After some trips to GB and eating there, I am happy to live in Spain
Meanwhile, both the tomatoes in the baked beans and the potatoes used to make the fries/chips originated in the Americas and the guy who cooked it once experienced the taste of paprika, so there!
The only British person who actually knows how to use spices is Gordon Ramsey, and he gets a pass on not using them cause he actually knows how to cook good food.
He can’t handle spice. His 2 appearances on Hot Ones are their top-watched episodes. They’re also the best. He’s so funny. He had so much fun during his first appearance, he came back for their Holiday episode. It was awesome.
I highly recommend the watch.
Desensitization based on routine is all there is to “handling spice”. It is neither an achievement nor an ability. Anyone can get used to it by starting from small amounts and slowly increasing the spice level. Also, there are many spices, chili is only one of them.
It was a joke, mark. A Christmas joke.
It’s great for stomach troubles, arthritis though.
I love chili, I just don´t like the glorification of desensitizing ones taste.
Tbf, I’ve rarely had a chili that wasn’t mild, unless I or a neighbor who likes it hot made it. You may want to avoid certain salsas (red or green) at restaurants and bodegas where actual ethnic Latin Americans eat, if you’re not into spicy, though.
Then he goes off and tells me to do something stupid like put cinnamon sticks in my chili, the Brits can’t help themselves.
Cinnamon, good. Chili, good. I can see where he’s coming from.
I may try that. Why not? Nutmeg is amazing in Alfredo, so I’m willing to try it. More toward fall, though. It’s too hot in spring fur such heaviness
I’ve never watched Ramsey, and I’m not British, but a hint of cinnamon in ground meats is great. Cinnamon in savory foods is underrated in general, imo
Clearly you’ve never had rich friends, they’re notorious for having everything and never using it.
“Oh man, I didn’t know you play guitar. That’s a beautiful Orange double stack and Thunderverb.”
“I bought that when I tried to learn guitar, haven’t used it since.”
Tell me you haven’t had proper British food without actually telling me.
Don’t blindly believe everything you hear.
Beans on toast can be done well also.
i do that all the time, but my own recipe, which is essentially hopped up chili beans on garlic toast. So i start with frying four pieces chopped up bacon in a bean pot, then add half an onion chopped n fry that soft, then a can of the heinz bbq chipotle beans, half a cup of E.D. Smith Baja Chipotle bbq sauce, half tbsp ancho powder, half tbsp jalapeno powder, quater tbsp white pepper, half tbsp garlic powder, simmer that all up and serve on and with thick cut buttered garlic toast. and to put the lie to any stereotypes bout regional cuisine, i’m doing this shit in western canada. I have a restaurant here, but this particular recipe is a bit too hot for most my customers.
That sounds good. I’ve never seen Heinz chipotle beans though (in Canada). I’ll have to keep an eye out.
my favorite is when they serve it hot! yum
That bloke is gently handling those pies.
Money can’t buy you taste 😉
Well, the whole spice trade was literally wealthy people buying taste.
…eh…profiting in a commodity trade doesn’t mean you…Ever see any midwestern farmer actually eat chickpeas? They love the bushel price most years though.
If this is what a country’s cuisine looks like to you, I think it says more about your choice in food than what is available from that country’s cuisine.
What British meals do you recommend?
!remind me to see any answer to this lol
It depends if you are looking for traditional or contemporary cuisine.
Traditional:
Can’t get much more traditional than a Sunday roast. Perhaps not the most spiced dish, but relies on a complexity of ingredients cooked just right, and served with a combo of rich gravy and various sauces (mint, cranberry, redcurrant, horseradish, mustard etc are all common). Certainly a flavourful dish when done right.
Pies and pasties are historically very popular. These days sometimes mistakenly viewed as plain food due to the availability of simpler fast food offerings, but there are a huge variety of styles, flavours and complexities around. Pies as a category cover those made with different types of pastries, as well as those topped with potato (cottage pie, shepherds pie, fish pie etc).
There are a huge variety of other traditional dishes from across the UK to explore which Google can list out a load of, but truth is historically much of British cuisine was based on what was locally or seasonally available; seasonal veg, seafood, cheeses, breads and cakes.
