Best result of a brutal empire.

I even walked past it. But I can’t remember the exact name, what is the number of the year in this regard, lol.

Maybe some of the following count?

Lancashire Hotpot (kind of stew)
Yorkshire Puddings (batter puddings, traditionally served with roast beef)
Pork Pies
Black Pudding
Spotted Dick (sponge with currants)
Victoria Sponge
Bangers (sausages) and mash

When you think about it, “national dishes” are a strange concept anyway. I’m told that there’s something American about Apple Pie, but I’d be very surprised if no one made apple pie before Columbus et al. went left a bit.

Mind you, I’m Irish. The land that never met a food it could not boil.

Two summers ago my family had unforgettable breakfasts in our (really cheap, really crappy) hotel in London: The full English with all the overripe fruit you could consume. The pineapple was to die for. The advice to us on checking in was to hit Sainsbury’s after 8pm as that is when the produce was marked down. And, of course, that’s when our hosts did their shopping.

The point is, to be notable, food doesn’t have to be good or bad, just interesting!

As for rationing cuisine: I think the review hits the nail on the head as to why it was so unappealing. Basically the approach was to improvise approximations of the foods that people were used to with the ingredients they had available. A lot of the ingredients that were available during rationing are not inherently icky (in fact, some are things I eat every day as a vegetarian), it’s just the way they were prepared that made them unappealing.

I have relatively simple tastes.

There’s also a eponymous Seattle restaurant that I’ve been dying to try.

Surprise: “The striking thing about the wartime diet was that after one week Sue Perkins, already a willow, had lost two pounds, and Giles Coren three and a half.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2008/may/21/lastnightstvthesupersizers

Apparently the heart attack rate dropped. Probably due to most of the UK eating mostly vegetables.

Back on track: The true populist British ‘cuisine’ is that of the greasy spoon cafe. Genuine examples are hard to find in the single digit postcodes of London. If you go hunting, I hope you like baked beans. My favourite has to be Mario’s Cafe in Kentish Town. Kind of an English cafe/Italian home cooking mash up. Passable coffee, but one of the few places with a heart in franchise blighted London.

When you try to veer away from the roast plus starch or sausage plus eggs or pate you’re in trouble.

Watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (BBC) and you’ll witness how awful their cuisine is. If you have not already eaten it yourself.. (which I have)

This is my family’s food!

My Nana wasn’t a “bad” cook per se, but she had learnt how to cook in a very poor family and then during the war, so yorkshire puddings and trifle were her best dishes. My Mother never got the knack of cooking. More than likely because her mother (Nana) was a little confrontational about her own food, as she said “You didn’t dare say anything, you just ate it.” My brothers and I all started cooking young, around 12, as we say “out of self defense”; Mom really just didn’t “get” cooking. And while we’re all rather good cooks now (I make awesome Dal and Naan from scratch) we still go wobbly in the knees for a proper trifle or a bloody roast beef with yorkshire puddings and fresh horseradish. mmmmmm…

Now I’m hungry.

as a brit living in the USA for a long time i can happily bemoan the lack of decent FOOD in this country till the cows come home. there’s plenty of well documented books and articles pointing to an eating culture here that is unhealthy, monocultural and driven by $$$ not taste. — that’s what the food scientists are for.

when i fly back to the UK, after 8 hours of crappy airline food i like that i can go into any branch of marks and spencers in the airport and pick up a ploughmans sandwich (that’s 2 triangular wedges of brown bread, buttered, with cheddar cheese, greens and branston pickle)…. can’t say the same in the USA. finding a decent sandwich in a “fast” food context is impossible. subway does not count.

british food often gets a bad rap coz it’s deemed unhealthy, high fat and what not. some of the best brit food is things like the “full english/welsh/scots/irish” breakfast which usually consists of bacon, sausage, fried tomato, fried bread, poss. hash browns, baked beans, poss. black pudding, toast w. butter and marmalade, healthy slathering of brown sauce (HP), fried mushrooms…. veggie options usually available for all of above. i had veggie black pudding recently and it was very good. now i defy anyone here in the states to pass up on a feast like that at 9am in the morning.

other signature dishes are fairly fatty too. fish and chips for example is a heart attack on a plate fair enough. but if this is purely about taste then once again i defy any salty fordist french frie to even come close to the odd shaped, steaming, british chip, served in a wad of newspaper after the pub. served on a bap, as a chip butty for lunch with butter and a fried egg. this is soul food. and bits…. when in the UK ask for your fish and chips with bits.. you’ll get a bunch of crispy batter bits… again not exactly healthy but pretty damn tasty.

as a veggie roast beef and yorkshire pudding is def. off my menu now. but as a kid growing up i could eat mountains of the stuff. yorkshire puddings are like pancakes cooked in the oven at very high temp so they crisp up and yet are soft in middle. try them with sausage, onions and gravy as toad in the hole.

english food is hearty food developed over centuries of rain and mist and generally shitty weather. it’s food developed using what you could get your hands on. whether that’s spuds and carrots and turnips, or chicken tikka, lamb masala and so forth….

… in the media cooking shows on TV in the UK have waned a bit i think giving way in part to auction and real estate reality programmes. but 10 years ago day time TV from 3pm – 6pm was heaving with shows like ready steady cook and Masterchef… eating well and eating tasty was popularized and enshrined in UK culture…. folks went from watching jamie oliver to making the stuff in 24 hours… go into any sainsburys or tesco or marks and spencers and be amazed at the wealth of ingredients from all over the world… where are the cooking shows on USA network TV, not cable but on ABC NBC etc… where does watching people cook fit into the 24 hr news cycle?

also WTF with the bread over here? leave a loaf of wonderbread in a puddle it’ll dissolve. sugar in bread? WTF? bread is the staple food rich / poor yet decent bread over here in only available at a premium, cheap bread here is shit. u can always get a decent loaf of bread in the UK at a reasonable price….

an on and on…. seriously…. beer, gin, cup of tea, scones with clotted cream, christmas pudding, custard, rhubarb crumble, vanilla slices, english toffee, eccles cakes, cornish pasties, meat and potato pie, samosas, meat and two veg, trifle, beans on toast, cheese on toast, welsh rarebit, cadburys creme eggs, oxo, hp sauce, mint sauce….

ok i’m off to eat my porridge.

There are several themes to English cooking: adopted (Empire/Trade) cuisines, rural peasant, the simple (based on outstanding quality meat), the foods that powered industrial revolution and the excesses of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Unfortunately people seem to focus on the Victorian insistence on boiling vegetables into pulp, a habit which continued up to the 1970s. That, and the bad diet of the industrial working class has blighted Britain’s culinary reputation for decades. While the WW2 cuisine drew on some of that dire tradition, it was later shown that the nutritional quality of the WW2 diet was far better than that of the majority in the 20s and 30s. (And probably today. Very little fat or sugar, high fibre, low GI…)

I live in Canada, and have never been to Britain. The Oldie may be better than actually visiting the UK- it’s great reading, and it has excellent cartoons.