• Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    6 minutes ago

    British food is great. Chicken tikka, pizza, Chinese, lasagne… The list goes on.

  • gmtom@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    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.

    • Riverside@reddthat.com
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      44 minutes ago

      British food is actually top tier

      Stopped reading. Actually, gonna block you right after writing this message. I don’t want to know anything from you ever again lmfao.

    • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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      13 minutes ago

      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”.

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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      54 minutes ago

      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.

  • nialv7@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    jokes aside, i’d say british cuisine is definitely taking more flak than what it deserves.

    • Rinox@feddit.it
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      4 hours ago

      Maybe…

      What I don’t understand is how they can be on an island, surrounded by some of the best fish in the world (including the fantastic Scottish salmon) and the only piece of fish you can find in the whole country is freaking cod with four layers of batter applied to it and fried until the only flavor you can perceive is that of mediocre burnt oil.

      They make good meat dishes (roasts, meat pies), but then they pair them with the most uninspiring sides… The UK cuisine has a few good things, and they have good ingredients, but more often than not they cook them in boring ways and stop there, calling it “good enough”

      • Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        I once read that a group of Rotterdam Housewives wrote a collective letter to their fishermen husbands, that they would abide no more then 2 days of salmon dinner a week. Maybe having an abundance of it makes it unbearable after decades. I mean, complaining about salmon dinner seams crazy to me, so who knows what you can get fed up with :)

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      I’m not much of a fan of many traditional British dishes, and there are some things many British people seem to enjoy make me wonder about their taste buds. OTOH, Britain once had a worldwide empire, and it brought back a lot of dishes from that empire to the mainland. Indian curries are the obvious example, but there’s also Caribbean food, Chinese food, even other curries from South-East Asia.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
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      14 hours ago

      Of course it does. I grew up in the UK and it’s fun taking jabs but then you have a bunch of people who just keep doubling down as if they’re God’s gift to the kitchen.

      My favourite take of theirs is always what they exclude from English food but they’ll talk about American food and include everybody else’s cuisine …

      • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        What’s crazy is all the trash they talk about American food, and somehow managed to completely forget that Louisiana is in America…

      • hraegsvelmir@ani.social
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        10 hours ago

        In fairness, a lot of people will only experience or know what’s brought out as quintessential English for at holidays or other special occasions, which isn’t always the best thing there is to offer from the cuisine. It’s something else entirely if you actually go there for a couple of weeks and pay attention to all the delicious stuff you’ll eat while there.

        Plus, you get plenty of weirdos from every country who seem to have Stockholm syndrome with the most bland/boring aspects of their cuisine and will wholeheartedly recommend their absolute most terrible dish as the pinnacle of their country’s cuisine. I have a coworker from Ireland who won’t touch a spice bag if his life depended on it, but will tell anyone who listens how wonderful beans on buttered brown bread is and that it should be more common everywhere.

        • lobut@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          lol I actually quite like Irish food. Went to a random pub in Galway and had some stew and it was so good! Irish beef is awesome.

          I have friends kinda like what you described though. No spices and they love bland food, lol.

          I’m okay with people taking jabs at British food to be honest. Like, my first year back when I was an adult I didn’t know what to eat and I actually cooked more because I didn’t know what to get. It wasn’t until I made some friends that I knew places to check.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Yeah, tikka masala is awesome. And yeah fish and chips is amazing too. It’s just that brits also have stuff like boiled roasts

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Something I’ve seen brits complain about on the internet before, Something about Sunday roasts involving far too much boiling and not enough seasoning

      • Drew@sopuli.xyz
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        11 hours ago

        I do believe tikka masala is British but it is funny that it’s the first thing you said because it’s also very clearly Indian

        • JackFrostNCola@aussie.zone
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          3 hours ago

          There is a whole category of British-Indian food which is from immigrants creating completely new types of curries that dont exist in India.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          Yes, that was intentional to attempt to be humorous. It was invented by brits returning home attempting to recreate Indian food.

        • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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          10 hours ago

          indian the same as pizza is italian. invented elsewhere by emigres to another country who then had family bring back the crazy new fusion food for the people of the homeland to go “oh that’s good.”

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      17 hours ago

      Yeah, you all definitely have… 8 or maybe 9 edible things that aren’t beer or curry.

      All the same, I’d rather have a full English breakfast than 90% of French food and 98% of German food. Kidneys in cream, or raw pork crackers, or bread and cheese like they invented it or whatever.