Local knowledge and variety is also huge. I’m Welsh and could name dozens of Welsh dishes others in the UK won’t have even heard of, and you won’t find much mention of even online and know what you’re looking for.
Contemporary:
…per the meme, Britain’s imperial past does mean a multicultural present, and the reality is that that has influenced common cuisine in a big way - what many British people are eating on a regular basis are based in fusion.
Curries are incredibly popular, and it is worth noting that written British curry recipes predate the founding of the USA, and imported recipes predate that by hundreds more years - it isn’t a particularly recent or novel thing. British curries are as unique to Indian curries as eg Chinese or Japanese curry is. Not only that, each country within the UK has unique variations of curry attributed to them.
Anglo-Chinese and Italian food are also particularly popular - most towns across the UK that are big enough to have a couple of restaurants will have a minimum of a fish and chip shop, a Chinese, an Indian/curry house, kebab shop, and an Italian restaurant. Most cities have places serving foods from dozens of countries available. In big cities, London in particular, it is probably easier to name countries that there isn’t food from than there is.
Growing up, a typical week of 7 home cooked dinners looked like Pasta bake or lasagne, curry, stir fry, jacket potato and/or soup, fish & chips, fajitas, Sunday roast.
… That turned into a bigger answer than intended 😂
Disclaimer: All of the below comes with the obvious caveat that it has to be made by someone who knows what they’re doing. Any country’s cuisine is shit if you’re eating at a shit restaurant. That’s not about your choice of meal, that’s your choice of venue.
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Pies. Britain has basically perfected the savory pie. Steak and kidney, steak and onion, scotch pie, shepherd’s pie, cottage pie, fisherman’s pie… British savory pies are an explosion of flavour. Pair with a good stout or porter; the kind of beer that still looks black even when you hold it up to a light.
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Good fish & chips is one of the most perfect meals ever created. Keep in mind that the condiments matter; you need the acidity and richness of a good malt vinegar to cut through that fattiness. Never get fish & chips in a pub or restaurant. Go to a proper chippy, preferably in a coastal town.
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Stews are a British classic. Try a real Lancashire hotpot sometime, with pickled red cabbage and mashed potatoes. Absolutely stunning.
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Get your ass down to a high quality carvery and try a roast dinner. Lamb or beef are the best bet, but chicken and pork are good too. The true test of a roast dinner is the quality of the gravy. It should be not too thick, and full of savory meaty flavour, not doughy or floury in taste. Also look for vegetables that have some colour on them, not just boiled. Roast lamb leg with a good mint sauce is a thing of beauty. Pair with red wine for lamb or beef, white for pork or chicken.
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Haggis is a flavour explosion. The real thing, no plastic wrapped forgeries, served with the traditional sides of tatties and neeps, and a glass of really good single malt whisky.
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Straight up, one of the best meals I’ve ever had was bangers and mash. I was at a high end London restaurant - I forget the name, but John Lennon used to eat there pretty regularly - and it was incredible. The potatoes were the perfect texture with just the right amount of salt and butter. The sausages were made in house, beautifully seasoned and cooked to perfection, and the gravy was stunning. It’s a very simple meal, but simple done right isn’t easy. In a simple meal there’s nothing to hide behind. Every part has to be perfect.
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Desserts. British desserts are phenomenal. Eton mess, spotted dick, and the absolute king of desserts, sticky toffee pudding served with thick cream. Unbelievably decadent.
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Never get high on your own supply. Just good business sense.
It’s not even that they don’t use spices they just haven’t even tried to evolve their cuisine. They still eat the same bland boring shit from 100 years ago. Meanwhile the rest of Europe thriving. It’s like they opened the books once 50 years ago to let chicken Tikka in and then immediately closed the books again. They can always point to that one dish and be like see.
Which parts of Europe is that?
Is it Germany where you can only buy shnitzel, sausage and cabbage in various different forms?
Or Italy, where they’re so proud of their food it’s basically illegal to serve anything that isn’t Italian?
Or France where spice and chilli is outlawed, only garlic and herbs allowed?
