Marmalade: A Very British Obsession
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The Portuguese original 'marmelada' made from quinces is sooo much better IMOH.
But (again in my opinion) nothing surpass the Brazilian take on marmelade, the "Goiabada", which is made with guava.
Why are you trying to create a divide, and why are you on the "lesser" side? Ignore the strange "posh" elite, they're morons. You can do whatever you want in Britain, no matter your situation (coming from an actually divided poor country, yes, really).
If only I was born to different parents, if only I was born in a different country, if only I had more money, if only I had friends in high places, if only the elite didn't keep us down. Lots of excuses, sometimes valid, but often not.
Working class Brits don't realize how much opportunity they have in their own country, and it's sad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_t...
Look at the university column.
Both are tasty but I wouldn't consider one to be "better" than the other, any more than I would consider peanut butter to be "better" than dijon mustard.
Marmalade is a form of citrus jam, very sweet, usually very sharp, and containing candied citrus peel. It's generally eaten on toast for breakfast. Quince cheese (in the UK) is generally less sweet, is a quince paste rather than a jam, and is used as an accompaniment to hard cheeses as an alternative to chutney. I believe this is how it is largely eaten in Spain, too, with manchego.
So while both marmelada and goiabada are great (I presume, having not tried goiabada), it's really a different thing to marmalade.
Portuguese 'Marmelada' is absolutely a historic ancestor of the british version. Atlas obscura has a good article on this. [0]
See also US/British flapjacks.
The earliest references to the orange version of marmalade, was marmalade made for Queen Catherine of Braganza (A portuguese noblewoman in the british court). It's innacurate to claim they are just phonetically related.
It's merely a categorisation thing I suppose, but to me they occupy very different niches, and saying one is better than the other is comparing quinces to oranges...
If it doesn't look like a duck, and it doesn't quack like a duck, then it ain't a duck. Even if you called it a duck the last 500 years, it still ain't a duck -- at least, it's not a duck like my duck's a duck.
I kind of like British fish and chips, the staple food for British people. But then once I've tasted Spanish fish and chips in Costa del Sol, I have just realised that I've not tasted a real fish & chips!
But the main reason I am looking forward for breakfast in any British eatery or any of their Bed & Breakfast apart from their wonderful Earl Grey tea, it will be their delicious marmalade. If I've remembered correctly, I have fallen in love in the very first bite!
To be fair though, a lot probably wouldn't consider the main place you get "British" food, the pub, as "eating out" because it's rather less formal.
> but it is nothing to write home about
I'll grant you that it's very, very variable, and the quality of a lot of pub food is crap in a lot of places. However there are lots of pubs that you can get very good British food (my local, for example - https://www.dancingmanbrewery.co.uk/food-glorious-food/resta...). You just have to know where you're going. And probably pay quite a lot for the good stuff. And avoid the chains.
There are many good, British restaurants around too - places like the Hawksmoor in London, or the Oxford Brasserie here in Southampton (the menu is here - https://www.theoxfordbrasserie.co.uk/menu). I wouldn't necessarily say I was going out "for British food" when I was visiting them though.
Do Thai people say they're going out for Thai food if they head out to eat in their home country? (I have no idea!)
The rib meat in that main is slow cooked, shredded meat from short ribs, not served as "ribs". And with a horseradish gravy, yes that's very british.
It's a shortened menu due to Coronavirus, usually there is a roast lamb and a pork belly dish too.
Plus there are three shortcrust pies, not explicitly called out as they are rotating specials, served with gravy and mashed potato.
All in all it's a very British menu, though yes there are two burgers on there. There are burgers literally everywhere these days!
Pedant alert: Fish and Chips is not originally British! (It's only been a staple over here since the 1860s.)
The chips had their origin as Belgian frites, and the fish is from Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Holland, who picked up and modified the recipe for pescado frito. (Fried fish could be eaten cold the next day, so was suitable for shabbat.)
For instance, chili peppers were introduced to asia by the portuguese during the 15th century, but now chili-heavy dishes are characteristic of much SE Asian and Indian cooking.
Is pasta characteristic of Italian cooking or do we need to look further back to ancient greek origins and say it's not really from there?
Are we sure we should credit either France or Belgium with the British 'chip'? While they argue over the origins of fries between themselves, and certainly their 'frites' pre-date the British chip-shop, they are cut very differently. Or do they both owe their heritage to Spanish "Patatas", as Spain had the potato first, and really, frying the damn things is pretty obvious when you think about it ...
Personally I think things cross-pollinate constantly, and very little can be considered solely and exclusively the property of one culture or other.
We have 'wagamama' which at best can be said to be japanese influenced, and a few chain sushi places (like Yo Sushi) across the country. They really aren't all that great. But if you look at some of the smaller/independent Japanese places that are around and about, they seem to be far better quality. I think London probably suffers from its centre being dominated by chains.
But on katsu ... I've had Chicken Katsu Curry in the UK, sure, but also in Australia, in Singapore and in Bangkok. If that's not a big thing in Japanese Cuisine then quite a lot of the world might have grasped the wrong end of the stick!
While I don't know about this specific case, it wouldn't necessarily be surprising to see 'fusion' food exported. You can get chicken tikka masala, which is a British Indian invention, all over the place these days (and in fact even the katsu curry might be a remote descendant of British Indian 'fusion' food; AIUI the Japanese navy adopted curry from the British in the 19th century).
