What amuses me about the criticism of British food and traditional American food, is that “American” food comes from any ethnicity who ever landed in America . What is “American food”…surely it is just a homogenized version of “every food”?
America is a multi-cultural society and has adapted many cultures foods and made them THEIRS.
They would have to adopt other cultures foods because left to their devices…They either roast a turkey or add a can of soup!
Just for the record Haggis is bloody good!
And so is steak and kidney pud!
Now I’m hankerin’ fer some good ol’ buttered toast with Marmite, smothered in XO white cheddar and broiled until browned and bubbling … mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!! :o
For Brits, ‘pudding’ is a very broad term, either meaning simply ‘dessert’ or, more specifically, a warm, steamed, sponge-based dessert such as Sticky Toffee Pudding (aka food of gods, and I don’t even like desserts much).
Steak and kidney pudding is so called because it, too, is steamed, in a suet pastry casing. It’s not found much anymore, to be honest. Bit stodgy for modern tastes.
It’s funny that Americans always cite excessive offal as a reason for poor British cuisine. Brits actually eat very little, and very many are equally squeemish about it, recoiling in horror on foreign holidays in Spain, France or Italy, where lambs’ stomachs and the like make a much more frequent appearance on the menus. Kidney in steak and kidney pie is a flavour enhancer, and is very tasty, but even then many Brits don’t like it, just as they don’t like black pudding, which again we eat rarely and much less than our supposedly gastronomic neighbours across the English Channel.
What Britain has traditionally been great at is the quality of its meat and cheese, things which were greatly rationed for many years after the war. Without these, our cuisine was poor, and cooking habits terrible from the 40s til the 80s, with overcooked, bland food, excessive use of convenience foods and a general collapse in knowledge and interest about great local ingredients. Thank god, there as been a complete renaissance in this in the last 20-30 years, and now, if you want to eat the best food in Britain, then hunt down a restaurant focussing on what is termed ‘modern British’, for the finest ingredients and most inventive interpretations. You can’t beat our beef, lamb, pork or seafood for quality. The Fat Duck, one of the world’s finest restaurants year-on-year, serves British food.
:eek: Why doesn’t Britain have an obesity epidemic?! Just reading that list made my arteries harden!
Does anyone actually go to work in Britain, or do you just eat breakfast and sleep it off?!
As Mike Myers said to Patrick Stewart in one of those SNL skits about the “Everything Scottish!” shop, “It’s like all Scottish cuisine is based on a dare!”
And he concludes by saying:
Well? Has what he describes changed any since 1945?
Actually, apart from chicken pot pie, which is not eaten on the run, the savory pie with which we’re most familiar is the Jamaican patty.
Unless you count Hot Pockets.
I tried that once, at a “British” pub in America. The steak was well enough, but the kidneys were like liver to the tenth power – I was still tasting it two days later, and not in any good way.
Blood-based dishes are extremely rare in American cuisine. I don’t know why. My WAG would be the early colonists, at least those who were extreme Bible-believing Protestants knowing their OT, ignored most of the Jewish dietary laws as laid down only for Jews, but eschewed blood as not being “Noahide kosher” (there’s a passage in Genesis, right after the Flood, where God forbids Noah to eat blood or meat with blood in it, and this is held to apply to all Noah’s descendants, i.e., everybody).
I guess it’s named as a complement to “white pudding” (same recipe minus blood), as in the old nursery rhyme:
Little King Pippin, he built a great hall
Pie-crust and pastry-crust, that was the wall
The windows were made of black pudding and white,
And slated with pancakes, you ne’er saw the like!
I could eat a full English breakfast every day. LOVE it.
I don’t think so; haute cuisine dates from the 17th Century – and nationalistic English jokes about how complex and needlessly highfalutin’ French cuisine is compared to honest roast beef go back at least to Hogarth’s time.
And your little stick of Blackpool Rock?
(Come to think of it, George Formby does provide a no-longer-living instance of another British stereotype: Bad teeth.)
I recall a scene from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle: Jack Shaftoe and company are sojourning in India. At one point they run short of money, and one of them raises some by performing an amazing public novelty act: Eating a raw kidney. (Attention is called to the bit of urine that dribbles out when he pokes it with a fork.)
Well, maybe it’s best to get your day’s eating all out of the way first thing . . .
From Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, by Terry Pratchett – preface to the recipe for Nobby’s Mum’s Distressed Pudding: