doing nothing to redeem the reputation of British cooking.

170 thoughts on “Is British food dull?”

  1. I heartily and tastefully recommend you look at the recipes here (https://www.riverford.co.uk/tru/recipes/) instead of the paper so that you may come to understand that even if eating the paper is always tastier than the recipe printed therein, there is much better available.

    “It’s not that I don’t read the news, it’s just that I need a place to hide from it now and then.”
    Oh yes, me too, and you use the hiding place so well.

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    • Thanks. I’m thinking wallpaper might look nice in the hiding place. Want to help hang it? I’m guaranteed to make a mess of the job and wouldn’t blame anyone who does the same.

      I’ll check out the recipes when I get a moment, but I don’t promise to be impressed.

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  2. I’ve never thought of food as being stodgy, but I’ve never thought of the food served by the UK-ish side of my family to be anything close to good. It wasn’t so much the food, it was the people cooking the food. Over-boiled things that should have never been boiled at all and meat cooked well beyond the point of every cell giving up. That, coupled with a profound lack of alcohol was a recipe for disaster.

    I should point out that the only homemade meal I ever had in England was quite good and included alcohol, so maybe it’s just my family. The recipes were lost on the way over…who knows.

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  3. Lord Google, LOVE IT!!!!
    I must admit I google everything…doesn`t everyone nowadays? And now they are selling google home, you can just ask a question out loud and will get an answer!!!!
    Love this post. Entertaining and informative!!!

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    • I’m sceptical about voice-operated, run-your-life machines. In large part because I don’t have the recommended accent, so I’m not at all sure what they’ll hear, but also because–I dunno. I just have a feeling my life’s being run by a machine. It probably already is, but not quite so obviously.

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      • I’m pretty sure they do. WordPress reports the terms of some searches and not others. I have no idea why that is, but I seem to remember hearing once that Google searches were among the ones that don’t register. Which is another way of saying that I’m being careless when I talk about Lord Google. The brand name, I think, went generic when we began using it as a verb.

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  4. Yes, the world would indeed be a poorer place because of your silence. Please, never rob the world this way. Liverpool and other Italian towns got the biggest chuckle.

    I was only in the UK twice for a few days. I guess I was eating but I don’t remember a single thing I ate, other than that Chinese broth that saved my life when I had flu. Oh, my host once brought fish and chips with her from work. I thought they only eat this in films. It was greasy and quite yum.

    As one surrounded by the Italians and their traditionalism in recipes, I can only imagine what an eye-roll the lasagne you write about would get. For the proper lasagna you need the proper ragu! Now that is a fully another topic all together. (In some places they don’t even put tomatos in it!)

    But I love it how my father makes lasagna that is completely off Italian topic (it might be a bit on the stodgy side) but it’s soooo good all the same that even amore must admit it.

    I follow Nigella on Fabecook (I just invented this word, trying to write Facebook). She is British, right? Do you like her?

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  8. Friday chuckle finished. Thanks Ellen. What I’d really like to know, as a Scot living in France, via a year-long stopover in Miami is this: when will someone invent the technology to allow us to eat together online? I would enjoy that.
    I agree that British food USED to be yucky. But Jamie Oliver has changed all that. Long live King James!

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    • I don’t know about the tooth thing. The last British friend who asked me why Americans thought the British have bad teeth has beautiful straight, white teeth. I don’t. I had no idea what to tell her. I still don’t.

      Pass me a piece of that apple pie, would you?

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  10. I haven’t been to England in a while (at least not to eat), but we were in Wales and Scotland this past summer and we found the food to be very good. Certainly different from our first trip to the UK over 20 years ago, when everything was very bland and “stodgy”. I think the food has improved vastly–the reputation just needs to catch up!