It’s true that a lot of traditional British food is bland, but there are way more Chinese, Indian, Thai, mexican, Italian restaurants in any town in England than you’ll find anywhere in Europe.
Sounds like a cope to me.
Most popular dish in the UK is Tikka Massala.
But:
Fat, carbs and protein do not come purer than fish and chips.
And vinegar so vinegary that it blows the taste buds of your descendants for 500 years
Exactly. Many people have an ignorant view of British cuisine, as though only foods grown in the British Isles are British. All kinds of foods and dishes from all over the world have been shipped, used, and adapted in Britain since at least the time of the Roman Empire. Heck, most of what a British, European or North American person would see on the menu of their local Indian restaurant is not traditional Indian food at all, but rather Anglo-Indian.
Yes, there have been a few comments mentioning Tikka masala, but can you name another British dish with flavor? I don’t think so.
Yes, there have been a few comments mentioning Tikka masala, but can you name another British dish with flavor? I don’t think so.
Let’s kick off with curries! We’ve been eating ‘curry’ since 1598, so longer than a lot of other countries have existed. As well as chicken tikka masalla, we’ve adapted or invented a few, such as:
- Madras curries
- Jalfrezi curries
- Balti curries
- Phall curries
For other British dishes with flavour, try (in no particular order):
- Any Sunday roast; beef with Yorkshires and horseradish sauce, pork with applesauce, lamb with mint sauce.
- Full English, full Scottish, Ulster Fry, Full Welsh
- Kedgeree
- Steak and kidney pudding
- Cream tea
- A proper ploughman’s lunch
- Sausage, mash, onion gravy with English mustard
- Cullen skink
- Shepherd’s pie / cottage pie
- Fish pie
- Irish stew
- Lancashire Hot Pot
- Marmite on toast
- Bacon sarnie
- Kippers
- Sheffield fishcake butty
- Welsh rarebit
None with flavor, plenty with flavour
pepper steak pie
Cornish pasty, apple crumble, scouse, trifle, haggis, rarebit, Sunday roast, shepherd’s pie, tatty scones… you can see why this “no flavour” joke is getting tiring.
Even shitty store brand haggis has a great flavor profile for a sausage. Yes, its a sausage: its meat, salt, spices, and other fillers in an animal casing. Fight me.
But its scottish food
How do you feel about thanks giving dinners and apple pie?
Edit: because they’re both British.
Turkeys are native to the Americas.
Now that I think about it, so are potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, corn and cranberries. Thinking about my own Thanksgiving dinner table, the only thing I can identify as an Old World food are yeast rolls.
That’s cause it was ham and duck with onions, leek and parsnips before.
Its almost as if they just swapped out the chicken for turkey, having discovered and been using potatoes for years beforehand.
Nothing on the apple pie then? Just the one you thought you could refute, it would seem.
By your wild “logic” that would make every pork dish ever Chinese and Southern fried chicken Indian, as the pigs we eat today and chickens come from China and India respectfully.
Yeah, apples aren’t native to the New World and apple pie wasn’t invented in the Americas. It’s not specifically British, either; it seems to have emerged independently across Western Europe in the middle ages, and was first brought to the Americas by the Dutch rather than the English. Hell, not even the quintessential American pie apple was invented here; the granny smith is Australian.
The British invented roast turkey about as much as they invented roast bison. You want to get into more specific recipes, I’d say chicken tikka masala is British and chicken parmesan is American, but I’m not letting the British have right of way over “get bird, add heat.”
Pumpkin pie is kind of a strange one; the first thing you’d call a “pumpkin pie” was more of a savory soup eaten by Dutch settlers in Massachusetts in the 1600s; the first pumpkin served in a pastry crust was French, and the modern pattern of “sugar pumpkin puree in a shortbread crust” was invented a few minutes after the US Constitution was ratified.
Sweet potato pie is less ambiguous; it seems to have popped into existence fully formed in the American south in the 18th century.
Basically all corn products including popcorn and cornbread were known to the Native Americans for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.
The first known recipe for cranberry sauce as we would recognize it today was written in 1796 in the United States.
Green beans are native to Central America, green bean casserole was invented in New Jersey in 1950…
Again, what of this is particularly British? An American thanksgiving meal is as British as pizza.
