British food is actually top tier. Tye difference with Italian food for example is Italian is quicker and easier to make, so your average person can put together a pasta dish pretty quickly as a weekday evening meal. Whereas youre not going to come home and quickly make a roast dinner or a beef wellington or a proper steak and ale pie, so instead you’ll just bang some fish fingers and chips in the oven and 20 minutes later have some perfectly good scran for while you watch EastEnders.
This affirms my hypothesis that the problem with British food is that they still have their nobility. France is the textbook example of the process - after they guillotined their nobles the good chefs that once served the elite had to offer their services to the general populace. But Britain? Only the nobles (or otherwise wealthy people) can have their servants at home prepare “a roast dinner or a beef wellington or a proper steak and ale pie”, while the comments have to settle for “some fish fingers and chips in the oven”.
As a British person myself, I completely disagree that our food is anything you would call top tier.
We have some nice food (as you mentioned) but it’s the exception, rather than the rule.
As a child I was forced to eat a lot of Sunday roasts at the grandparents that were bland and anemic and mushy, with veg boiled within an inch of its life, and where the meat was the only good part. I don’t think my experience was atypical.
British food these days is getting better all the time, but mostly because modern British food is a cultural fusion of tastes and techniques from everywhere in the world, and thanks to the Internet people are actually learning how to cook. Good roasts these days have sweetly caramelised oven-roast veg with olive oil and herbs and seasonings, and are a million miles from the mush I was served as a child.
But has British food historically been good? No, it has not.
British food is actually top tier. Tye difference with Italian food for example is Italian is quicker and easier to make, so your average person can put together a pasta dish pretty quickly as a weekday evening meal. Whereas youre not going to come home and quickly make a roast dinner or a beef wellington or a proper steak and ale pie, so instead you’ll just bang some fish fingers and chips in the oven and 20 minutes later have some perfectly good scran for while you watch EastEnders.
Stopped reading. Actually, gonna block you right after writing this message. I don’t want to know anything from you ever again lmfao.
This affirms my hypothesis that the problem with British food is that they still have their nobility. France is the textbook example of the process - after they guillotined their nobles the good chefs that once served the elite had to offer their services to the general populace. But Britain? Only the nobles (or otherwise wealthy people) can have their servants at home prepare “a roast dinner or a beef wellington or a proper steak and ale pie”, while the comments have to settle for “some fish fingers and chips in the oven”.
As a British person myself, I completely disagree that our food is anything you would call top tier.
We have some nice food (as you mentioned) but it’s the exception, rather than the rule.
As a child I was forced to eat a lot of Sunday roasts at the grandparents that were bland and anemic and mushy, with veg boiled within an inch of its life, and where the meat was the only good part. I don’t think my experience was atypical.
British food these days is getting better all the time, but mostly because modern British food is a cultural fusion of tastes and techniques from everywhere in the world, and thanks to the Internet people are actually learning how to cook. Good roasts these days have sweetly caramelised oven-roast veg with olive oil and herbs and seasonings, and are a million miles from the mush I was served as a child.
But has British food historically been good? No, it has not.