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  11. I have eaten amazing food and absolutely lousy food in multiple regions and countries. I think what makes the difference is the aptitude of the person cooking it and the quality of the ingredients. I wonder if we Brits gained our reputation for bogging food simply because crap cooks were passing on their “techniques” through the generations until people decided to start educating themselves rather than just using Great-Gran’s recipe for warm grey mulch. The tendency to boil vegetables to mush, for instance, is a skill set problem rather than a food culture problem. I also suspect British food improved in quality when it began to assimilate ingredients, techniques, and recipes from other countries (it may well be the only side effect of Imperialism I approve of). As a family who are fond of spice, many traditional recipes just taste too bland for us. That blandness may have contributed to the reputation too.

    Italy has a stellar culinary reputation and I have certainly eaten some wonderful food there but I have also eaten one of the worst meals ever there too. Likewise France is pretty much regarded as the touchstone for wonderful food and cooking and yet I would say I have probably eaten a higher proportion of crappy food in France than any other country I have visited. I am not really forming any sort of argument here, merely sharing some observations based on personal experiences. Possibly I am just very unlucky and some of that lack of good fortune may be that I am limited to the vegetarian section of a menu.

    I think you are onto something with the stodginess. When I think of traditional British meals (as opposed to ones we have stolen from other cultures) they do tend to be very carb heavy and meat-centric. Lots of pies. Lots of potatoes.

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    • I just dug this out of the spam folder. Sorry–I wasn’t ignoring you, WordPress was.

      I agree about it being possible–maybe even easy–to find terrible food the world over. But I do think British food leans toward the bland. Unless there’s a not-British-food restaurant around, I’m just not excited about eating out. I can do as well at home.

      On the other hand, the best American food is the food that came with immigrants: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jewish–I could go on endlessly. The only difference, I think, is that it’s been incorporated a bit more deeply.

      I think. I’ll be interested to hear if that strikes you as true.

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      • Certainly I’d agree that very traditional British food leans towards the bland and I have never liked the whole “meat and potatoes” basis to most traditional British meals. I actually concur about the “I can do as well as home” thing too. I often find that we eat out and I end up feeling confident that I could have cooked just as good a meal at home. I think assimilation from different cultures – whether recipes, ingredients, or methods of cooking – is key.

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  12. Ah, Ellen, it is rough that most of the truly interesting/satisfying British foods that aren’t sweets are meat or fish based, like rare roast beef or haggis (which I like) or cock-a-leekie soup (the name is classic, no?) or Cullen Skink.. I spent many wasted years as a professional cook and wine-and-food critic trying to figure out what a truly national cuisine would be and I give up–they’ve all borrowed so much (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Germany, etc)! Maybe fish and sea mammals for the Greenland Inuits? Now I just think there are infinite varieties of local concoctions which people think are traditional because their mother made them.

    I’ve had lovely home cooking in Britain and a goodly amount of it vegetarian. Do you like Quorn? It works pretty well in some Italian-derived things like lasagne…again thanks for your blog–I miss Britain.

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    • Quorn. Hmmm. I don’t dislike it, and I use it now and then, but I’m not bowled over by it. I wouldn’t design a national cuisine around it, but it’s coming on the scene a little late to make a convincing case for that anyway–especially if you’re going to rule out borrowings, which I assume also rules out innovations. My rule is accept all borrowings and reserve the right to make fun of them.

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  13. Stodgy. Hmm… my favourite pudding (and I mean pudding, not dessert, though it was dessert, as you know…) at school… in fact the only food I liked at school, was Spotted Dick ( recipe here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/spotteddickandcustar_87835), with custard. Yellow custard, not the vile pink custard that we were also offered. But despite liking it – it was stodgy. And in this case, ‘stodgy’ means you could probably use it to cement bricks together.

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    • I’m sure you’re right. And China’s the wrong place to order a full English breakfast. And let’s not even get started on what the Unites States does to tea.

      I’m not sure where this argument I’m putting together is taking me, but I’m getting pretty passionate about it.

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      • The US is not alone in what it does to tea. I had to stop drinking tea in Italy. It came a different way each day in the same hotel.

