Navy beans and tomatoes are both native to the Americas, does that count?
The British eat so much Indian food it’s crazy. There’s a Nando’s on damn near every corner in London.
France too! French cooking is WILDLY overrated, they coast by on their desserts and pastries and those are just good cause butter
The best Italian restaurant I ever ate at was in Paris, and I’ve been all over Italy.
It was a near thing. But the French do not fuck around with their cooking.
those are just good cause butter
Paula Dean’s food is good because of butter.
Julia Child’s food is good because of experience.
Isn’t it because they considered spices for peasants?
Anyone shit talking fish fingers is going to get a visit from me and my sledgehammer in the middle of the night. You’ve been warned!
Leave my motherfucking fish fingers out of this!!!
Do you like fishdicks?
Fish don’t have hands. Where do the fingers come from?
… you don’t want to know
Britain stole all those historical artifacts and culture but couldn’t steal a recipe.
We’ve stolen lots of recipes. Modern British cuisine is basically a massive rip-off of of every other country’s cooking smashed together.
Fusion, if we’re being polite about it.
Walking down a high street in the UK. I smell loads of spices from even the shit takeaways.
curry doesn’t count.
I dated a British girl in high school. She microwave broccoli in water. No salt or seasoning. No butter. No nothing.
She took it out, drained the water and told me her dish was done.
That was the last time she made anything for us.
Sounds like me, except I would drink the broccoli water.
Once you reset your palette, cutting out excess salt and sugar and cheap fats, and processed foods, you learn to enjoy the taste of whole foods all on their own. Salted ourselves to taste, which is far less than processed food will add.
…there’s gotta be a healthy solution somewhere between industrially processed meals and plain microwave-boiled broccoli
A toaster oven, or regular oven I guess if you’re fancy, some olive oil and a sprinkling of red chili flaked will get you done delicious roast broccoli (400°F/205°C for ~15 minutes)
I feel like I’m missing something, was her task not to cook the broccoli? What is meant by “dish”? It is just broccoli? Am I Bri’ish?
I know that it’s mostly a joke, yet it is worth mentioning that those valuable spices were exclusively used by the rich and wealthy. Ordinary people and their food did not benefit from the spice trade at all. If you delve a little bit into culinary history and find out what the aristocrats did with (for example) extremely rare and precious nutmeg the British Empire fought wars over, you want to dig up their bones, revive them, just so that you can kill them again.
i’m not looking it up i’m just going to pretend i know
I remember reading that in today’s money sugar used to be over £100/kg. Spices probably more. No shit regular people didn’t use them much! But sugar was also considered a spice too.
i’m going back to pretending they just boofed it my version of history is happier
Jesus fucking christ, there’s never a shortage of harrowing greed
The limies weren’t even that big into the spice trade, it was the dutch. You mention nutmeg, nutmeg and cloves came from a certain string of small indonesian islands only. There were some english traders there, when the dutch were trying to monopolize the trade.
The dutch sent a delegation, that angered the natives that killed them. The dutch came back and exterminated the natives. Killed every single one of them, and the english and other traders there.
Edit: Adaman islands if memory serves, fuzzy on the years no time to look up.
I mean, that’s true, but hasn’t been the case for at least a century, so why do they still eat like the aristocrats are hoarding all the spices?
We don’t. It’s a bit.
The part people forget is that we didn’t just take the spices, we took the whole cuisine and the people who could cook it.
The general British public has been eating a multicultural diet for a very, very long time. So when you see bangers and mash, rather than wonder why it isn’t spiced, consider that we’re just being retro and tomorrow we’ll have Indian and the next day Chinese and…
What you call Chinese comes with fries and gravy, man.
Not usually
WW2 rationing really messed up their culinary scene
WW2 rationing really messed up their culinary scene
What? That doesn’t make sense. Even if it was a decade of rationing, that wouldn’t completely wipe out and replace a culture’s cuisine. Just look at all the other countries that had rationing during ww2 and other wars, and their food is still flavorful.
Also this isn’t ancient history stuff, if what you said was true then we’d see that British cuisine was radically better before ww2, but it’s not the case
i mean, that is one effect. there’s also the fact we have way better refrigerated transport nowadays so what we view as food deserts now, that was just average. a lot of the fruit and veg came canned 70 years ago if you weren’t next to a place that grew it. those awful fruit cocktail in syrup things were damn good back then
It’s a real effect. Wikipedia has a whole section about it in their British cuisine article. A combination of rationing continuing well after the war ended (until 1954), agricultural issues, and a bunch of other stuff put Britain in a position where even after rationing ended, the effects stayed on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_cuisine
It’s not the only reason British food has a bad reputation, but it’s part of it.