Apple pie is from England, even if you don’t want it to be. Its not even about it not being American but it having flavour and being nice to eat.
They swapped out chicken for turkey and used the exact same recipe and cooking style. Declaring it unconnected changes nothing.
Green beans is a substitute for the exact same green veg you get with a British roast meal. If I put peas into a stir fry, it doesn’t make the meal not Chinese lol.
Again, how can you not see those mildy adapted British things as British?
Because I’m from a country with an actual national identity of its own, not some washed up little island whose national museum has on display a lot of things stolen from elsewhere and not much of its own, because their national culture has extremely little to show for itself.
I don’t have to pretend we invented (checks notes) cooking food to feel like have any kind of national identity. You do, and it’s hilariously pathetic.
Beast of a comment. Found all of that really interesting 👍
Embrace; Expand; Extinguish
Jeez bud. Ya think of this yourself?
The fish recipes I have seen use Turmeric
i was told by a brit that american biscuits were “salty scones”
and i have never wanted to complain more in my life. Especially given the american propensity to make shit sweet as fuck.
It’s true, the “biscuits and gravy” biscuits are closer to scones than what a Brit would think of as a biscuit.
Also, biscuits and gravy, wtf
What’s wrong with biscuits and gravy?
Biscuits with sausage gravy doused in hot sauce and a couple fried eggs make a great breakfast
In this case I prefer fresh cracked black pepper to hot sauce. No other notes.
That fresh black pepper makes biscuits and sausage gravy killer!
I think he’s a trucker. the biscuits and gravy at a Love’s I could see dumping hot sauce on. Not generally though.
he just hasn’t tried it made by a competent cook yet
I had the distinct pleasure of explaining what biscuits and gravy were to a confused 6th Doctor Who actor Colin Baker. To his credit, he said he’d like to try it.
ah, it’s you again. Anyway. Gotta hate, i mean love the brits, and the wacky shit they get up to.
I’m everywhere!
judging by the amount of posts/comments, yeah, makes sense.
Chicken Tikka Masala entered the chat.
I’m happy Great Britain was able to make one interesting dish 50 years ago, but the cuisine could use a couple more seasoned recipes.
I will not argue against that.
Indian food?
Chicken Tikka Masala is a British national dish and that is common knowledge.
If by common knowledge, you mean that a significant portion of the population believes it, I’m not sure how reliable that evidence that is. People will believe a whole lot of strange stuff.
On topic, even the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page states that it was “popularized by cooks from India living in Great Britain”. Regardless of where it was first created, this is clearly the product of Indian immigrants. I don’t believe their heritage should be ignored just because they moved. Although, I don’t want it to sound like I believe in a 100% black and white distinction here. It’s clearly a fusion dish with British influences. The original chicken tikka was a lot dryer and the “masala” sauce was added to make the dish creamier to appeal to British tastes.
However, I don’t go around claiming General Tso’s chicken isn’t Chinese food, just because it was first made in New York; or that the chimichanga isn’t Mexican food, just because it was originally made in Arizona; or that a Cuban sandwich isn’t Cuban, just because it was first made in Florida. These dishes wouldn’t exist without the immigrants who modified their cultural recipes to adapt to a new environment.
To me, chicken tikka malala is an Indian dish with British influences.
E: Tao to Tso.
Go to China and tell them that General Tso’s is Chinese cuisine, I dare you.
“I dare you”
How could you think this possibly warrants a dare? Do you really think people are this confrontational in real life? When traveling in other countries, I have only had positive interactions when attempting to find any common ground with locals. In this case, the worst thing that could happen is you share a laugh and they offer for you to try real local cuisine.
Kind of related, the duck tongue and chicken’s foot I had earlier this year in Malaysia wasn’t that bad.
So let’s agree that it’s neither Indian nor British, but a fusion of the two, created in Britain by immigrants or their descendants and becoming a national dish loved by people in Britain regardless of their cultural background.
Origin is Scotland I believe…Glasgow.
It was popularised by cooks from India living in Great Britain, but I don’t believe that makes it any less Indian. Just as the chimichanga wasn’t invented in Mexico, but is still considered Mexican food.