        I think we just lost confidence in our own food, although that includes potatoes which don’t even come from this continent, let alone this country. Everyone else’s food seemed a bit more sophisticated and, when some of the necessary ingredients started to be imported in the 60s, we had a go at creating it ourselves. Now we know that you can’t have an Italian meal in the UK that tastes the same as one made in Italy because the ingredients don’t travel that well and we’re going all out with making it more ‘made in the UK’ in our own exccentric and tasteless way.

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  17. Institutional mass cooking probably bears some responsibility for the reputation…cabbage boiled until the cooks were sure that it was dead, thus the aroma lingering in nooks and crannies of the buildings, ready to leap out on the unsuspecting….packet blancmange, usually coloured a sort of sticking plaster pink…..artificial cream, fried whiting on Fridays, their tails pinned within their mouths, to name but a few of the horrors…

    But where you have, as once you had if you had some money, fresh ingredients of good quality then the view seemed to be ‘why spoil them with sauces and suchlike?’.

    As to puddings, I am wondering when those who bleat piteously about a long gone colonialism will demand that they are removed from the British diet as it was only when the sugar of the West Indies plantations hit the home market from the seventeenth century onward that sweet puddings took off as evidenced by the otherwise gloomy Henri Misson
    ‘Flower, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, suet, marow, raisons, etc., are the most common ingredients of a pudding. They bake them in an oven, they boil them with meat, they make them fifty several ways.
    Blessed be he that invented pudding for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people.
    Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding. To come in pudding time, is as much to say, is to come in the most lucky moment in the world…’

    Made properly such puddings are far from stodgy…try a Sussex Pond Pudding, or a Black Cap Pudding where the cook has a light hand. It is as far as possible from the slime covered leaden lump of suet duff which would turn up at school dinners, accompanied by plum and apple jam which was suspected to be army surplus from the Great War to make a dish known to us all as dead baby.

    And pudding and dumpling figured in the terms of service of the sailors in the Newcastle collier fleets, bringing coal to London down the East Coast.
    ‘Duff out, dumpling home, poop in the cabin foul weather.’

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    • I’m not sure it was only institutional cooking, because I remember the stairways in a lot of the buildings where I grew up smelling of cabbage. As for colonialism, I could do some bleating myself–I’m far from convinced that it’s long gone, or that the past is really over–but that doesn’t make the products any less appealing. The problem is the price other people paid for, say, sugar. I’m not going to gloss over the complexities.

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      • Yes indeed they did pay a price…not only slaves but indentured servants too.
        And you are quite right, colonialism has not disappeared…it has become global business and its practices bolstered by supine or corrupt governments and I would have a lot more time for those claiming redress for injuries to their ancestors if they would put their energy into preventing others…now…, from suffering a similar fate.

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  20. Fish in lasagne? I can’t even get it together in order to gag. Who thought that was a good idea?

    British food is fine as long as someone else cooks it, it would take a lot to dampen my gratitude enough to complain. Deep frying improves pretty much everything including old boots. Deep fried Mars Bars definitively establish the genius of the Scottish culinary sensibility.

    Although Heston Blumenthal really needs to rein it in.

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  21. I’m not nearly as humorous as you, Ellen, or many of your other correspondents, but I hope neither you nor British cuisine goes the Minnesota State Fair direction of “if you can put it on a stick and deep fry it, people will overpay ridiculously for it”. They haven’t yet figured out how to do “water on a stick”, but probably will–maybe ice cubes? I mean, there is Baked Alaska and in the movie “Comfort and Joy” (I can’t do italics here, sorry) they solve a war between Italian family mobs by creating deep-fried ice cream. In fact, I don’t see why Italy can’t do fish-and-chips when it was Italian immigrants to Britain who created the industry–think of the deep-fried artichokes of the old Jewish Quarter in Rome? And I do like deep-fried cheese curds (once a year at the Fair).

