I'm bored of seeing lazy jokes made at the expense of traditional British cuisine. But a big part of that is surely that so much of British cuisine is just forgotten by the proletariat masses owing to the war and chasing takeaways. Something I'm surely a part of and should start correcting by looking at the man in the mirror.
What British cuisine do you recommend more people learn to cook?
More people should learn how to make hot water pastry. Pies are a great way to use up meat and veg and they last ages in the fridge too.
In general, the traditional British foods you see are made for the everyman but there's no reason you can't fry off your aromatics with tomato paste or add more herbs and spices to taste. We're not in the 1700s anymore.
England doesn't really have a native cuisine. There are a handful of native dishes - pies and pasties, stews, various kinds of forcemeat - but everything else is an import or a fusion.
The defining trait of English food is our willingness to adopt and adapt foreign foods. We shouldn't be embarrassed about that. Have you ever tried to get a curry in Italy? We don't have a precious tradition of local and regional foods handed down from mother to daughter, because we've never particularly needed or wanted one - we had a navy instead.
In that spirit, I'd suggest learning to cook kedgeree or mulligatawny.
>>15492 Doesn't that go for most places? Italian cuisine will be heavily influenced by Roman conquest and they've only had tomatoes since the Spaniards went conquistadoring.
England is an extreme outlier in our willingness to take a punt on funny foreign muck. The idea of a national cuisine is essentially a cultural fiction, but it's a fiction that we have never tried to cultivate.
Italian cuisine has evolved over time, integrating new ingredients and new styles, but there's a clear line between "Italian food" and "foreign food" and likewise clear lines between different regional traditions. They have a strong sense of protectiveness over something that's a vital part of their national identity. Change to that identity happens slowly, reluctantly and with great controversy.
By contrast, we've been xenophiles since time immemorial. People who are reluctant to try foreign foods and incorporate new ingredients have never been praised as defenders of a culinary tradition, but mocked as parochial plebs. The highest-status foods in England have always been the most exotic.
The contents of the British Museum are a useful parallel. Our most prestigious collection of artefacts doesn't advertise our own cultural products, it showcases the might of our empire; rooms filled with cultural treasures from around the world says more about our national identity than the work of any native artist or craftsman. Britannia ruled the waves.
>>15489 Northern European climates including Britain don't have any tradition of spiced food full stop.
Few spices grow here and many herbs aren't available year round like they are in southern europe, and additionally our cold climate means there is little demand to use spices to preserve food or otherwise hide the flavour of already spoilt food.
The same is true of Britain, Norway, Finland, Germany, Poland etc. What really sets Britain on the back foot compared to those countries is the loss of a wider range of preserved meats, different types of grains, less fruit and seed and nuts in widespread use. and similar things.
The cause of this is often cited as the rationing during and after the war, but Britain also saw a much faster rate of urbanisation and industrialisation around this period that led to monocultures of our home grown fruit, veg, grains and livestock, so we lost a vast amount of variety in the choice of foods we have even though the basic recipes didn't change.
>>15496 Better is the wrong word. Quantity won out over quality.
We used to grow wheat and rye and oats and barley and millet and spelt and more, every farmer in Britain had local varieties suited to the local climate and soil and grew different grains on rotation. But industrialisation and rationing left us with monoculture processed white wheat in as big quantities as possible, and all other grains massively declined in production. While on the continent all these grains continued to see widespread use.
The recent surge in popularity of sourdoughs and artisanal breads isn't really a foreign concept at heart it's relearning what we lost.
There's similar stories with a lot of other types of food.
I looked up historical food and some of this stuff is quite nice.
Imagine having peas, sorrel and salmon on a rich brown bread for breakfast. And beer.
>>15499 You mean what have we lost other than the varied and more nutritious varieties of the countries staple food that people ate for centuries and still eat everyday. The one food in medieval times so essential that people would have their food served in it?
We got two posts before the thread was completely derailed. The worst part is it's not even interesting conversation.
Funny you should bring this up actually. I was having a big row with Czechlass the other week about gravy, which she insists is the sole innovation of British cuisine, and that we just throw gravy on everything to cover up for lack of creativity. I did almost break up with her then and there. As a self respecting Yorkshireman, I wasn't going to have someone slander gravy under my roof. Not when it's someone whose culture considers a stew with paprika in to be exciting.
Anyway my argument was that modern Britain never really needed our own "cuisine" when we basically took over half the world just to steal other people's and bring it back. British Indian food isn't much like Indian Indian food, so can we not claim Indian food to be, in many respects, British cuisine? The humble tikka masala was invented in Glasgow, supposedly, after an indian chef tried to make gravy. Which makes the charge that Brits are boring because we just cover everything in gravy quite unfair, because nobody would call Indian food boring, and yet what is curry if not just spicy gravy?
The next day she sent me a picture of a gravy covered roast she was having at Toby Carvery without me. Bitch.
>>15503 >what is curry if not just spicy gravy?
The non-British Indians I know use the words gravy and curry interchangeably. It just means a freshly cooked sauce.