Sure, but that ended in the 50s. They can no longer reasonably use that excuse.
The real problem in my view is that people don’t recognise post-imperial fusion cusines as ‘legit’ British food even though the curry house is the definition of an Anglo-Indian institution. When people in Britain claim the tikka masala it’s not being twee or politically correct, rather it’s earnestly considering an immigration-originated fusion cusine as part of the wider national one.
Also even pre-20th century British food isn’t exactly bad, I’d argue it doesn’t travel amazingly in many cases but a Sunday roast in our climate is sheer perfection. Too many people expect France or Italy from a country with nothing like their climate.
a Sunday roast in our climate is sheer perfection
i’ve got some amazing roast recipes, but they’re “english” or “american” cuisine so bleh. but godsdamn are they tasty when they’re done right.
also, y’all have enough immigrants from the larger empire that claiming anglo-indian cuisine isn’t british cuisine just kind of feels racist (which is parallel to your point). how long do you have to live there before you’re british? I like the french approach. five minutes.
It’s a bit like more traditional Anglo and Celtic American foods in that respect, lots of simple shit that tastes good by itself but is generally considered basic or has had certain context stripped with time. A good example is meatloaf which in some reasons was basically whatever meat and possibly eggs you had lying around after a bit thrown together in an loaf. But then you get shit like cheese curds and it’s just deep fried cheese and it’s great.
Also you can end up with something like my ancestoral food traditions where it’s just soup, cooked meats, and weird increasingly modified trail foods. The trail foods also happen to still be cheap even with modifications, though I guess rice and chili ain’t exactly that complex.
They tried to fix it later though
I always wonder whether it’s a lingering effect of rationing,which didn’t end until the '50s.
“Culture”
You’re somewhat correct but also not.
The spice scarcity and making do without is a result of two world wars ravaging a somewhat isolated island nation. See e.g. the Irish potato famine. Some were misfortunate enough to have no food at all - and many had to live with bland, rationed food items.
Those decades were formative and a lot of that stuck around.
And to be perfectly honest… I kinda like it. I like spiced (spicy in the flavourful, not the hot sense) food too, but there’s some beauty in putting together a dish of meat and potatoes where you let the flavour of the meat and potatoes come through. In some sense it’s actually similar to Japanese cuisine, specifically sushi, where the focus is on the fish itself, with minor added flavours (salt from soy sauce, heat from wasabi).
I think the two things we mentioned are not only not excluding each other, but rather cumulative: Spices were not common before the wars and the wars further increased their scarcity for most people, essentially preventing them from becoming part of the popular cuisine in a time period when other European nations became increasingly accustomed to using them.
wow i dont have time to research what they did. tell me what did they do?
They ate it, mostly as a status symbol. They’d carry it around with a small silver grinder to add it to their food. I’m not sure what was so bad about that, other than adding something worth a laborer’s salary for a year on your food. Also, it contains myristicin which if one consumes enough in one sitting can sort of give a high - a really bad one with hallucinations that go in for 48h - don’t try it, it can make you very sick.
There’s somewhere between 10 and 20 spices in the food pictured, why do you think its orange?
onions and tomato
Bean juice?
I mean the beans mostly get their color from the molasses and sugar but lots call for Worcestershire sauce which is going to have a bunch of stuff.
Use sparingly:
Salt
Pepper
BBQ rub seasoning from ???
Onion powder
Garlic salt
Misc. dried Italian herbs you’ve owned for years
Anything else left in your pantry
BBQ rub seasoning from ???
gets color primarily from paprika. almost always
sparingly
onion
garlic
Garlic and onion seasonings are measured with the heart, not the brain.
Camping advice from a feral Redneck, throw garlic and onion powder in your pack. It’ll come in good if you need a bit of oomph for your food, or you pull a me and over season the unholy amalgam of top ramen noodles and flavoring, chili, mac and cheese, and a hot dog tasted meh but the calories meant I didn’t need to eat for 30 hours so it was fine.
no. that's a little overkill, dude
bring the whole garlic braid. either braid it into your hair or wear it as a belt. you never know when you might need emergency rope.
bring green onions (not scallions) to plant along the trail so next time, you don’t have to bring onions you can just harvest them. first year, bring shallots to eat. fuck, plant the whole allium family. and some parsley, thai basil, thai chilis, you know what we’re going to need an herb garden. just try to get the same campsite every year.