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    • I know some people love fish and chips. For all I know, I’d love it if I ate fish. But it’s equally possible that the immigrants who invented it may have thought, hey, the British’ll eat anything, and sold the stuff to them while not eating it themselves.

      We’ll never know.

      And, for the record, you can create italics almost anywhere online by typing (and I’m going to insert spaces so that the coding doesn’t work) before the words you want italicized and after them.

      I do like the idea of selling water on a stick. It’ll be a challenge.

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      • Thanks Ellen, but–typing what? If there is a command I don’t know it–I am a Luddite with an old Mac—I know there was a way on PCs but please tell me more! And I don’t know what the GBBO might be either….

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        • It should be the same on a Mac or a PC. What you do is type the marks I put in above (only without the spaces between them) before and after the word(s) you want to italicize. They won’t show up in the comment–they just tell the magic little brain of the internet that it should italicize that chunk of text.

          Did that make any sense?

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          • Not sure–I saw parentheses, nothing else—but Flo thinks she can show me how to do it. I do want to, as I think it is proper style to italicize major works (books, plays, movies, symphonies) while leaving quotation marks for short stories, poems, brief quotes—right?

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  22. I fondly remember your post about making hamburgers American-style there. I think of it often, actually. More like meatloaf there, I spose.
    Smoked sausage and mashed potatoes is a rare and deeply comforting meal for me now and again, so I’ll not complain about bangers and mash, but I do not want baked beans on toast, which is saying a lot because I like almost everything on toast.

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  23. Stodgy. Haven’t heard that word in a while, but now thinking of the British food I’ve heard of and the ones you’ve named, it does seem fitting a word. When I was growing up in Singapore and Malaysia, one of the most popular canteen dishes was crumbed chicken piece and mashed potato, and fish and chips.

    A sauce can make or break a meal. If you have bad sauce or sauce that you don’t like, it can ruin it completely.

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  25. Ellen–I’m guessing “Great British Bake Off”, which is one thing they do well–I’d say originating in the early days of Empire when flour and sugar were cheap products from the colonies, and eggs and dairy were still high quality local products. Affordable luxuries?

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  26. I enjoyed your comments on food. Yes, pudding originally meant a dessert that might be savory or sweet and originally called for meats and suet. It was boiled till done because it needed to last. Over time, it has shifted to the sweet thing. Later in the week I’ve a column set to publish on plum pudding, so I learned a bit about the history of puddings.
    I love the shortbread, cheeses, and tea I get over there when I visit.

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  29. Pingback: Is British food dull? – Fat Loss Tips Blog

  30. Pingback: is it? | food and stuff

  31. My grandfather was an enlisted Scottish Highlander in the British Army WW1. He would eat anything. Kidney, brains, head cheese, haggis. I was grateful that the only that passed through the years was the shortbread, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Christmas. And scones.

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    • Harshit, your post is clear and well written, and as far as I can tell well informed, but most bloggers consider it spamming when a person’s includes a link to something on a totally different topic from the post it’s responding to. You might want to check out the Meet and Greet that happens every weekend at https://dreambigdreamoften.co. It welcomes links on all topics.

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  35. Hmmm.. I’m not so sure about this one. Not sure where you’ve been eating or who has been cooking for you but ‘stodgy’ is not the word I would use for beautiful British cooking. Also you totally dismiss the beauty of fresh British produce… maybe do some more research next time.

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    • Sorry to be slow in responding. I just dug your comment out of the spam folder, where, for some reason, WordPress dumped it.

      A lot of it, I think, in what we learn to love. English breakfasts don’t do anything for me, but a good egg salad sandwich (that’s egg mayo to you, I think)? To me that’s a thing of beauty, although I’m happy to admit it’s not the world’s greatest creation. It happens to be something my mother made if we went to the beach, so it carries a lot of memories and overtones.

