Fanny Cradock, a lodestar in the foul-tasting odyssey of bad British food
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
Got about a billion people here who'd like to disagree. In fact, of all the crimes against humanity the British visited on India, I think that assertion might just be the worst.
While there are a few good restaurants, most Indian restaurants in the UK are bland beyond reason, catering to the common palate. There’s nothing wrong with liking bland food or restaurants catering to that preference, but let’s not make this extraordinary claim that it’s better than the food in India. For most part the food is plain and plays it safe. For example, it’s rare to find Indo-Chinese, a cuisine nothing like Chinese or Indian but a staple of cuisine in India.
This is an extraordinary claim that by taking Indian food to the UK, stripping it of it's spice to suit the locals somehow made it better. It'd be like claiming Italian cuisine became better without the tomatoes or Mexican cuisine better without the beans.
Indian Chinese cusine was developed by the ethnic Chinese community in Kolkata. I really don't see any distinctive Punjabi influence.
Maybe you find British Indian food too bland, too dry, too sweet, to have a lack of variety or to use low quality ingredients. Whatever it is, it could more usefully continue the discussion.
However, I think even people who've tried food in both countries (I haven't) will often find themselves arguing, based on their experience. The majority of "Indian" restaurants in Britain are cheap -- a step above a takeaway. Like similar restaurants in Britain, they have a menu based on combining pre-prepared ingredients/sauces to lower costs. There are also middle and some high-end Indian restaurants. I can easily imagine people experiencing "takeaway+" and assuming this standard of food is universal in Britain, or (especially on HN) someone on a business trip to London being taken to a high-end restaurant and generalizing from there.
Nowadays the top end is a bit self-parodic with too much emphasis on weird visual presentation, culminating in Heston Blumenthal, but the middle rank of available restaurants are great.
I don’t think this explains it. Being the first place in the world to get processed food has more to do with it. Britain’s been importing a lot of calories for a long time and canning and other flavor destroying methods of preservation really didn’t help. Rationing is unlikely to be relevant. British food was widely considered dreadful long before WWII. See any description of boarding school food or just consider the paucity of decent cheese in the UK in the 50s. The US didn’t have post war rationing and food in DC was terrible well into the 70s going by restaurants. Anglos have never beg known for great food culture like the Italians, French or Spanish.
I had plenty of great food in the 70’s and 80’s just not usually in restaurants.
I’d imagine in the U.K., they probably didn’t have enough farmland to feed everybody given a rapidly growing population during the industrialization period. If you have to import food, it had to be preserved and again you acquire a taste for poor quality food because that’s what’s available.
Italy, France, and Spain did not industrialize anywhere near the scale that existed in Britain or the US.
???
Northern Italy has been among the richest, most developed parts the world non-stop since the renaissance. They didn’t achieve that without industrializing. France was so rich that it conquered half of Europe after 1800 and then it got richer with the Industrial Revolution. Paris was one of the biggest cities in the world for over 200 years by any standard. No history of the West, or the world would make any sense without France since the Revolution. You do not manage to acquire imperial possessions on every continent without industrializing early and fast. Spain, sure. It, Portugal and Southern Italy did not do as well as most of the rest of Western Europe.
https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2013/02/22/winston-churc...
From age 6 or so, it was my contribution to Sunday dinner. Much better!
Like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/realmintsauce_67706
Huh? It's the worst way of preparing meat combined with the worst way of preparing vegetables, managing to destroy both flavour and texture of both. Having grown up in Britain, the memes are on point when it comes to traditional British cooking (though no reflection of the wealth of cooking that actually exists in Britain today).
I don't think every family in Britain automatically has a good chef. Now if we're going to talk about leaks. Ewww. And boiled brussel sprouts. FML.
Roasted vegetables can be nice; boiled vegetables not so much, and those are more closely associated with British tradition.
> Juicy meat that falls off the bone.
Roasting is the least effective way to achieve this. Dried-out meat is very much the norm, and frankly, burnt meat would be significantly less bad.
That is British houses. Different topic!
But I do like leeks in cheese sauce.
Basic recipe: https://www.recipesmadeeasy.co.uk/leeks-in-cheese-sauce/#gal...
Fancy version: https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/cheese-recipes/cheesy-le...
I would cook them in the oven with everything else though, and only very slightly brown the top of the cheese. They then make a good contrast to the roast vegetables.
(On houses, there is a line in The Xenophobe's Guide to the Swiss about how swiss abhor drafts. According to my father, this observation, albeit made in a book nominally about the swiss, says much more about the british.)
Speaking subjectively as a South Asian person, there is not a single thing I find appealing about the Full English, visually or tastewise. However, your sweet dishes and desserts are very good indeed.
Sunday roast, great hearty filling meal after a big day.
Pudding, chips, peas, gravy, a great filling chippy tea.
Ploughman lunch with pork pie, yum.
Agreed they are some good foods, I wouldn’t say we have fine foods, we have simple foods and tastes. I live overseas now and sometimes miss the simple foods when feeling hungry and craving a big feed. A northern English chippy tea is especially hard to find, going out to a restaurant for Italian, French, Greek, Indian etc etc doesn’t hit the same spot when craving chippy tea although I pretty much love all food and mainly eat non English cuisine
Seriously though - the freshness of ingredients available in the United Kingdom makes a huge difference, if you ignore British-Chinese food and can track down real Chinese food in the UK - it's genuinely world class
Btw, German sausages can't hold a candle to British ones, change my mind :D
I’ve eaten the Full English. I’ve also eaten Idli-Vadai-Pongal-Chutney-Sambhar and I prefer the latter. There’s nothing objectively better here. We prefer what we grew up eating.
British cuisine these days is amazing, all the old cliches no longer apply IMO
Any specific recommendations for contemporary british cuisine?
Thinking back a few years, "The fat duck" was voted as one of the best restaurants in the world.
Check out the great British menu on the BBC too. Chefs from around Britain on top of their game, usually making refined versions of British classics
Heaven:
The police are British
The cooks are French
The engineers are German
The administrators are Swiss
The lovers are Italian
Hell:
The police are German
The cooks are British
The engineers are Italian
The administrators are French
The lovers are Swiss
That was the sixteenth century. For the twenty-first, what should it be? "I speak english online, russian for scientific sources, chinese for datasheets, and french quand nos aînés n'y seront plus ?"
The conductors of mysteries and processions be Athenian
The organisers of games be Eleians
The whipping-boys, should any hellene misbehave, be Spartan
Fish & Chips was derived from Portuguese chefs in Goa India
The Portuguese may have been early European consumers of potatoes, but they likely got that from the Spanish, who in turn got it from Central or South America, where human consumption of this tuber originated thousands of years ago. There is no telling how many cultures it may have passed through that have been lost to the ages. And even the first potato consumers may have been inspired to eat potatoes from a prior culture of eating other sorts of roots.
When people are starving, they're willing to eat things they otherwise would throw away. Unfortunately the British decided the PREFERRED those things, and attempt to make every dish taste accordingly.
Not every meal has to be a culinary experience
Meat, potatoes and two veg might be mocked as unadventurous and bland but it's a decent balance and gets the job done.
I think you have neatly summarized the usual criticisms of British food.
Much of it is easily improved, but many British people (including my parents) don't bother with even the smallest improvements to the most basic recipe. Just garnishing with some fresh herbs would be a good start, or adding some herbs or spices during cooking. Then we can talk about sauces.