Don’t get high on your own supply.
Guv.
The fish recipes I have seen use Turmeric
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.
i do that all the time, but my own recipe, which is essentially hopped up chili beans on garlic toast. So i start with frying four pieces chopped up bacon in a bean pot, then add half an onion chopped n fry that soft, then a can of the heinz bbq chipotle beans, half a cup of E.D. Smith Baja Chipotle bbq sauce, half tbsp ancho powder, half tbsp jalapeno powder, quater tbsp white pepper, half tbsp garlic powder, simmer that all up and serve on and with thick cut buttered garlic toast. and to put the lie to any stereotypes bout regional cuisine, i’m doing this shit in western canada. I have a restaurant here, but this particular recipe is a bit too hot for most my customers.
That sounds good. I’ve never seen Heinz chipotle beans though (in Canada). I’ll have to keep an eye out.
That bloke is gently handling those pies.
my favorite is when they serve it hot! yum
Money can’t buy you taste 😉
Well, the whole spice trade was literally wealthy people buying taste.
…eh…profiting in a commodity trade doesn’t mean you…Ever see any midwestern farmer actually eat chickpeas? They love the bushel price most years though.
If this is what a country’s cuisine looks like to you, I think it says more about your choice in food than what is available from that country’s cuisine.
What British meals do you recommend?
Disclaimer: All of the below comes with the obvious caveat that it has to be made by someone who knows what they’re doing. Any country’s cuisine is shit if you’re eating at a shit restaurant. That’s not about your choice of meal, that’s your choice of venue.
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Pies. Britain has basically perfected the savory pie. Steak and kidney, steak and onion, scotch pie, shepherd’s pie, cottage pie, fisherman’s pie… British savory pies are an explosion of flavour. Pair with a good stout or porter; the kind of beer that still looks black even when you hold it up to a light.
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Good fish & chips is one of the most perfect meals ever created. Keep in mind that the condiments matter; you need the acidity and richness of a good malt vinegar to cut through that fattiness. Never get fish & chips in a pub or restaurant. Go to a proper chippy, preferably in a coastal town.
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Stews are a British classic. Try a real Lancashire hotpot sometime, with pickled red cabbage and mashed potatoes. Absolutely stunning.
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Get your ass down to a high quality carvery and try a roast dinner. Lamb or beef are the best bet, but chicken and pork are good too. The true test of a roast dinner is the quality of the gravy. It should be not too thick, and full of savory meaty flavour, not doughy or floury in taste. Also look for vegetables that have some colour on them, not just boiled. Roast lamb leg with a good mint sauce is a thing of beauty. Pair with red wine for lamb or beef, white for pork or chicken.
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Haggis is a flavour explosion. The real thing, no plastic wrapped forgeries, served with the traditional sides of tatties and neeps, and a glass of really good single malt whisky.
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Straight up, one of the best meals I’ve ever had was bangers and mash. I was at a high end London restaurant - I forget the name, but John Lennon used to eat there pretty regularly - and it was incredible. The potatoes were the perfect texture with just the right amount of salt and butter. The sausages were made in house, beautifully seasoned and cooked to perfection, and the gravy was stunning. It’s a very simple meal, but simple done right isn’t easy. In a simple meal there’s nothing to hide behind. Every part has to be perfect.
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Desserts. British desserts are phenomenal. Eton mess, spotted dick, and the absolute king of desserts, sticky toffee pudding served with thick cream. Unbelievably decadent.
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!remind me to see any answer to this lol
It depends if you are looking for traditional or contemporary cuisine.
Traditional:
Can’t get much more traditional than a Sunday roast. Perhaps not the most spiced dish, but relies on a complexity of ingredients cooked just right, and served with a combo of rich gravy and various sauces (mint, cranberry, redcurrant, horseradish, mustard etc are all common). Certainly a flavourful dish when done right.
Pies and pasties are historically very popular. These days sometimes mistakenly viewed as plain food due to the availability of simpler fast food offerings, but there are a huge variety of styles, flavours and complexities around. Pies as a category cover those made with different types of pastries, as well as those topped with potato (cottage pie, shepherds pie, fish pie etc).
There are a huge variety of other traditional dishes from across the UK to explore which Google can list out a load of, but truth is historically much of British cuisine was based on what was locally or seasonally available; seasonal veg, seafood, cheeses, breads and cakes.
Local knowledge and variety is also huge. I’m Welsh and could name dozens of Welsh dishes others in the UK won’t have even heard of, and you won’t find much mention of even online and know what you’re looking for.
Contemporary:
…per the meme, Britain’s imperial past does mean a multicultural present, and the reality is that that has influenced common cuisine in a big way - what many British people are eating on a regular basis are based in fusion.
Curries are incredibly popular, and it is worth noting that written British curry recipes predate the founding of the USA, and imported recipes predate that by hundreds more years - it isn’t a particularly recent or novel thing. British curries are as unique to Indian curries as eg Chinese or Japanese curry is. Not only that, each country within the UK has unique variations of curry attributed to them.