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      • Food customs and biases, I am told (and as a therapist I believe) are some of the must tenacious habits for most people. I do love the English (Scottish/Irish) full breakfast of the B+Bs, though occasionally ask for porridge instead if I’ve had several days. I also love Coq Au Vin but not for breakfast. And I haven’t ever cooked with Quorn here in Minnesota, though the coops have it…used to use tofu and miso a lot but Flo has some trouble digesting them. I like egg salad just fine, but almost never make it…curries are quite frequent menu items, including dahls and besan cakes (ever done those—so easy AND savory. Well over there they sould be savoury).

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        • According to what I’ve read, not only is the food from their country of origin the thing immigrants hold onto most strongly, of that, breakfast is the meal they’re least likely to change.

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  38. As a British person who often cowers away from the food of my ancestors by exploring every other possible cuisine, I see your point (and the humour). But as a country continually battered by rains and wind, stodge has a place, and that’s keeping the winds away from vital organs. Great read.

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  39. Had my first traditional English breakfast when I went travelling in Europe 5 months ago. I gotta say I’m used to having American breakfast so English breakfast was an interesting experience for me. My great-grandmother was British, she made really good roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

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      • HaHa..when I have time..I would probably have much to say to your sweeping statement….But I am sure whatever anyones favourite cuisines are then amongst the great meals have been some horrors and so far removed from the great meals as to be almost indistinguishable….I love Thai food..most of it..but have had some aweful dishes ..All down to the individul chef not the cuisine likewise the British Yorkshire pudding…Mine are crispy and light ..no stodge..venture up North and they like them stodgy with gravy to start a meal..Two totally different outcomes and both loved in their respective regions…No right or wrong way just regional differences… Just well, just because I can ..London ranks Numero 6 in the world with 87 Michelin Stars…
        Haha for someone who didn’t have the time..you have my answer..Have a nice day and if nothing else your post did elicit many responses which proves we are all pashionate about food…

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        • You’re right: It has gotten a lot of responses, which is always fun. And for the record, I didn’t actually say British food was dull, just that it has that reputation. For my tastes, I’d say it has a mixed record. A lot of it (and keep in mind that I live in Cornwall, not London), I think, is. But then there are things like scones and apple pie and broccoli and cheese soup….

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            • It could. And if it does, I’ll host it until we (or at least I) get bored.

              I don’t know if Cornwall’s produced the chefs or if they’ve just kind of landed here. Rick Stein has conquered Padstow so thoroughly that it’s sometimes called Padstein. Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve never eaten at his restaurant(s), so I don’t get to have an opinion on his food.

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  41. Pingback: In Defence of British Food, and a Discussion of Netiquette | quercuscommunity

  42. An interesting post. British food hasn’t got the best rep compared to say Italian or Spanish food. It’s not massively healthy (Cornish pasties, sponge pudding, crumble, fish and chips an example) and it could be argued it’s not really part of our culture. You visit Italy and see food is part of life, it’s love and happiness. Here in the UK it isn’t. You eat out here and waiting staff have no idea what’s in the food unless they get out the allergy book. Having said that, the UK has got some great chefs and talent. We are a fantastically multi cultural in our society which – from living in Birmingham – has meant there is an array of amazing places to eat. I wouldn’t poo-poo British food, agreed it’s not massively healthy but the tide is changing.

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    • In Cornwall, where I live, both food and people tend to be much more mono-cultural, which colors my impression of British food. Your comment about how much food is a part of life in different cultures is interesting, and not something I’d given any thought to. By the standard you’ve set, I’d have to say it’s not much a part of American life either. We eat. Some of us love food. But I don’t think we’ve made it central to our culture.