      • FreeBeard@slrpnk.net
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        17 hours ago

        Very ignorant take because everything a full English offers is also very German. This includes the pig blood which isn’t french but you probably didn’t think of that anyway.

        • hansolo@lemmy.today
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          10 hours ago

          Branding and beans for breakfast. That’s why the English get the win here, which is also occasionally called a full Irish breakfast if there’s no Brits looking. Plus, the English hardly have any indigenous culinary variety or spices. Why else colonize with such a passion?

          And I’m actually very much ok with black pudding, that’s not the issue. I don’t like northern French cuisine because it’s just “how much butter and cream can we pump into this snail or these poor mushrooms or a potato that was fine all on its own? Can we drown this perfectly mediocre cut of beef in cream and butter to make it seem fancy?” I’m far more partial to living below the butter/olive oil border. Southern France on the sea is tolerable, they’re also below the border.

          • Miaou@jlai.lu
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            8 hours ago

            Snails are not a northern France thing though (unless you have a loose definition of north). It’s mostly central, with a huge correlation with tourist hotspots

            • j_overgrens@feddit.nl
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              6 hours ago

              They confused Central French with Northern French, but it’s true that classic French cuisine, both northern and central, use too much dairy.

              I mean I love France with all my being, but there’s no denying the use of cream and butter (or cheese in Northern French cuisine.

        • Damage@feddit.it
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          5 hours ago

          The French have good bread as well. Not as good as what we have in Italy of course, but well, they’re doing their best!

        • hansolo@lemmy.today
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          10 hours ago

          I left the 2% for pretzels, sausage, and Haribo gummies.

          And Italians also make bread, you’ll notice they’re not on the exclusion list.

        • Miaou@jlai.lu
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          8 hours ago

          They sure like talking about their bread a lot. No one beyond their borders understands why however.

          • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            That’s what I thought until I started working at a German bakery. Now I’m converted (as someone who isn’t from here and grew up with fresh home baked sourdough every day). You should try more of it.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          9 hours ago

          Germans have roughly one kind of bread that they’re very good at.

          Germany has tons of Turkish immigrants, but Germans won’t buy pita bread unless they’re getting a doner. They share a massive border with France but mostly ignore delicious French breads like croissants, baguettes, etc. They’re right near Italy but you won’t find much focaccia. Forget about naan, bagels, bao, corn bread, crumpets, injera, etc.

    • idunnololz@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      idk man. I went to the UK to sample some of the cuisine thinking it can’t be that bad and I have mixed feeling afterwards. Like the food is edible at least.

    • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      It’s a reference to Alberto Grandi and his theses about the origins of many popular Italian dishes that are perceived as “traditional” but did not become mainstream until after WWII (and that Italian cuisine before that was much more regional and less homogeneous).

      I think there’s something to those arguments, but it is worth noting that he’s not really a “food historian” as he’s often described but a professor of economics and management.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          9 hours ago

          Pasta has been around in Italy since at least the Roman era. The story that they didn’t know about pasta until Marco Polo returned from China is just not true. He might have brought back some specific new recipes, but Italians have been enjoying pasta since before the three kingdoms began their romance.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      14 hours ago

      Ahkshually, cultures all over the world have eaten crustaceans for millennia!

      (I made up that fact for the sake of the punch line, no idea if accurate)

      • Logi@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        My people would rather have starved than eat crustaceans. Lobsters were being fed to prisoners in the US until recently. People are weird.

        (It was a valiant attempt)

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      The Etruscans, famously known for their tomato sauce.

      “Food made by people living on what is now the Italian peninsula” is not a synonym for “Italian food.”

      • Meursault@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Yeah, all they did was form the basis for modern pasta, and cultivate the seasonings used by modern Italians. I’m sure that counts for absolutely nothing. /s

        • Monzcarro@feddit.uk
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          8 hours ago

          I can! I come from that area and it’s a real dish that is eaten commonly and served in pubs and restaurants. If you go to a local market, you can get then to take away with scoops of mushy peas in the container too.

          I don’t eat meat, so I can’t speak to the taste, but mushy peas themselves are delicious and shouldn’t taste anything like garden peas. They are more like a dal.

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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      17 hours ago

      I’d much rather have some Mexican bean dish rather than a British one. Baked beans are trash, you cannot change my mind.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        14 hours ago

        English baked beans are trash. Barbecue Baked beans heated up out in a smoker with a bit of shredded pork or brisket in it are fantastic, and if you disagree with that, you and your bean mash can go burn in hell ;-p