“spices”, in this context, is Obese American for " salt, butter, and bacon grease"
my dude have you ever gotten a sandwich in Ljubljana? It’s bread, salt, butter, and bacon grease. that’s it. And they’re fucking amazing. I don’t think europe has any room to criticize.
Ha ha, that is the holy trinity.
But spices are used to disguise low quality ingredients just like the aforementioned salt, fat, and sugar. Namely garlic and onion powders, which are added for that purpose to all manner of processed foods that they aren’t elsewhere. IE italians are aghast at pizza sauce having garlic in it.
spices are used to disguise low quality ingredients
can be used to disguise low quality ingredients. high quality ingredients with high quality spices turn out amazing.
I wouldn’t even mind such a dinner. A clear red flag is people who boil meat or don’t use any oil anywhere.
Fish finger or chip sandwiches are great hangover foods. Once you understand that you will be closer to understanding British cuisine.
The curry or kebab was from the night before and that absolutely has spices. In the morning you go with fairly plain carbs.
Look at this guy. This guy doesn’t even soup
I read your comment while eating a stew with sausages in it. Okay. You’re right. Boiled meat can be nice under certain circumstances, which reminds me of Fondue Chinoise, where you basically boil your raw meat in hot broth.
What I had in mind: cooking chicken in plain water for 30minutes.
visited a greggs for the first time this summer, i was genuinely shocked at what they served. it’s like they went out of their way to not put any flavor in. and it was packed.
Yeah because a Stilton and cheese bake is totally favoueless, right?
Not enough salt and corn syrup for the discerning American tongue
We are forced into it, there are few to no not super sugary and salty and fatty processed foods here.
The only way to get away from it is to eat whole foods, which is also the cheapest and otherwise healthiest way to eat, if you don’t consider all the chemicals they douche our food in, or the poison shit they fertilize fields with here, (shitty story, municipal sewers will accept industrial waste of all sorts, then sell the result to farmers to use, now laced with all sorts of nasty stuff. Often applying it wrongly because there is no regulation anymore, leading to run off on top of it. A problem mostly solved from the 70’s on, that came back this last decade.)
It certainly won’t earn you any favours with me!
I’m sorry to hear that you’re stuck in a permanently basic bitch state. Stilton and steak is delicious.
You said “favoueless” instead of “flavourless.” They were making a joke about your typo.
It’s even better with good cheese!
apparently.
I read before ww2 rations got Brits used to bland flavourless food and they gave the same to their children so now it’s just what they do there
but there are also flavourful things there! i visited edinburgh and their black pudding and haggis were very pleasantly spiced. i just don’t get why they would charge almost €4 for a completely un-toasted bread roll and a tiny sausage.
Is black pudding blood pudding? Sheep blood?
You liked the haggis? It sounds revolting. Maybe not as bad as ludafisk, where they preserve fish in lye in scandanavia.
Black pudding is pig’s blood, grain, seasoning etc. There’s also a (more Irish) white pudding with chicken blood.
dunno if it’s sheep or pig, but i know it’s seasoned differently to what we have at home. haggis is just pölsa sausage so that’s just completely normal food. nothing wrong with a bit of lutfisk for christmas either.
I was under the impression haggis was sheep organs mixed with onion and oatmeal and lard cooked in a sheep stomach over a fire (traditionally on the cooking.) The last part doesn’t sound gross. It’s the oatmeal as the carb that seems off to me. I’ve tried and failed to use oats in that kind of savory way and it never works for me, and haven’t seen any other recipes using it as such.
sounds like a skill issue ngl
Well sure, I’m no chef. But haggis is almost universally disliked in any case. And the lack of oatmeal in common recipes elsewhere suggests it’s not great for these kind of uses. That said I would probably like the haggis if made well.
All the other grains are used elsewhere as such, except maybe rye, another food that grows well in the poor sandy soils of scotland and thereabouts as I understand it. I’ve never seen rye in a savory dish as such either. Barley, wheat, potatoes, corn, rice, all the rest are in numerous dishes.
You can’t improve on perfection
“perfection”
“British food”
Pick one
it was just a joke man ._.
It’s ok for people to not like your joke, but crying about it just makes you look like a child.
Feel free to complain about this downvote too.
Sure. But what does this have to do with British food?
If that were perfection, the rest of the world would be eating it.
We only got them to stop the Dutch getting them.