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  43. This is an interesting start of a topic, British food does certainly have a fairly poor reputation but mainly externally rather than internally. British food doesn’t travel well and you definitely don’t find it overseas unless the area is heaving with British expats. Does that make it dull though? In my opinion, British food is very adaptive. A list of Britain’s favourite national dishes would certainly include curry and many Italian dishes as well and this influences the way we cook and the ingredients we use. Fish and chips itself is actually Italian in origins and was brought the Britain from Italian migrants in Scotland. From reading your post maybe you’ve just eaten in some bad restaurants, but I’ve eaten in bad restaurants in France where cooking is essentially sacred. I believe the main point is that no ingredient or cookery belongs to an individual country. Cooks borrow or steal from others. Lasagna wasn’t ‘invented,’ no meal is. French cooking borrowed from Italian cooking. The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, who borrowed from the Egyptians, who borrowed from the Persians. Your lasagna is different from my lasagna, there is no definitive recipe, just adaptations that may or may not include fish. You also make ‘stodge’ sound like a bad thing though. I see it more as a necessity. Yorkshire pudding was made as a substitute for meat during the war when meat was scarce. It’s now part of a traditional roast and I don’t know many people who doesn’t love a Yorkshire pudding. Stodgy food may not be glamorous but it’s cheap and warming which was needed for poor families in hard conditions and that is part of our history and lives on in our traditional foods. As someone who works in a ‘modern British’ restaurant there are a huge amount of different influences in what and how we cook; from French, Italian, Scandinavian, Asian. To me, that is the very strength of British cooking, adapting to our influences and the food of others. It may result in adding ketchup to a burger which may seem weird to you but is part of our culinary nature.

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    • I’m with you on absorbing influences. But I’ll differ on what I actually said here about British food. I didn’t say it was dull, only that it had that reputation and that some chefs seem to be overreacting to it, innovating for the sake of innovation rather than taste. But taste, of course, isn’t something humans will ever agree on.

      Your comment on stodge makes me realize that, without noticing it, I carried over the meaning Americans attach to the word–dull–to its use in Britain to describe food, so I assumed it carried a heavy tinge of criticism. As you’re using it, there’s nothing wrong with stodgy, just as there’s something wrong with starchy. Interesting point. Thanks for that.

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    • I’ve lived here for eleven years, and I love it. First off, not everything in life is food (although, to me, a lot of it is). Second, the food isn’t all dull, but if you don’t love with British food, most small towns have ethnic restaurants–usually an Indian restaurant and a kebab shop. Cities have a much wider range.

      The British foods I love tend to be either desserts or baked things: scones (especially cream tea, which is scones with jam and clotted cream), trifle, apple pie–the list goes on. The cheeses are wonderful. In the local cafes, where I sometimes grab lunch, soups are often good. Jacket potatoes (what I’d have called baked potatoes when I lived in the U.S.) come with an assortment of toppings, or just plain butter, and they also make a good lunch. The sandwiches are–well, they’re sandwiches. Some are good, some aren’t.

      I’m guessing from your photo that you’re likely to want vegetarian food when you’re eating out, and most places will have something vegetarian on the menu. It won’t necessarily be wonderful, but it’ll fill the gap. I’m a vegetarian, and I appreciate that. To me, a lot of the main dishes are edible but not interesting, but if you’re here for a few years I’m guessing you’ll mostly be cooking at home anyway, which is what I do.

      It’s a fascinating country. Don’t let me discourage you.

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  46. Your sense of humor here is fantastic. When I stayed briefly in London last summer, I did find that the food was repetitive, not bland or poorly made, but the patterns of flavors and style of presentation was predictable. Thankfully, the repetitive dishes I had most often were English breakfasts and fish and chips, which were delicious!

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    • Sorry to leave your comment hanging for so long. I only just dug it out of the spam folder–no idea why it ended up there. I’ve never been a fan of the English breakfast. I hate baked beans, don’t like grilled tomatoes, don’t eat sausages (I’m a vegetarian, and even veggie sausages don’t do much for me, although they’re edible). That leaves me with eggs and toast, which are fine. And mushrooms, which strike me as a wonderful addition to a breakfast.

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