Anglo-Chinese and Italian food are also particularly popular - most towns across the UK that are big enough to have a couple of restaurants will have a minimum of a fish and chip shop, a Chinese, an Indian/curry house, kebab shop, and an Italian restaurant. Most cities have places serving foods from dozens of countries available. In big cities, London in particular, it is probably easier to name countries that there isn’t food from than there is.
Growing up, a typical week of 7 home cooked dinners looked like Pasta bake or lasagne, curry, stir fry, jacket potato and/or soup, fish & chips, fajitas, Sunday roast.
… That turned into a bigger answer than intended 😂
What do you think tea is made of?
Leaves?
mfing brits will make tea and I ask what kind and they say “Lipton”
Nobody drinks Lipton in the UK
Yes, I’ve never heard or seen anyone from the UK so much as acknowledge to Lipton as actually being tea. TBD, though, I actually prefer our Bigelow teas to Twinning, though. Especially the Earl Grey.
Yorkshire or Tetley, usually
Does anyone use tea as a spice?
Tea is spice
Spice isn’t necessarily spicy. It also contains herbs.
Man, it used to drive me nuts that people would say “spicy” or “too spicy for me” when they clearly meant “too hot” but then i started to pay close attention. They were using the term properly, they were actually bitching about the garlic and cumin and cardamon and white pepper and curry and anise and whatever else i was using. Mustard was too much. Yeah, some of them used spicy for hot, but those were the people who could handle spice or hot,
Yeah, oregano, cumin, and such are spices. But I’m not arguing it isn’t a pungent plant used culinarily I’m saying it’s not used as a spice. A spice is used to add flavor to a dish, tea is more of an ingredient. It’s closer to strawberries in culinary use. By adding strawberries to something its flavor is so impacted we either specify that it’s a strawberry version of the dish. Tea is more like that. Coffee too.
Whatever a Bay leaf is, tea is too. Same process.
But extremely different culinary uses.
I asked chatgpt for ideas
Black Tea Infused Chicken: Marinate chicken in brewed black tea with garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and honey for a flavorful twist.
Black Tea Glazed Salmon: Create a glaze with brewed black tea, honey, soy sauce, and a dash of lemon juice to brush over baked or grilled salmon.
Black Tea Poached Pears: Poach pears in brewed black tea with cinnamon, cloves, and a touch of sugar for a delicious dessert.
Black Tea Ice Cream: Infuse heavy cream with brewed black tea, then mix with sugar and vanilla before churning into ice cream
Fascinating. Hopefully someone itt have tried some of those and gives a critique.
Yeah some of those sound like decent novelties. Tea ice cream sounds good. But notice in each of these situations it’s being used far more like a fruit than bay or oregano would be. It’s never “do you know what this dish could really use? A bit of tea” no its “let’s build a dish to show off that we can use tea culinarily” its never curry with tea in its masala. It’s never used to spice up your rice. It’s never part of your dry rub. It’s never thrown into your soup or stew.
Interesting. I never heard tea referred to as such and won’t use it in speech, but it’s a fascinating bit of trivia, for me.
“Never dip into your own supply”
- brits, probably
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.
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.
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.
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 nightly 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.
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.
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
man if you make stew right it’s the most flavourful thing out there. half a bottle of red wine, couple cans crushed tomatos, chop up half your intended vegetables( Carrot, potato, onion, green onion stems, parsnips and celery for me), brown the beef, dump it all in except the other half of your vegetables, bring the level up with strong beef broth till everything is covered, and simmer covered till it all except the beef dissolves into a brown gravy, then add the other half of your vegetables and serve when they are cooked. Bay leaves and rosemary and thyme and pepper of course too. Garlic. Usually enough salt from the beef broth.
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.
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.
Literally by definition boomers would have been born after WW2.
Yeah this one was the silent generation
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.
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.
I don’t think I’d recommend chilli peppers with your user name.
It’s probably cause his spoon is too big.
Case proven, all the good cooks left.
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
Are the trees frozen or the suckers?
Depending on the time of year, yes.
How rude (although it was a clever insult and I literally laughed. I needed that. Thanks)!
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.
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.
They clearly never had soul food or Gullah/Geechee food.
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.
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 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 use a lot of herbs, garlic and mustard traditionally.
I look at it the other way around. The food was so horrible, England sent entire fleets of ships just to get takeout from India. It didn’t matter that it took months on end and people lost their lives along the way, it was still worth it.
The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made the British the best sailors in the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never get high on your own supply. Just good business sense.
Chicken Curry is the most popular British dish as of about 10 years ago and It’s only gotten better since then.
It’s like a US state dish but given the size and population that’s fair. Even more important it’s good.
It’s also been developing for about 100 years. It’s the British/Indian equivalent of Pizza. And It’s beautiful.
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
And then purposefully mispronounce almost every foreign food.
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.
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.
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?
he just hasn’t tried it made by a competent cook yet
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.
I think he’s a trucker. the biscuits and gravy at a Love’s I could see dumping hot sauce on. Not generally though.
That fresh black pepper makes biscuits and sausage gravy killer!