The name of the dish is simply kare rasiu (curry with rise) and that's most common form. It's also super simple to make if you have rice cooker at home. Just pre-fry some onion, carrot and potatoes on the pan, then boil it with considerate amount of water and add curry blocks to it - done. You may add meat but it's just an additional ingredient which can be easily omitted. You can make it once and it lasts for couple of days. You can even freeze it if you want.
Rules [0] in Covent Garden, London's oldest restaurant, established in 1798, disagrees.
The reason you don't see them on a restaurant menu is because they're mostly functional meals you can leave in a slow cooker, or throw together with whatever you've got in the cupboards.
You will never know local british cuisine unless you were raised with it.
(No offence to British sausages intended, but I just had to sneak in that reference)
> It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go. And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor’s point of view. This is, that you practically don’t find good English cooking outside a private house. If you want, say, a good, rich slice of Yorkshire pudding you are more likely to get it in the poorest English home than in a restaurant, which is where the visitor necessarily eats most of his meals.
> It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English and which also sell good food are very hard to find. Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches. The expensive restaurants and hotels almost all imitate French cookery and write their menus in French, while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant.
What about sandwiches(!), desserts, and gastropub fair? Tasty.
Not to mention afternoon tea (a fine tradition) and lots of nice grab-and-go lunch options in many shops. And items marked as suitable for (usually ovo-lacto-)vegetarians.
And cheeses, many cheeses (though they may not all be strictly British in origin.) And chocolate - even the humble Cadbury bar seems better than its US version.
There is also something to be said for the full English breakfast vs. the anemic "continental" breakfast.
It is also often paired with cheese, both hard as well as the local "queijo minas", especially the "frescal" variety, which is a very young kind of cheese.
That being said, I haven't had UK marmalade to be able to compare, I'm coming from my experience in marmelada and extrapolating from there.
"Romeo e Julietta"
This is a Seattle Brazilian shop who takes covid-friendly online orders (I just searched online don't have any experience with them):
As a Brit, I resent that! And plenty else besides. And that's despite the brief window of nice weather we're now having.
Which, incidentally, is too hot, and is making many of us terribly bothered. Some of us even border on the flummoxed.
Still more incidentally, I personally don't have strong feelings on marmalade, but I have very strong feelings on the proper way to prepare a scone. This is an issue that divides my nation. I refer the reader to an article which is about as British as the mind can comfortably conceive:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/quee...
It's lovely up here in Sunderland in the North East.
And by lovely, I mean it has stopped raining. It's nice and grey now.
We'll be having words about that.
British cuisine doesn't really use bitterness much. Although Britain brought back curry from India they didn't pick up a taste for bitter cuisine such as gourds.
P.S. and so is hydroxychloroquine ;)
Not any more! (The strains found in India are largely resistant these days, and other drugs are more appropriate.)
It's worth remembering though that from the '80s[0] onward Lagers would've dominated beer sales in the UK. So while we could buy more bitter beer than available elsewhere, we often didn't.
[0] - I've no source from this, it may have started earlier but at a certain point in the mid-late 20th century we shifted to lager. Often very poor quality ones like Carling, Foster's or Tennents that would not compare favourably to those available in Germany, Belgium or Czech Republic.
Anyway, if the people in Seville are prepared to part with their treasures, we're delighted to take them!
> Edmund Hillary took [a jar] up Everest
Edmund Hillary wasn’t British.
I can’t stand Seville orange marmalade but lime marmalade is good.
(And don't get me started about lime. Lime is the most overrated citrus.)
But here in NZ, we kinda like the fact that he stuck it to the British. We even have one of his modified tractors in the Canterbury Museum.
Another random factoid - part of Hillary's team was Peter Mulgrew, who died in the Erebus disaster[2] having replaced Hillary as the tour guide at the last minute.
[1]: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/hillary-reaches-south-pole
When Edmund Hillary was born in Auckland (in 1919), New Zealdn was not yet independent, but a "Dominion" of the British Empire.
What would even be the best demonym to refer to anyone born in that dominion?
While we weren't technically independent, we'd been self-governing since 1865, although it took us a lot longer to cut all of the apron strings, and well, the Queen is still our head of state, so who knows if or when we'll go full republic - most NZers don't really care. But hey, in the 2000s we stopped using the Privy Council in England as our highest court.
http://www.firstworldwar.tki.org.nz/assets/Uploads/Images/Y5...
"In 1948 New Zealanders became New Zealand citizens – before that they had been British citizens."
So Hillary would have been a British citizen most of his life and possibly acquired a liking for marmalade while in that state.
Also the expedition was the "British Mount Everest expedition". I think it's fair to include marmalade being in Hillary's supplies as being indicative of British cultural adoration of marmalade. Hillary's grandparents were from Yorkshire, UK.
Apparently Hillary, as his father and brother, was a beekeeper; I wonder if he took honey too.
> Sir Edmund Hillary and his team carried Romney's Kendal Mint Cake with them on the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. The packaging currently includes the following: “'We sat on the snow and looked at the country far below us … we nibbled Kendal Mint Cake.' A member of the successful Everest expedition wrote – 'It was easily the most popular item on our high altitude ration – our only criticism was that we did not have enough of it.'”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendal_Mint_Cake
Imagine a Peppermint Pattie, but intensified by an order of magnitude.